Good to see you, Snake: Dodge Viper SRT-10

Now, if I could still play an instrument off the cuff, I’m pretty sure this is how it would feel to play a song you’ve played hundreds of times. It’s a car spotting post on Hooniverse! These felt great to write way back in the day when I used to stroll small town streets, snap a bunch of photos of something weird to me, weird to you, and then dump the images in a blog post while writing something about the context in which the car existed in that place and time. I wrote a great big bunch of them and they’re now mostly in the great big photodump in the sky, which is probably for the better. A lot of those cars have been crushed by now, too. But here, we have the same thing again, and it feels new.

I love spotting a car that wears temporary tags. It means I don’t need to painstakingly smudge the plates, and I can just slap the photos in the post after just a quick resize. The car is the main thing, and I want to get it out there with as little fiddling as possible.

As for this particular car, you can tell it stood out on the street quite well. A Viper parked in a slumbering Swedish speaking Finnish coastal town! I would have been more excited to see an earlier car, but a Viper is a Viper. Importing one here now, especially as high octane fuel prices have risen to almost touch two euros per liter, takes some guts. Of course, you never drive one of these if you’re spending your last Monopoly money on gas, and if you do you have interesting priorities. Still, it’s a cool thing to take to a burger run every now and then in the summer.

Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve seen one of these before. I’ve seen some earlier generation cars, and witnessed an early green RT-10 have some dashboard wiring issues that manifested itself as a cloud of smoke, but a Viper this new is a fresh spotting to me. It looks like a funnily upscaled coupe Miata with shoulder pads, which is not a completely thing to say when you consider a designer who helped shape the first Viper also did design work on the NB generation MX-5. I guess the touches are still there in the newer Viper as well. I also like the inverted Daffy Duck face on the rocker panel.

I had to look up to confirm which generation Viper this is, and the vented hood marks it down as a fourth gen car from the model years 2008 to 2010. This means it has a 8.4-liter engine and a power output of more than 600hp. I don’t think many identical cars have been registered in Finland, but it’s definitely worth bringing over.

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2 responses to “Good to see you, Snake: Dodge Viper SRT-10”

  1. Batshitbox Avatar
    Batshitbox

    Tell me more about “Camilla’s Hair Garage”.

  2. wunno sev Avatar
    wunno sev

    love Vipers. in the USA, at least based on the people I’ve known to own them, these kind of are driven by people spending their last few bucks on gas and vape juice. they retain their value pretty well, and people rationalize financing all kinds of things. but hey, if you can make the payments on this, the diesel F-250, and the suburban palace, more power to you.