7 Dodge Viper Facts You May Not Know, from the Men Who Built It

We may never see another car quite like the Dodge Viper again. That’s a sad truth, but one that feels safe to accept. When the stunning Viper concept first appeared at the 1989 North American International Auto Show, it felt like the massive jolt the Chrysler Corporation needed to break free from a successful but sleepy product lineup.

The story of how the Viper came to be is one of grit, scrappiness, and the best kind of corporate mischief guided by visionary leaders and scores of people who believed in an idea to their core. In the latest episode of his Never Stop Driving podcast, our Editor in Chief, Larry Webster, and editor/photographer Cameron Neveu had a chance to sit down with two of the most important people from that Viper team: Herb Helbig and Dick Winkles. Helbig was the manager of vehicle synthesis for much of the Viper’s lifetime but he began as a transmission and suspension engineer on the project. Winkles was the powertrain engineer behind the Viper’s legendary V-10 engine. They shared so many interesting tidbits throughout the hour-and-a-half conversation that our notes on the episode ran north of 4800 words.

We won’t subject you to all that madness here, but we will whet your appetite with a handful of fascinating details you might not know about the Viper. Right up front, know this: The episode, which you can catch below, is absolutely worth watching in its entirety—you’ll want to hear the rest of the surprising details of the Viper’s history straight from the mouths of those who were there.

If you’re a fan of the Viper, some of this may be familiar to you. But if you’re new to the car or perhaps only vaguely familiar with it, these seven tales from the men who were there from the start are guaranteed to give you a finer appreciation of the car.

Blank checks helped propel the Viper beyond a mere concept

The Viper concept made a huge splash at its debut at the 1989 Detroit International Auto Show, but the gala that took place the Friday before was perhaps just as important. The party was a mixer of industry execs, well-to-do buyers, dealership magnates, and generally anyone who was anyone inside the auto industry.

At the gala, Bob Lutz, Tom Gale, François Castaing, and the other Chrysler execs who had ginned up the idea behind the concept were mingling with a sizable audience that had come to gawk at the wild machine. “People were coming up to Tom Gale and Bob Lutz and saying, ‘You know, you have to build this car,'” said Helbig. “‘Not only that, but here’s my checkbook, I’m gonna give you the check, I want the first car. You write the number in.'”

At this point, the car was barely beyond the idea stage, and the path forward was anything but clear. But Lutz and the team knew that the “take my money!” levels of enthusiasm from potential customers was significant enough that it just might give the company the exit velocity it needed to break free of the K-Car mold.

A few dozen staff were invited to the Viper’s initial planning meeting. Some 300 people showed up.

Following the auto show and the buzz that the Viper generated, Chrysler’s top execs decided to test the waters internally to see if there were people who wanted to work on this. But how do you get a team together to take a moonshot car like this from a pipe dream to reality? The right people can make or break a project like this. Lutz and his team knew that.

The plan, as Helbig tells it, was to hand-select a bunch of gearheads from the company, invite them to Chrysler’s design dome at Highland Park for a secret meeting, and ask those attending, “Does this make any sense?”

“There might have been 60 people on the list for this secret meeting,” Helbig explained. “But of course, there are no secrets in a company.” News of the meeting traveled fast through the grapevine, and Helbig, along with a cubicle neighbor who tipped him off, crashed the meeting. “We show up at this styling dome in Highland Park—there was really nobody at the door to see if you’re on the lists—so we just sign our names, walk in, and blend in with the crowd.”

That crowd—which was supposed to number around 100 on the high side—ended up being nearly 300 people, according to Helbig. If the goal was to see if there was any enthusiasm for a Viper, Lutz, Gale, Castaing, and the other senior leaders surely got the message. Instead of filling out a list of team members, the leaders had to whittle the team down to a manageable amount.

Creative accounting kept the project entirely off bean-counter radar

Automakers are massive organizations dealing with budgets that often add up to billions. Even back in the late 1980s, a budget in the tens of millions didn’t warrant any sort of oversight, depending on who held the purse strings.

As Helbig tells it, $50M was the threshold at which you had to flag a budget for accounting’s attention. So, to keep this program on the down-low and beneath scrutiny from the bean counters, the Viper program was given a budget just shy of that $50M threshold. “That way, it dropped down a decimal point and nobody could ever see it,” explained Helbig.

To give some context around how much money was in the halls of Chrysler at the time, Winkles noted that certain engine programs were running budgets of around $30-$40M, so you can about imagine how scrappy that team had to be with development dollars for an entire car.

Imagine one of the most significant cars ever coming from Chrysler having to be developed in the dark with a small enough stack of cash that nobody could bother checking into where that money was going! That sort of stealth—creative accounting, backroom dealings, after-hours labor—only adds to this car’s mystique.

Lamborghini had a hand in the V-10, and it nearly had trick F1 tech

From the outset, the Lutz and the team wanted the Viper to have a V-10. That’s where Lamborghini, which Chrysler had recently purchased, came in.

As Winkles explains, Lamborghini had an in-house source large enough to make the big aluminum castings needed. Chris Theodore, then the powertrain director at Chrysler, knew that the Viper’s V-10 would need to roll down the same assembly line as the iron-block V-10 that Chrysler was also cooking up for the Ram pickup.

Theodore took the blueprints for the aluminum V-10 to Mauro Forghieri, the chief engineer of Lamborghini’s Formula 1 program at the time, and asked for assistance to make the Viper motor something truly fitting of a sports car.

Well, as Winkles explained, Forghieri may have taken a few too many motorsport-derived liberties with the initial result. Some exotic tech, such as shorter water jackets around the cylinders and an aluminum bedplate for the bottom end, weren’t going to cut it in something meant for street driving.

Despite taming a few things on the Viper’s engine in service of practicality, it feels safe to say the end result was still epic.

Cell 13: Valhalla for Chrysler’s most epic engines

Seriously, this entire segment could warrant its own podcast—maybe even its own book. Even if the final prototype V-10 wasn’t quite as exotic as what Mauro Forghieri had suggested, that doesn’t mean it was treated to a run-of-the-mill development process.

Enter cell 13, the dyno where the V-10 proved its mettle. “[Cell 13 is] not any dyno cell,” said Helbig, “It’s the dyno cell. It’s the dyno cell that ran all the high-performance, big-inch motors, all Petty’s Hemis, all the NASCAR work was all done at cell 13 … cell 13 was like holy ground.”

Entering that dyno room was like entering the Colosseum in Rome. “You could go into cell 13, you could look up at the ceiling and you’d see where pistons had gone up there and different parts had destroyed parts of the ceiling,” said Winkles.

Cell 13, as Winkles explained, was the only cell left in Chrysler’s Highland Park facility with a dynamometer rated for more than 300 horsepower. In other words, the only place for a V-10 of this ilk to cut its teeth. So, even though it had been mothballed for some time prior to the Viper program, cell 13 was brought out of retirement to see if it could lend its magic touch to one more epic engine.

“When a project went in there, it seemed to come out better,” said Winkles. “It always had that mystique about it because of what it had done in the past.”

(We won’t spoil it, but be sure to pay close attention to Helbig’s story about his experience near cell 13.)

The Viper almost had an all-aluminum 426 Hemi V-8

Vipers and V-10s go hand-in-hand, but at the project’s outset, that match wasn’t a guarantee—despite Bob Lutz’s mandate that this unique car have an equally unique engine. Some within the program were concerned about the compressed timeline between the concept and production car (Lutz gave the team just 36 months).

“One of the things that we started thinking about was, ‘okay, if the V-10 doesn’t make it, what’s our backup?'” said Helbig. “Well, there was only one backup. To have enough draw to make this car so special, it had to have an all-aluminum 426 hemi.”

Mopar fanatics will rightly note that Chrysler never made an all-aluminum 426. “We didn’t, but Keith Black did,” noted Helbig with a grin. Keith Black was a drag-racing legend who had become famous for aluminum-blocked V-8s back in the 1970s.

“We went to see Keith Black under the cover of darkness—you want secret meetings? This was like a secret trip to the West Coast to talk to Keith to find out if he had any interest in building all-aluminum motors.”

Though it ultimately didn’t pan out that way, picturing a Viper with an all-aluminum 426 sounds like a fun way to pass an evening with Mopar faithful.

Last-minute supplier drama, solved by an ex-Corvette man

Initially, the Viper’s six-speed manual transmission was slated to come from Getrag, a German supplier who was looking to break into the North American market at the time. “We knew a bunch of the guys that worked there,” explained Helbig, noting that many of the Getrag North America guys were ex-Chrysler employees. “We had a great relationship, [and] they built us this really really great transmission.”

But in the waning phases of development, Getrag’s German management came in and said that the company couldn’t sell Chrysler the six-speeds for the agreed-upon price. Mind you, this was after the purchasing team had put together a whole pricing scheme for the Viper, and there wasn’t much margin to work with, according to Helbig. “We tried everything, but their CEO was like, ‘no, double the price or no sale.”

In the scramble for a solution, Roy Sjoberg, a Chrysler exec who was big in the Viper program (and who had worked on Corvettes under Zora Arkus-Duntov), came to the rescue. As Helbig tells it, Sjoberg had a few friends over at BorgWarner. “Over some undetermined number of Jack Daniels at the Indy 500 one year, he and the head of engineering for BorgWarner, they were in some suite and they were knocking ’em back, and Roy got them to commit to help us out.”

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The interview covers many more topics, ranging from what happened as the first Vipers began rolling off the assembly line to the incremental improvements made in the ensuing generations. Rather than lay any more of them out here, we encourage you to do yourself a favor and watch the discussion in full below. Let us know in the comments which factoid you found most interesting.