{"id":31871,"date":"2019-12-04T18:30:50","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T23:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dodgegarage.com\/news-api\/?p=31871"},"modified":"2024-03-25T11:23:52","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T15:23:52","slug":"a-magician-never-reveals-his-secrets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/racing\/2019\/12\/a-magician-never-reveals-his-secrets.html","title":{"rendered":"A Magician Never Reveals His Secrets"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

recently had the chance to catch up with Tim Barth from Barth Tuning<\/a> to talk about an impressive car they recently had on the track. If you know the struggle to pick up 10ths of a second on the drag strip, especially once you get into the 9-second and faster range, then this should impress you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When the SRT\u00ae<\/sup> team was testing the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, they were able to pull off an impressive 9.65 ET quarter-mile time. That was achieved, of course, with perfect weather, perfect prep and a driver with hundreds of passes on the car. To this day, the closest any owner has gotten to that benchmark is a 9.70, which is still pretty dang close. I point that out to say that many people think that the SRT Demon just automatically runs 9.65 so any improvement beyond that doesn\u2019t seem as impressive. In reality, it takes a lot of work to get the car out of the 10.0 range stock. Kudos to those fighting the stock battle chasing the 9.65 slip! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those unfamiliar with Tim Barth, I will give you a little backstory. As I have mentioned in previous articles, there are not a lot of tuners out there that specialize in the SRT Hellcat\/Demon platform. There are only a handful of people that can successfully and properly tune these cars. Maybe I should back up slightly and clarify \u201ctune\u201d. The tune is technically called the engine calibration. It\u2019s like all the instructions in the car’s computer that tell the engine and all its parts and sensors and pieces how to run and operate. A tuner, therefor, is someone who custom writes that set of instructions to go along with any physical\/mechanical modifications to the vehicle.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Now, back to Tim! He has been tuning Gen 3 HEMI\u00ae<\/sup> engine-powered cars since\nthey came out in the passenger cars back in 2005. He has tuned and built\nliterally thousands of SRT vehicles for both street and strip. He is now\npartnered with AJ Berge at Hemituner Performance, who has also been fiddling\nwith the digital 1s and 0s on these cars just as long. Together, they crank\nout some seriously capable track machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently, John Harding from Grove City, Ohio, reached out to Tim to get a little more pep out of his SRT Demon. Barth is already building a full-blown racecar for him, so his goals for the SRT Demon were much less lofty. Harding simply wanted to be able to run high 9s anytime and anywhere. He didn\u2019t want to have to search for perfect prep and perfect air. And he wanted to change minimal parts. The SRT Demon is designed and tuned from Dodge to run race gas (100 octane or more) in High Octane mode. Race gas is great. Ethanol is better and E90 from Ignite is\u2026well\u2026even better!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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They formed a simple plan, change the fuel injectors to be\nable to flow Ignite E90, toss in a tune and it might do what Harding wanted.\nThey also fitted the car with a set of Billet Specialties 17\u201d rear beadlock\nwheels and 18\u201d front skinnies, wrapped in Mickey Thompson tires. Both Barth and\nHarding felt pretty confident they could make the SRT Demon run consistent 9s even\nduring the summer heat or test ‘n tune prep without adding any parts to increase\nhorsepower. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After loading up the magic tune generated by Barth and Berge, and a tank full of Ignite E90, Barth took the car to Great Lakes Dragway to do some testing. Right off the trailer, the car ran a 9.60. Wow! That is pretty impressive if you ask me! Tim made a few small adjustments and made another pass and cracked out a 9.50. One more tune revision netted a final run of 9.42.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Again, this is stock boost, no crazy parts added. Injectors,\nE90, wheels. The car even has the stock catalytic converters. Happy with the\nresults, Tim gave the car back to Harding. He decided to haul the car to Atco\nthe first weekend of November to see if there was anything left in it. Harding\npulled off a 9.38 pass. Sheesh!!! 9.3s on nothing more than a tune! That\u2019s\nreally wild. Barth decided to give it a whack and piloted the car to a 9.30\nflat. Again, to date, 9.70 is the fastest anyone has gotten a stock powered\nSRT Demon. Even those cars in the 9.70s are running similar wheel and tire combos\nas this car. Barth was able to shave off .40 of a second from the best of the\nbest SRT Demon owners with just a tune and different race gas. That is a lot of\nground to cover in the 9-second range, especially with just a tune. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I asked Tim how it’s possible to get such drastic results\nlike this. Tim explained, \u201cGetting a handle on torque management and fine\ntuning the transmission tune makes a huge difference in what these cars will do\non the track. They come set up very conservative from the factory and we just\ntake what they left on the table and run with it. These cars pick up a lot from\neven just shifting at a higher RPM.\u201d While to some that may sound pretty vague,\nwell, it kind of has to be. You know a magician never reveals his secrets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having lived through the entire evolution of the SRT lineup, and being up close, personal and elbow deep in thousands of them, I asked Tim to give some insight on what he thinks Dodge and SRT did right with the SRT Demon. His response: \u201cEverything! The Demon is the best engineered performance car to ever come out of Dodge, and I want one.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo credit: Ron Schendorf<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So what\u2019s next for this near-stock SRT Demon, dare you ask? Well, in this case, not a whole lot. As I mentioned, they already are in the middle of building Harding\u2019s drag car. They plan to add a Litens Hellraiser 3.17\u201d Pulley and try to run low 9s in Texas in a few months and call it a day. The Litens pulley will add just a few more PSI of boost and might be all that is needed to shave just another click off the slip. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

recently had the chance to catch up with Tim Barth from Barth Tuning to talk about an impressive car they recently had on the track. If you know the struggle to pick up 10ths of a second on the drag strip, especially once you get into the 9-second and faster range, then this should impress you. When the SRT\u00ae team was testing the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, they were able to pull off an impressive 9.65 ET quarter-mile time. That was achieved, of course, with perfect weather, perfect prep […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":31897,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[575],"tags":[526,528,2227],"class_list":["post-31871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-racing","tag-challenger","tag-drag-racing","tag-mods"],"acf":[],"custom_fields":{"post_thumbnail_image":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Magician_Feature.jpg","icon_selection":"article","external_link":"","featured_article":[],"upload_background_image":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31871"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31871"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41901,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31871\/revisions\/41901"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}