With great power comes great accessories. The Dodge Challenger Demon 170 is a 1,000-horsepower beast and racing down a drag strip in under nine seconds means you need some goodies to stay between the lines, which Dodge will have available soon through its Direct Connection parts catalog. They include a parachute mounting system, a harness bar, a street wheel/tire package, and a carbon fiber rear seat delete insert.
The parachute may not sound strictly necessary, but as far as the National Hot Rod Association is concerned, it is. Any car built after 2014 that runs under a nine-second quarter mile requires one. Currently, it’s unclear if the harness bar—used to attach a harness, of course—satisfies the NHRA’s definition of a safety cage, though.
We’ve reached out to Dodge in an attempt to clarify. If it does, you’ll be able to go to NHRA drags using off-the-shelf parts from Direct Connection. If not, I hope you know a good fabricator. Both a cage and a chute are required by the NHRA to race legally. In its stock form, the Demon 170 is banned from NHRA drag strips.
The street wheel/tire package is necessary because the tires that the Demon goes 0-60 mph in 1.66 seconds with are not exactly suitable for daily driving. They’re slick tires with soft sidewalls designed for maximum traction on a prepped surface.
You don’t want to drive on them in the rain or else you’ll probably slide off the road. To make changing the car’s attitude easier, Dodge will include wheels with your new civilized tires. The car will absolutely not be as quick when equipped with street tires, however.
Dodge currently offers a number of Direct Connection parts for other Challenger models. They’re mostly engine performance-oriented options, like supercharger pulleys, cold-air intakes, and tuning software.
That being said, the original Demon was originally offered with the “Demon Crate,” a set of hardware that came as a no-cost option to get the car to its track-ready spec. The Demon 170 doesn’t undergo the same transformation to get into its final form, but all of these parts are reminiscent of that.
Dodge says there will be more news about the availability and pricing of the factory speed parts for the Demon 170 soon. Production of the most powerful Challenger ever will be limited to just 3,000 units in the United States and 300 in Canada.