Hennessey puts the Dodge Demon through its paces

Watch as the mighty Dodge Demon stretches its legs. Showing off with 721bhp at the wheels and 0-100kph in 3.2s

Before undertaking any sort of tuning on your car it’s always good to establish a baseline, ensuring any changes you make result in a measurable improvement.

The same applies at every level of the industry, which is why Hennessey Performance, best known for its Venom supercar (which trades top-speed records with Bugatti) and six-wheeled takes on Ford’s F-150 Raptor, has run a series of tests on America’s performance car of the moment, the Dodge Demon.

Struggling to place the Demon? Think Dodge Challenger Hellcat, the 707bhp retro-styled muscle car, but granted even more power and a chassis set up for nine-second, 225kph 0.40km (quarter-mile) runs with just a few small tweaks from showroom floor specification.

If you’re wondering where Hennessey could go with such a car, then think engine tuning, new headers and supercharger upgrades, taking the power beyond the stock 808bhp and into the 1000-1500bhp realm – with drag-suitable upgrades like parachutes and roll-cages also in the works.

As for that baseline, Hennessey has released videos in which it tests the Demon’s power on the dyno, its 0.40km (quarter-mile) performance and its top speed.

The results – you may want to skip ahead a bit in each video to get to the meat of the tests – are predictably impressive: 721bhp and 684lb ft at the wheels, a 10.8-second quarter at 211kph (having passed 60 in 3.2sec and 161kph in 6.6) and an indicated top speed of 264kph.

All were achieved on a fairly new, tight engine, so there’s undoubtedly more to come. A lot more, when Hennessey begins its part-swapping, which should begin very soon. More videos are sure to be on the way.