Vehicle Effects Builds Manual Charger Hellcat Widebody the Hard Way
What might be the world’s only manual Charger Hellcat Widebody lives up to the hype by being a total blast to drive.
As amazing as the Dodge Charger Hellcat is, it’s missing one little thing that old-fashioned enthusiasts crave – a manual transmission. While this would obviously make the supercharged beast a tad slower, many of us simply prefer to row our own gears, regardless. So it’s somewhat surprising that no one has created a manual Dodge Charger Hellcat until now. Though the world’s first such car – built by the movie car makers at Vehicle Effects – isn’t just a Charger Hellcat Widebody with a manual transmission, as we learn in this video from AutotopiaLA.
No, this wicked manual Charger Hellcat Widebody started life as a regular old run-of-the-mill Charger. The folks at Vehicle Effects, run by the legendary Dennis McCarthy, then scooped up a manual Hellcat Challenger and swapped all of its important parts over, including the car’s 707 horsepower, supercharged 6.2-liter V8. In the process, the team added bigger injectors, a pulley kit, and a tune, which reportedly resulted in a nice bump to 800 raging ponies.
The team even did a full interior swap on the car and moved over all of the pertinent body parts – hood, badges, wide fenders, etc. – then added a Magnaflow exhaust to make it sound extra nasty. As for the transmission, well, that had to be sourced from somewhere else, since Dodge doesn’t offer a manual option in any version of the Charger. Luckily, it does sell the Challenger with a Tremec TR6060 six-speed gearbox, which was the perfect choice for this rambunctious sedan, which has had all of its electronic nannies disabled.
Regardless, out on the road, this beast of a Charger doesn’t quite drive like the animal our host was expecting, but it still pulls like a freight train. “Definitely pulls nicely,” he says. “But it’s not the violence I was anticipating.
This thing definitely moves, and it’s just as comfortable as can be.” That’s not to say that this manual Hellcat can’t light up the tires on a moment’s notice, of course. “Definitely spins them no problem,” our host notes. “I mean, I coulda spun them all the way down the street.”
We can credit a trick suspension setup for taming all of that horsepower, as well as some stickier Mickey Thomson tires. And while it may need its extra power to hang with a stock, automatic-equipped Hellcat, this special car is likely far more fun and engaging to drive, which is precisely why so many people remain hardcore fans of manual gearboxes.
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