<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Sometimes, it&amp;#039;s what people don&amp;#039;t say that matters. Earlier this year, I ran a ChumpCar race on the West Coast with a team made up largely of present and former Mopar engineers. On the second day of the event, as we sat around under the pitlane pop-up waiting for the next driver change, I told them that I was thinking about buying a Viper TA based on my experience with the car during 2015 Performance Car Of The Year. &amp;quot;Unless, of course, there&amp;#039;s an ACR coming.&amp;quot; There was silence as everybody pretended to be very interested in their shoes. &amp;quot;Okay, then,&amp;quot; I smiled. My friends resisted every effort I made to pry out more details, but now the details are here\u2014and they&amp;#039;re worth the wait. Nearly a ton of downforce? Carbon brakes? Double-adjustable suspension? Purpose-built tires that are significantly faster around a track than existing &amp;quot;DOT-R&amp;quot; race rubber? Full customization of interior and exterior color? Don&amp;#039;t these people care about my ability to save for retirement?  Maybe not, but they clearly do care about the meaning and heritage behind the &amp;quot;ACR&amp;quot; badge. The first car to carry the three letters into battle was the Neon ACR, a car that utterly humiliated the competition in SCCA road racing and continues to win club events to the present day. When the first-generation Viper ACR appeared, it followed the Neon ACR formula by shedding equipment and adding focus to what, let&amp;#039;s face it, was already a pretty uncompromising vehicle.  The next Viper ACR didn&amp;#039;t appear until 2008, but it was worth the wait. This time, the focus was on aero\u2014and the result was a Nurburgring time that until then had been the exclusive province of purpose-built, sportbike-engined prototypes. My brief time in the car revealed it to be an exhaustively developed track weapon that could be driven with abandon like a Spec Miata but which would do it at half again the speed.   As is the case with the current Viper TA, that 2008 ACR is notable for its honesty. Around a racetrack, the ACR does what you ask. Exactly what you ask. To drivers who have been coddled by a generation of understeer-oriented, stability-control-enhanced, nose-heavy sportscars that cover your mistakes like Auto-Tune on a Miley Cyrus live performance, it&amp;#039;s terrifying. But if you can learn the Viper&amp;#039;s language, you&amp;#039;ll be rewarded with an experience that is authentic, thrilling, and eminently repeatable thanks to the car&amp;#039;s on-track durability. Sure, the radio knobs might fall off, but you&amp;#039;ll never rip a subframe mount or lose a wheel bearing the way you will in workaday sedans that find themselves promoted to track duty by their manufacturer&amp;#039;s marketing departments. When the informal &amp;#039;Ring record was broken by other cars, SRT decided to bring the Viper ACR back for one final shot at the title. The problem was that they didn&amp;#039;t have any Vipers left\u2014they&amp;#039;d all been sold to dealers. So what did they do? Did they bring a factory prototype? Did they have a race shop prep a bare chassis? Nah. They went to Tomball Dodge in Texas, picked up two in-stock Vipers, took them to Germany, and smashed the record again. That&amp;#039;s right. The Viper ACR that ran 7:12 around the &amp;#039;Ring came from dealer stock. That&amp;#039;s the ACR philosophy in a nutshell.   ACR, by the way, stands for American Club Racer. It described the first Neon ACR perfectly. It described the Viper that left its Texas home to rule the &amp;#039;Ring perfectly. It&amp;#039;s a three-letter badge that has won more races in the last two decades than nearly any other. And as an American club racer myself, I&amp;#039;m thinking the new Viper ACR won&amp;#039;t have any trouble proving worthy of the name. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/features/a25703/all-the-things-you-acr-the-legend-of-the-viper-acr/>