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" Lets start at the front of the car and move to the back. Can you talk a little bit about the hood and lights? Im a big believer that vehicles have faces. The Vipers eyes have been kind of these horizontal slits for a long time with multiple headlamp projectors in them. This time around we went to single projector and literally styled the eyes of the car around a snakea little bit more vertically oriented, with a little hood over the projector. If you look very closely, its almost like the two LEDsthe upper is a turn signal, the lower is the daytime running lightthey almost appear to be pupils in a way. And what about that mouth? We actually started off with having a grille. We had SRTs version of the crosshair because it started off as being a Dodge. When we decided to make it an SRT we got rid of the classic [Dodge] crosshair and made it black on purpose to kind of make it secondary. [Editors note: While GM has shed brands, Chrysler is adding them. It peeled off Ram as its standalone truck marque and now SRTshort for street racing technologywill be its high-performance brand.] We used to have a grille texture in there that we had to get rid of for maximum cooling. The opening is about as big as we can make it before it gets too big visually. The lower opening and the side vents allow air to pass into the wheel well and back out. This releases some pressure in that area for aero.  We learned a lot with our Dodge SRT-4 ACR. The ACR came with a loose splitter that was attached to the bottom of the front fascia. This time we tried to style the lower front fascia to be as splitter-like as we could to create the maximum amount of downforce in the front. The new car has quite a bit of downforce built into it. Those three things make up the front of the vehicle.  Can you talk a little bit about the central air intake on the hood? Its a defining characteristic of the Viper. The intake has become a beautiful cue to the car and has been part of the Viper heritage for a very long time. Right from the very beginning we had a central intake, and its always been functional. In this case, weve really tuned the shape. I mean, its gone from being marginally functional to extremely functional with this one. Now it has very deep draw that gets maximum airflow to the engine.  What about those scoops on each side of the intake? We call them exhausters on either side, and theyre the result of lessons learned from our comp coupe racing Vipers. We found that by actually angling itits kind of parallel to the airflow path that goes through the radiator module, or very close to being parallelit actually relieves a lot of pressure and hot air from behind the radiator. This increases top speed a little bit, decreases pressure buildup on the nose of the car, and also improves cooling. We styled the scoops so that the hot air actually goes around the windshield and not into the passenger compartment if the windows are open.  The way they make the hood undulate gives it a great shape.  Because of the way the Viper engine is set very low and very far back, we were able to really exaggerate that shape of the hood quite a bit. It has a beautiful hood bulge. Its not your classic hood bulge thats kind of grotesque and sits on top of the hood. It kind of melts into the hood. I dont want the car to look like Dolph Lundgren or Schwarzenegger with his shirt off. It has muscles, but you discover the shapes versus them screaming at you. Its every bit as bodacious as its ever been, but its more sophisticated in the way it goes about doing it. The windshieldits the same rake and everything, correct? Its the only actual carryover part of the old car that hasnt really been touched. Is that just the way it worked out, or did you build the cabin around the windshield? Its just the way it worked. Its because the overall silhouette of the car remained the same. The number one thing about the Viper is its what we call a cab rearward proportion. It has a distinctive, far-back-positioned cab with a very, very long nosekind of a lunging-forward nose. This allows the car to be a front-midengine car, where even though the engine is in the front, its so far back behind the front wheels it actually gives the car 50/50 weight distribution.  Another classic feature is that side gill.  We wanted to preserve the side gill. Obviously thats from the 96 Viper. Weve kind of played with the side gill over the years.  The super gill is unmistakably a Viper cue. The gill that we have today is actually the deepest one weve ever done. And its 100 percent functionalin the past its only been decorative. Its almost 2 1/2 times as wide as its ever been. And its all about getting the pressure and heat out of the engine bay for stability and cooling.   A lot of these design cues seem to hark back to the 96, right? Yeah. I grew up kind of loving that car. That car was in clay when I came to Chrysler. I was like, oh my god, its the most beautiful thing Ive ever seen. And it has timeless proportions. There are certain things about that car. I always joke that its like a human body. It has these appealing shapes that are always going to be appealing. I dont care if its 100 years from now or 200 years from now, these curvaceous shapes are just ever appealing.  We wanted to take some of that essence and make it more modern so the whole car is not such a cartoon. The 96 had some very exaggerated proportions, where the hood and the body were almost disconnected. In this case, theyre much more holistic. The front fender lunges all the way to the mirror and then continues and kind of blends into the door and the bottom of the window. What about the vent on the side window? Is it functional, and how does it work into the overall design? Its actually a differential cooler. People are calling them brake coolers, but its a duct right behind the windows that feeds air to the differential. The differential on a performance car actually gets pretty hotalmost hotter than any other part of the carbecause its working so hard. So we actually have air going into that area of the car right from the side ducts there. The brakes dont really generate that much heat in the back, so its really more the differential. They also help modernize and lengthen the canopy of the vehicle.  This Vipers cabin definitely looks longer. The Viper has always had a very small daylight graphic [window area or greenhouse]. This time we elongated it and tapered it so it looks like the side window is lunging forward. Everything was designed around velocity; everything looks like its kind of wind-sheared. The rear window is designed to be on the top so it doesnt wrap around the corners anymore. This allows some body color through the roof to the base of the decklid, really elongating the canopy.   The door and the sill are both aluminum [the hood, roof, and rear are made of carbon fiber]. If you ask anyone in the stamping business, aluminum is an evil material to stamp. It just doesnt want to do anything that organic, but the super-forming processa new technology that were using only on Viperkind of preheats the aluminum. We hope to use that elsewhere, but were very proud that you can get that much shape out of stamped aluminum parts.  The rear of the vehicle, with that visible carbon fiber, is quite striking. Yeah, we had a lot of fun with that. The rear of the car is probably one of the most critical parts in terms of styling. Its one of my favorite parts of the car. Supercars are naturally very wide and low cars, but we were looking for elements that would exaggerate that even more. If you look at the way the back end wraps around, we exaggerate the width by cutting into the side slightly. And by organizing it in this carbon-fiber silhouette, it gives a brand new graphic for us. Weve always had the two taillamps on either side, but we used very modern taillamps captured in this carbon fiber. We actually clinicked this with some of our owners and that detail was polarizing. Some of them loved it, thought it was the coolest thing. And others were like &amp;quot;What did you do?&amp;quot; I personally love it as carbon fiber.   Can you talk a bit about the diffuser and rear exhaust ducts?  Right underneath the taillamps there are also these exhauster ducts. That takes a little pressure off from under the wheel wells. Theres a lot of pressure built up in there.   As much as my designers wanted to style the diffuser, its a huge contributor to the downforce of the back of the car. Im very proud of it; it looks sculpted, but its 100 percent functional. We have integrated backup lamps kind of hidden in there.  We also, for the first time, have side-view reflectors that are hidden in the wheel arches. It would have made the taillamp a lot bulkier if we had had to integrate them in the taillampsame with the rearward-facing reflectors. So we separated those elements out and kind of integrated them. That allowed the taillamp to be its own thing. The taillamp is really kind of a pure statement without all these other doodads in there.  And, of course, you kept the double-bubble roof.  Yep, but we raised it. We made it even more functional and a little more contemporary; its just a little more geometric in its execution. We added a new detail in the roof that goes into the rear window now. This kind of accent detail elongates the roof a little bit.  Is there anything people should know about the rear window? That little tab that extends off the roof accentuates the double bubble, but really its trying to minimize the appearance of the rear window. That allows the wheel arches to really breathe. Since we also made the rear window narrower, those two rear-wheel wheel arches are more prominent. And we exaggerated the arches as well. They bulge because, to me, thats really where the power comes fromthe rear wheels.   Yeah, you can definitely tell the rear window is smaller when you get on inside. I had a chance to sit in it, and from the inside, visibility is . . .  We added a standard backup camera, so if anyone is bitching about it, just use the camera. But my feeling is, when you see the car on the freeway or people are driving behind it, theyll just be taken aback by this incredibly wide, sexy proportions. I wanted every single line to blend into everything else. Krugger [Scott Krugger, exterior design manager], Trostle [Mark Trostle, head of SRT design] and myself, we all debated the design so much. And Ive never sweated a car this much in my life. We really wanted every millimeter to have a reason for being, so it almost looks like an organic thing that you found, that hatched out of an egg and became the carit wasnt assembled by men (laughs).  Switching to the upgraded interior for a second, I understand a lot of time went into the steering wheel.  I must have driven Tome [Tome Jovanoski, interior design manager] crazy on the steering wheel. We just went through sections and sections and sections. We got all these different steering wheels from Audi R8s to Ferraris to Volkswagen GTIs to aftermarket racing wheelsall these different wheels. We just kind of held them all. One of the favorites was the 500 Abarth, which we loved a lot. We kind of took the best of all the steering wheels we felt and integrated it all into one wheel and went our own direction after that. I think people will just talk about it after they spend time in the car. When they meet at their car clubs, theyll be talking about the steering wheel. Thats the kind of level of detail we went after.   We also shrunk the wheel down in diameter and added the flat bottom. Youll see that in a lot in race cars for knee room. In most race cars, especially with quick steering, you dont turn the steering wheel more than a quarter turn either way in 90 percent of the situations.  This is kind of like asking a mother which one of her children is her favorite, but would you say you are the proudest of this car out of all the cars youve designed?  Absolutely. And that was the goal. Like I said, I joined the company because of this car. I was involved in the 2003 version. I did some of the interior, I managed the coupe program, but it wasnt mine from scratch. So it was always a dream to be able to sink our teeth into it. The team I had on this all had the same feelings. We all wanted to have a crack at doing the ultimate Viper. And I think if we didnt, then we died trying. We really put everything weve got into this car.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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