We Took Our 2019 Dodge Challenger R/T Scat Pack 1320 To The Track For The First Time:

A week ago today I had the chance to take our new 2019 Challenger  R/T Scat Pack 1320 to the drag strip for the first time. Just the day prior we had also formed a sponsorship with our friends over at White Rock Dodge, and we are very happy to have them on board. I grabbed my helmet, taped up the rear quarter panels (to protect them from rocks and rubber sticking to the quarters) and headed out to my local track, Mission Raceway Park. 

Upon arrival, I got the car teched in, dropped the air pressure in the rear drag radials to 20 PSI and waited to get called to the lanes. The ambient temperature was hovering around 34 degrees and even though the track is at sea level they had the highest density altitude that they had all year at 1900 feet. This was a new mid-week event that I hadn’t been to before and in my opinion, the track prep wasn’t up to the usual standard. 

At this point, I had also only had the car for eight days and was still learning it so I didn’t expect to set the world on fire. I managed to botch the first run pretty bad by having old habits kick and kept my foot on the brake while trying to do a line lock burnout, this caused the car to disable the throttle pedal while I was doing that so of course, the burnout didn’t work out. At this point, flustered, I staged the car, forgot to put in in launch control mode and ended up accidentally doing a brake stand while launching the car, red lighting in the process. Total amateur hour. It also didn’t help that even though I have made hundreds of drag strip passes this is the first time I had been in about 15 years other than running my Ram, two years ago.

While I felt like an idiot at least I got that all out of the way and didn’t have any technical difficulties for the rest of the night. Run 2 came pretty quickly with the car still heat soaked, I did my burnout, staged the car and left off the launch control at 2000 RPM. This resulted in a 12.398 at 110.67 MPH with a 1.836 60 foot. The car spun a bit at launch on that run so I dialed the launch control down to 1600 RPM for the third run. This resulted in a 12.380 at 111 MPH but I lost a couple hundredths on the 60 foot which was now a 1.858. 

After that run, another racer oiled down the track which took a while to clean up. For run 4 the car finally had a chance to sit for about an hour and a half. I had talked to a friend and Moparinsiders contributor Mike Volkmann who drag races his Dodge Charger SRT 392, who told me not to use the launch control but to either use the transbrake or footbrake the car to about 2000 RPM. This resulted in what would be the best run of the night, a 12.201 at 112 MPH with a 1.765 60 foot. I tried a few other things throughout the night with the second best run being a 12.269 at 11 MPH with a 1.801 60 foot time. 

The next track day is July 5th and weather permitting we will be out there trying to punch this thing into the 11s. While the first time out was definitely a bit of a learning experience with the car, we will have quite a few more miles on the car for the second track day and should also be a lot more comfortable with the drag racing features of this awesome track-ready Challenger. Hopefully, weather and track conditions will also be improved as we continue to hunt for an 11-second time slip. You can also follow the car and our best time slips at the Dodge Garage 1320 Club page.