1983 Dodge Shelby Charger is Built to Slay Giants

From the April 1983 issue of Car and Driver.

And you thought old Carroll Shelby had fallen off the edge of an earth too flat to appreciate his talents. That hard times and high-priced fuel had squared up a once-hip populace and relegated the old Black-Hatted Chicken Farmer and his sports cars to a resting place out behind the last row of coops in Texas like roosters gone gray in the gonads. Did you really think ol’ Shel, the Snake Charmer, the Terlingua Chili Chieftain, had shot his Warrior’s Wad?

Yo’ mama!

The man in the black hat is back. Try this on for size: the new Shelby Charg­er, conceived, engineered, and pack­aged in three madcap months, will pin any other car in its class directly to the mat. On four very energetic cylinders, the Shelby Charger will run a whopping 117 mph, burn off quarter-miles in the sixteen-second bracket at over 80 mph, stop from 70 mph in under 200 feet, corner at a bloodcurdling 0.80 g, and return a most laudable 22 mpg even un­der giddily throttle-minded feet.

Back in the days when Lee Iacocca was running Ford and Carroll Shelby was running Fords, they saw very much eye to eye. Fast was fun and perfor­mance was profit. Now, Lee Iacocca has brought the Chrysler Corporation back from the dead, and he has resurrected Carroll Shelby as the black-hatted good guy. Every other maker of performance cars will soon want to have this unholy marriage annulled.

We’re talking three months from pro­posal to progeny here! This must be some sort of all-time record in the auto­mobile business. Mattel can’t even get a two-ounce toy car into production that fast. The Shelby Charger, this 90-day wonder, is the first Chrysler product in many a year that has everyone walking around with a huge smile. Chrysler is small enough to move quickly. Its quick­ness has been learned in desperate straits, and the talent has been honed by Iacocca. The program started with the formation of a Chrysler-Shelby tech center in Santa Fe Springs, California, complete with dynamometers, an eighth-mile drag strip, and a full-size skidpad. For the first month, Shelby spent a good deal of hands-on time with his new hardware, but he later was able, when corporate PR requirements cut into his time, to leave much of the fine-tuning to longtime Chrysler engineer Scott Harvey, a former national rally champion and Monte Carlo Rally participant.

Says Shelby: “I laid out all the param­eters that I wanted in the car. The main parameters were to have as good a han­dling front-wheel-drive car as there is anywhere, that it be unique in appear­ance, and that it perform adequately. It’s not another Cobra, and there’s no claim for it to be. But it had to be built so that we can add certain things to it. The person who buys it can buy these parts and pieces from Chrysler’s Direct Connection to bring its performance up as high as he wants. And my last param­eter was that the base price be held to around $8000.

“I wanted a car,” Shelby continues, “that was going to blow off the GTI, that would perform with the 924, and that would have the potential to equal the 944 even if it comes out with a tur­bocharger. If we build an automobile that is in the ballpark with these things and sells for $8000, then I’ve got me some sales. I am not trying to build a race car. My racing days are over. But I goddamn sure guarantee you I could blow ’em off with somethin’ I’d sell for $25,000!”

This man is incorrigible. The front­-wheel-drive Charger is nifty, and Shelby knows the 2.2-liter engine is a winner. Redlined at 6000 rpm, it produces 107 hp at 5600 rpm (and he says there’s an­other 25 naturally aspirated horsepower to come). At 107 hp, it is 13 hp stronger than the standard 2.2, thanks to a block­-milling of 0.030 inch, which raises the compression ratio from 9.0 to 9.6:1. The overhead cam is retarded four de­grees for better top-end performance. Pete Gladysz, a project engineer on the Shelby powerplant who works out of Chrysler’s Engine Electrical Engineer­ing, says: “The spark is running very close to max-power advance. Premium unleaded is recommended, but not absolutely required because we’re using a detonation sensor. In 0-to-60 runs, I’d say premium allows the car to be per­haps a second quicker.

“This engine is carbureted richer than the normal, federal-package 2.2. We’ve used the California-spec carbure­tor because of the emissions setup, and we’re probably 20 percent richer.”

These refinements mesh with the two-barrel’s electronic controls to pro­duce generally good drivability. A warm 2.2 provides pleasing performance, de­cisive responsiveness, and total freedom from flat spots. And there is never an unpleasant letdown at the top of the rev range. The 2.2 always feels ripe underfoot.

The five-speed transaxle’s final-drive ratio has been bumped from 3.56 to 3.87:1. This, along with a good cluster­ing of ratios, propels the Shelby smartly from corner to corner. Shelby noticed in hard driving that the transmission be­came unduly obstinate after a few hard shifts, but this will be corrected with re­finement and hardened shift forks be­fore the car goes into production.

Sitting almost an inch lower than a bread-and-butter Charger, the Shelby sacrifices 0.6 inch to shorter springs (30 percent stiffer in front, 15 percent stiff­er in the rear), and 0.3 inch to the spe­cial-construction 195/50VR-15 Good­year Eagle GT tires. These tires—some of the best performance doughnuts in memory, providing excellent traction and feel in both wet and dry—are an amalgam of construction techniques pioneered by Goodyear in its European NCTs (which the Chrysler-Shelby équipe found to be ill-suited to its needs) and its American-developed Ea­gles. Incidentally, the inner circle of decorative holes in the wheels will soon disappear.

Larry McLeese, senior vehicle-dy­namics development engineer, confirm that the shocks are considerably stiff­ened with more rebound damping and a little more jounce control. The Shelby’s ride is very firm, but not out of propor­tion to the added responsiveness and excellence of handling, and we never found a pothole that brought the car to its knees. According to McLeese, this is because new, progressive bump stops keep suspension compression from reaching the critical stage.

The car rides up on the front tires’ shoulders during high-g cornering, bad­ly wearing the outer ribs of tread. Shel­by would like to crank in some static negative camber to square up the tire near the limit, but Chrysler begs the question. However, camber can easily be biased toward negative by any align­ment shop if that’s your predilection.

The Shelby has straight-line stability in abundance, and its steering, in the opinion of some enthusiastic staffers, is the best power-assisted steering en­countered in any American car. It still must fend off some torque steer (un­equal-length half-shafts are partial cul­prits here, and a fix is on the way), but it never gives you the feeling that the car is going to jump off the road. Still, a firm hand is a good thing. The steering, with a ratio of 14.0:1, is highly linear and vastly superior to the wishy-washy units of the Z28 and the Mustang. Thankfully, the car’s development was not accomplished solely within the “too sanitary” (McLeese’s words) world of the proving grounds alone. “You’ve got to get into the real world,” McLeese avers, “and deal with bumps in the cor­ners and off-camber turns and other cars in your path . . .”

After you’ve put them all behind you, you can sail into the next corner and lay into the brakes. They’re ridiculously easy to use, and they took a useful twen­ty feet off our last 70-to-0 Charger stop­ping distance, cutting it to 195 feet.

Chrysler isn’t talking, but the add-on exterior trim (a substantial air dam, Camaro-like rocker spats, and a handsome ducktail) may have contributed to the four-cylinder’s war with the winds, although our coast-down measurements indicate the opposite. The add-on flying buttresses over the rearmost side win­dows are less than swell, but our Shelby never failed to draw admirers at every gas stop. On the road, the pretenders who tried for a closer look invariably fell away in stunned defeat.

An inch of road we wouldn’t give the pretenders, but the interior they can have. We like the nice cloth and the gray and royal blue, but the colors are too evenly apportioned. What’s more, the trim and the dash layout are strictly sec­ond-string, while the driving position, saddled with a towering steering col­umn left over from the taller Omni se­dan, is best suited to life forms un­known to this corner of the universe. Lateral support is less than it should be, the buckets’ cloth upholstery providing the only saving grace.

We do, however, nominate the Shelby for the first annual Console Feature of the Year Award: a three-way choice of closed, open with a nice boxy space, or open with two mini dry docks for stor­ing cups of coffee or chocolate shakes and the like, as well as a graduated row of coin holders for those afflicted with tollboothitis. Kudos also to the Char­ger’s power-assisted armrest (spring­-loaded to move back when the parking­-brake lever is pulled up), the first we’ve ever encountered.

Okay, so eight thousand bucks gets you no A/C. So what? Pay the extra. And plunk for an aftermarket Recaro or two. And laugh with us when you pick off all those dozens of pretenders you’ll come across every day. Nobody ever said Carroll Shelby didn’t know how to have fun, not even the flat-earth disci­ple who’d written him off, chili and all.

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com