Driven Hard: Dodge Challenger

I fell in love with America this year. Deeply, spiritually, irrevocably; my world will never be the same. It has been a long time coming. Believe me, this is no quick crush.

Barely two months have passed in the last 20 years — since my closest friend left "on a short business assignment" to New York and never returned — when I haven't bothered the immigration line at JFK. Yet I never quite let myself fall. I developed a repertoire of poorly disguised excuses to hide my growing dependence on New York's overwhelming, addictive energy. It's easy, after all, when you're a Brit to take the high ground; reject the city's soul, and all you'll see is gross vanity and self-interest. "That's not how we do it back in the Old World, old chap."

B.S.! Spend some time working there, as I have this year, and you'll see something else; a sense of community, a sense of ease, a sense of balance, a real intolerance with a lack of respect or poor support or contracted service, and a real belief in the sense of opportunity — the events of Nov. 4 validated that. My defense was stripped from me. It was apparent to anyone and everyone just how much the place meant to me. So I gave in. I fell in love with America. Inevitably, I fell in love with an American girl, too. It didn't work out.

Some months after that personal implosion, I'm pondering all this in a new Dodge Challenger, driving the same roads I used to take to see the girl. The irony isn't lost on me. This car is the only news Chrysler has left to shout about. Walt's once pioneeringly smart operation is in tatters of unpayable debt and unmeetable obligation. Daimler-Benz wasn't the answer, unskilled private equity certainly wasn't, now all it has to look forward to are government handouts and a shotgun marriage to General Motors. "Last chance power drive," indeed; I have a call before I leave the city. "Can we meet?" she asks.

The Challenger makes you think about how you feel regarding all things American. It's impossible to get under its skin if you don't. If you don't let America near your soul, then you'll never get it. It's a re-creation muscle car. No more, no less. A re-creation of the some of the most primitively engineered performance cars ever to hit road or track. Performance car? The original Challenger predated the Miura by three years, don't forget. So the new Challenger is doubly ersatz.

You, me, us...we should hate it. But we don't. I'd bet you love it, too.

I've written before (about another Dodge actually, the Viper) that I believe the only way to get on with American cars is to lower your expectations before you even climb in. (I actually wrote, "All American cars are shit," but I was younger then.) The Challenger is no exception. It turns up on the morning Top Gear's Cars of the Year shoot relocates from New York City to Montauk, 120 miles away on that long, all-too-familiar drive along the Long Island Expressway and Montauk Highway.

It creates a monumental stir outside the hotel in New York's hip Lower East Side. Don't forget these bellboys have already taken delivery of our Lamborghini and our Rolls-Royce. They're impressed. Truly impressed. And it goes on, the Challenger stopping traffic and breaking necks. Genuinely, I have never seen anything like it. And this is the LES, where New York's famous cool is at its most potent and potentially most poisonous. People try very hard around here not to be impressed by anything. When they are, it says something about that something. No amount of fake ram vents or fake carbon Fablon can hide the fact that the Challenger is a deeply beautiful object, possessed of a surface and silhouette that would grace any car. That it so viscerally evokes the original compounds the magic. It's magnificent.

Inevitably, then, by the time I throw my bags in the silly little trunk, expectations are high. I'm heading for a fall. As an American car, the Challenger delivers. The interior (we'll come to that, but it's not as bad as everyone says) is not the issue. It's the pedals, which feel remote, lazy and way too long in their action. The clutch, especially, seems to function only in 20 percent of its travel, so while the six-speed stick (yup, a yank with a proper gearbox — the original R/T had a three-speed manual, don't forget) is explicit enough, getting the Challenger under way ain't as dignified as it should be.

Trying to find a way around road work sees us getting lost. It's an LES thing; you can see the Williamsburg Bridge you're heading for, you just can't seem to get the combination of streets you want to get to it. We thread through Chinatown on our way back on track, and it's here, as if it wasn't apparent outside the hotel, that the Challenger shows its second flaw, its size. It's over 16 feet long. It's enormous. The goodwill generated by that dramatic arrival a few minutes earlier is starting to fade. It doesn't feel tight, it doesn't feel powerful, it's certainly not lean. And it ain't feeling especially fast.

But what was I expecting? Had my summer romance with America completely blinded me from that more youthfully expressed maxim on American automobilia? Who was I kidding, this is a modern car, a cheeky, pragmatic, maybe even cynical, way of getting us to buy the same old shit all over.

All cars are built around the vital organs of others these days, but, please, no snobbery here around the fact the Challenger is a Chrysler 300C under that two-door skin. And as American platforms go, the 300C ain't a bad one — Chrysler's recent history means there's a whole lot of stuff Mercedes left lying around the house when it exited under this car...independent suspension on all four corners, for instance. You don't find that on a Mustang or a new Camaro or a Corvette, even.

But even Stuttgart's finest chattels can't cope with the holes and ditches New York's road-keeping authorities believe it's still acceptable to inflict on the city. No wonder nobody drives in Manhattan. It's time to head out.

The magnificence of the three bridges — Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg — that span the lower end of the East River and feed traffic out in to Brooklyn and Queens bestow the beginning of the long haul to Long Island with a sense of romance the rest of the journey doesn't really justify, well not until the commuter suburbs and – some considerable 65-mph interstate miles later – the chichi residences of the Hamptons have been past. It's Dullsville for 100 of its 120 miles.

It's not until the arrow-straight I-27 is a distant memory that the Montauk Highway begins to play the Challenger's game. The clue's in the name: it's a muscle car, stupid. The muscle here is another Chrysler reinvention: the Hemi. In this case, a 6.1-liter producing 425 hp (the original R/T's 6.3-liter V8 had 335 hp). You wouldn't think it, so lazily is it produced, but it is, as is a more-than-welcome 420 lb-ft of torque. It's muscle that rapidly finds room under your skin. Away from stop-go traffic, on the free and empty streets challenger R/T's were made to race on, it begins to let you know it means business. Pussy around with this car and you'll wonder how a car that looks so much made-for-purpose can deliver so little; muscle it, and it'll begin to show you its soul.

By the time we arrive in Montauk at sunset, I've got the measure of this car. Big throttle, quick shifts, no messing with the god-awful clutch get this car growling and, you know what, really shifting. Close to five seconds to 60 mph, all the way to the ton and back to standstill in 17 seconds — just about quick enough to run off a quarter-mile drag race and park up without the State Troopers spotting you.

You sense yourself falling for it every time a junction needs clearing, or slow-moving traffic needs passing, or a green light needs racing. Bit by bit, that way it first made you feel returns to you. The interior ain't a stitch on the outside, but we all know interiors are so much more expensive than exteriors to execute, so I'm inclined to forgive. It's clean and clear and not so cheap looking. Besides, the radio's strong and clear and tuned to E Street radio, wall-to-wall Bruce Springsteen, which is where all this American thing began with me. Cars are a constant metaphor in Springsteen's writing, offering always the promise of an escape to somewhere better, the promise of the American dream. The Boss' critics decry this: "some things mean more, much more than cars and girls," they say. I'm not so sure.

So what about the girl? A well-traveled soul with an acute eye for all things pretty (your author clearly an exception), she never once flipped out over any of the cars I'd rock up at her door with throughout a long summer. Difficult to impress, then. But she likes the Challenger when I rock up the next morning. "It's cool," she says. It is, indeed.