With Ram roaring back to its V-8 performance roots with a trio of muscle trucks, it might seem that there's never been a time when Stellantis has hit harder. Well, you'd be wrong about that, as there was a time when Dodge was so audacious that it decided to stuff a Viper engine into a pickup.
Found over at Bring a Trailer, this Dodge Ram SRT-10 combines ten cylinders and a six-speed manual transmission for a one-two punch that's a knockout. Need to get a sheet of plywood home as fast as is humanly possible? This is the truck for you.
Pleasingly, this example is finished in a Flame Red paint job that brings up memories of one of the original muscle Mopar trucks, the Dodge Lil' Red Express truck of the late 1970s. In 1978, this truck posted the fastest 0-100 mph for an American-built vehicle that C/D had so far tested.
View Price on AmazonAs for our test of the SRT-10, that turned out into a good-natured verbal brawl between editors emeritus John Phillips and Brock Yates. Phillips took the side of reason, Yates took the side of Viper Engine Pickup Yeehaw. Fun stuff.
Putting an 8.4-liter V-10 in a Ram to create a pickup truck with a top speed of 153 mph does seem like the kind of thing a moonshiner might do after sampling their own supply, but it is at least good fun. Dodge liked the recipe so much that it did it twice over three years, first with a regular cab and a manual, later with a quad cab and a four-speed automatic.
For collectibility, you want a regular cab like this one, complete with low mileage and a gear shifter the length of a 9-iron. This first-year SRT-10 bests Ram's new muscle trucks in both cylinder count and pedal count. Sure, the Hellcat-powered Ram SRT has more power on tap, 777 horsepower vs the SRT-10's 500 horses, but the SRT-10 is the sport truck the latter is paying homage to.
With a clean history, pristine interior, and just 3000 miles on the odometer, this Viper-engined pickup is a blue-chip collectible with a country-music twang. Ram's current rollout of sport pickup trucks is a bit of a gamble, and it remains to be seen whether the timing is right for a return of full-sized pickup performance. The SRT-10 is a past example of when it pushed all its chips into the middle, bet big, and won.
The auction ends May 27.
Source: caranddriver.com
