Driver Battles: Season 3, Drag Edition Episode 1, GTO vs. Challenger
Last year we took a hard look at the upcoming, third season of our popular video series Driver Battles and decided it was time to change it up before it became stale. While we loved racing ‘round Chuckwalla and Willow Springs, we decided to do a different style of racing and took our Driver Battles series from time attack on the track to best E.T. on the drag strip.
Tire-spinning, high-horsepower V8-equipped American muscle cars are all the rage right now and everyone thinks they have the fastest car on the block. Well, now there’s a place where they can prove it. Luckily for us, there are plenty of people out there with fast cars of all varieties and we can’t wait to see all of you out there with modded Mustangs, crazy-fast Camaros, vicious ‘Vettes and mammoth-motored Mopars rocketing down the ‘strip.
In this episode of Driver Battles, we went to Irwindale Dragstrip in Southern California for an 1/8-mile brawl. For the day’s battle, we pitted a hopped-up Pontiac GTO with a 6.0L V8 running Nitto NT555R drag radials against a Dodge SRT Challenger with a 392ci Hemi on Nitto NT555 G2 rear tires. While the Challenger had more power than the GTO, the GTO is lighter—so we knew it was going to be a good race.
As an added twist, and to up the entertainment value of this season, there’s an equalizer component to the competition that you’ll appreciate, but we’re not going to discuss it here, so we don’t ruin the surprise. You’ll just have to take a peek at the video to find out what other vehicles these two had to race.
Visit the Driving Line YouTube channel and see if Mopar muscle or Pontiac power wins the day. Bragging rights are on the line.
While you’re there, leave a comment and let us know if you think you’ve got something faster—we’d love to know what you’ve got, and we'd love to have you on our next episode.
We didn’t forget about our off-road fans—stay tuned to Driving Line’s YouTube channel for our upcoming Driver Battles ‘Dirt’ Edition.
Click here to see which cars we paired against each other on previous versions of Driver Battles.
