When Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' (FCA) Mopar and Dodge Mopar and Dodge brands unveiled a new 2015 Mopar Dodge Charger R/T drag racing body this past November at the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) show in Las Vegas, it was the culmination of months and hours of tireless work.

The 2015 Mopar Dodge Charger R/T Funny Car was designed and developed on a virtual platform, using the same production-based technology and tools applied to the street vehicles, in a collaboration between FCA production and race engineers and the Don Schumacher Racing team.

When Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' (FCA) Mopar and Dodge Mopar and Dodge brands unveiled a new 2015 Mopar Dodge Charger R/T drag racing body this past November at the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) show in Las Vegas, it was the culmination of months and hours of tireless work.

The 2015 Mopar Dodge Charger R/T Funny Car was designed and developed on a virtual platform, using the same production-based technology and tools applied to the street vehicles, in a collaboration between FCA production and race engineers and the Don Schumacher Racing team.

The new body is scheduled to make its NHRA debut in nitro Funny Car competition at the 2015 season opening Winternationals Feb. 5-8 in Pomona, Calif.

“It was a pretty extensive process,” said Dale Aldo, Mopar’s Motorsports Director, about the redesign of the 2015 Mopar Dodge Charger. “It’s not a whole lot different than designing a car. It starts with evaluating where you are and then kind of setting some guidelines of where you want to be. Then you go to work, basically simulating, and setting up designs and scenarios and you work from there. After that, you obviously go through a wind tunnel simulation and then eventually you make a car and actually do some on-track testing. So, from beginning to end it’s a full 12 months of solid work with the team you’ve assembled to put this together in conjunction with DSR and their drivers and NHRA, which we have been partners with for a long time. We had screen reviews, body reviews and we had a test session that we ran down in Ohio. There were a lot of steps involved. We are pretty proud collectively of a Dodge product that was produced by Dodge.”

It’s a well-documented fact that many of the Dodge bodies utilized in the last year or so in NHRA nitro Funny Car competition were blown up by supercharger explosions which Aldo said was an element looked at closely in the redesign of the 2015 body.

“One of the items that was at the top of the priority list for the whole team, and again I want to stress it was a team between several different groups, was to make it (the new body) as resilient and robust of a product as possible,” Aldo said. “We wanted to minimize catastrophic body explosions both from the standpoint of what the power plant is doing and from the standpoint of what the body does when one happens. That was a very, very high point on the priority list. We did incorporate several points to address that issue and we feel that the new product will be an improvement over the old product.”

Aldo said building the new Dodge Charger body was a complex, step-by-step procedure.

“We always start with a clean sheet of paper to end up where we need to be,” Aldo said. “We always look at this as doing it the proper way from our corporate processes, and for the current car we looked at what the new Charger looked like and we developed the new Charger body to mimic as many cosmetic points and data points from the Charger onto the Funny Car as possible because one of the major priorities was to be sure that the visual identification with the Charger body that you would buy at a dealership and the Charger body that races on the dragstrip are sisters, there’s identity there,” Aldo said. “It’s critical from our standpoint both from marketing, and the way we do things, that that body presents a production body. We had a team which involved designers, aerodynamic specialists, CFD people, marketing people, racers and those people all contributed. This particular car we feel is the most representative of the cars competing to the actual production model.”

To Aldo’s final point, he offered an example.

“If you look at the side cove, the side cove on a production Charger is there on our Funny Car body,” Aldo said. “It was designed to be a Charger.”

The results of the Ohio test and the preseason testing also have left Aldo upbeat. Reigning NHRA nitro Funny Car world champion Matt Hagan clocked an unofficial 3.954-second world-record lap in December at Palm Beach (Fla.) International Raceway.

“We have not been disappointed with any of the test results going back to Ohio to today,” Aldo said. “There’s been no disappointment in the ranks of the people who developed the body with any information they received about any of the test sessions. We feel it is a great looking Funny Car. I’m very, very excited to have been part of this and I’m very excited to see it hit the dragstrip and I think it will represent Mopar and represent the Dodge brand in a great way and we have nothing but pride that we developed this internally. We used our technology. We used our processes and it was done 100 percent in-house.”

There have been rumblings for years from race fans that Funny Cars rarely represent what body style they are supposed to be, which Aldo addressed.

“I believe that if you look at the last three bodies we’ve had, I believe that I can make a case that each body has represented the production model closer, as we have continued to make that a priority to address this issue,” Aldo said. “On the other hand, you do have to realize these cars are basically a plane, going 325 mph in 1000 feet, there has to be an aerodynamic package that goes on that body and allows it to compete. The material, the carbon fiber composite-type body has to be done so that it can withstand that level of downforce. It has to go through the wind, it has to maintain its integrity, it has to last a certain number of runs, you can’t just throw them away after every run. So, there are a lot of compromises, and a lot of pieces that go into an equation to end up with a body, so you will never have a car that looks exactly like the production car because of these extreme requirements which are placed upon on a Funny Car. However, I believe the current car that we have comes as close as possible to mimicking the production model. For our development of a body, we always want to have the best, the most robust and the most well thought out product that hits the dragstrip. I think our on-track performance reflects that thinking and I think this current car that we have is the car we hope will last for a long time and garner a significant number of victories.”       
   
 

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