In 2015, the car ended up with Mario Abascal at Gearhead Fabrications, a Dodge/Hemi specialist shop in Jensen Beach, Florida. He continued to make changes, putting an engine in it in 2010 to go quicker, and so on. And I thought I was the (stuff) at the time," he says. I had a little 6-point RPM roll bar bolt-in cage in it. It sounds like a jet engine pulling into the school when I'm dropping my kid off. "It got to a point after a while where, now I've got a ProCharger on it, screaming through a blow-off valve that's louder than hell. All the while, he was still driving it every day. Then came a smaller pulley and a fuel system. I did a whole bunch of stuff and basically showed the car for the first three years I had it," he says.īut the show life got old, and Harrigan, wanting more, put a Paxton Novi 1500 supercharger on the car and made his way to the dragstrip, where he clocked several 11.60s. "I started hooking up with a lot of local guys here in the Orlando area and doing things to the car. In those pre-Facebook days, message boards were the hot ticket to become educated on your car platform of choice. He headed off to the internet to see if he could link up with some like-minded enthusiasts and discovered a couple of forums based around the LX chassis and the Charger. His natural curiosity got the best of him. "The purchase of that vehicle had a profound impact on the direction my life went," he says.Īlthough it was nowhere near the build quality of the BMWs he was accustomed to, the raw realness of the Gen III Hemi captured his attention in a way no car ever had before. I drove it home and was intoxicated with the vibe of the car. He avoided the significant ADM markup on the car and made the decision that would change his life. So I looked and it and said, 'Dodge Charger.' And I'm like, 'I didn't even know they made a Charger anymore, especially 4-door.' I just had no concept of what the American cars were at the time I'd been driving German stuff for so long."Īfter a few weeks of poking around, he was able to find a dealer who was willing to swap his two BMWs for one of the 4-door Hemi Chargers, and that was that. "At 7 a.m., I got out of my car, walked onto this guy's driveway - I didn't know him - and started checking the car out. I looked and went, "Holy crap, that's a cool-looking car," says Harrigan. I remember driving by it when I was on my way to work. I stumbled across an SRT8 Charger in December of '05 that a neighbor of mine had just bought. And I was looking at M5, but they were a little out of my price range - we're talking 2005. I was single at the time, decided to get rid of it, and was looking for a high-horsepower 4-door sedan. "I was driving German - BMW specifically - and I had two of them. Harrigan has quite an interesting story about how he ended up with one of the Hemi community's trendsetting machines and racing the car regularly, along with owning a business catering to the Hemi market. That proliferation of Hemi performance has sucked in enthusiasts from all walks of life, of which Chris Harrigan is one. In today's world of high-powered factory-built performance cars, Dodge stands out from others as the company has committed to stuffing the Gen III Hemi engine into just about every chassis that has enough room to accommodate it.
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