'We just did it': The story of the Viper

With the public debut of the 2013 SRT Viper scheduled for the New York auto show, we've scoured the Autoweek archives to bring you some classic Viper stories from our past. For exclusive Viper Week content including the latest news as it happens, check out Autoweek.com/viperweek

By Robert A. Lutz, originally published in Autoweek 10/5/98

The most famous Chrysler turnaround, the one fueled by the invention of the minivan and the K-car and supported by government loan guarantees, was followed by a second, less-celebrated escape from the brink of disaster.

The first comeback is rightly attributed to Lee Iacocca and then-vice president Hal Sperlich. The second recovery depended on a wave of new, more appealing and competitive products. It owed much to a triumvirate of car-crazed leaders-Robert A. Lutz, Tom Gale and Francois Castaing-who not only changed what kind of cars the company built, but also how it went about designing and building them.

Lutz retired as president and vice chairman of Chrysler on July 1. He has written a business management book based on his experiences, Guts: The Seven Laws of Business That Made Chrysler the World's Hottest Car Company ($24.95), that will be published Oct. 19 by John Wiley & Sons Inc.

The accompanying excerpt is condensed from Chapter Three of Guts, in which Lutz recounts the inception of the car that began Chrysler's second turnaround: the Dodge Viper.

If ever there was a right (and right-brained) product at the right time, the Viper was it!

In the media's eyes we remained laggards, a technologically (and stylistically) benighted company riding a tired, one-trick K-car pony. What we most needed was some event, some symbol, some proof that Chrysler was not dead: that within our company there bubbled the optimism, creativity, and sense of outrage necessary for us to fight our way back to health. While we needed such proof for the press and for analysts, we needed it most badly for ourselves. We were tired of being treated with the same dismissiveness shown the terminally ill; tired of being patronized at cocktail parties by executives from other car companies.

Finally, what we needed came. As with so many right-brain-inspired breakthroughs, this one owed its origin to serendipity. For Newton, the precipitating agent was an apple. For me, it was a black roadster.

I was blasting my 1985 Autokraft Mk IV Cobra (a splendid recreation of the famed Shelby Cobra of the sixties) around some of southeastern Michigan's more interesting roads one day in the warm-weather months of 1988, pondering Chrysler's situation and reflecting how the original Cobra, with its lightweight, two-seat aluminum body and its outrageously powerful Ford V-8 engine had become the single most-imitated sports car in history.

Then came a sort of blinding flash of inspiration: In our future product plan, we had identified a big, new pickup (what was later to become the highly successful all-new Ram pickup, introduced in 1994) to be powered by an equally monstrous cast-iron V-10 engine. Also planned for the truck was a new 5-speed, heavy-duty, manual transmission. Why not, I thought, combine a prototype of that new truck powertrain, wrap it in an exciting two-seat body only slightly less voluptuous than Raquel Welch's and display it at auto shows? That we would be shamelessly lunching off Ford's heritage did not trouble me overmuch; the Cobra's mystique transcended any one company's ownership.

The next morning I talked over the idea with Tom Gale in our design shop, and Francois Castaing, who was then heading Jeep-Truck Engineering (the potential source for the prototype parts). It took the three of us about ten minutes to decide to do at least some initial design sketches and preliminary mechanical layouts. The legendary Carroll Shelby, having transferred his allegiance to Chrysler along with Lee Iacocca, was brought into the picture next.

We were delighted to have his help, since as a certified Friend of Lee, he could help convince a possibly skeptical Chairman that we should at least create a show car.

The early drawings, very close to the final Viper, were (to tell the whole truth) initially disappointing to me. My personal vision had been of a car much closer to the original Cobra, though somewhat modernized. But Tom Gale and a tiny handful of designers had (wisely, as it turns out) decided instead to embark on an all-new look, an interpretation of the character and "feel," the aesthetic impact, of the Cobra, but bearing no direct Cobra-derived visual cues.

Over the years, I have learned not to react too quickly when shocked by a design proposal: the very best designs, the freshest and most audacious, often are hard for a nondesigner to integrate.

Later, when I saw it as a full-size clay model, I was overwhelmed by its impact. I was immediately sold, and the Gang of Three (plus Carroll Shelby, as our "Cobra conscience") decided we should execute it as a concept car for the Detroit auto show in 1989.

Work was begun in Newport Beach, California, by Metalcrafters, a highly skilled and oft-used source of concept cars. On a visit with Lee Iacocca, we saw it semicompleted as a real car for the first time. It was stunning, much more dramatic in shiny metal and fresh paint than in dull-brown modeling clay. Lee Iacocca became a fervent supporter on the spot.

Now to name it. Dodge marketing was eager to tie it to some heroic but semiforgotten Dodge icon like "Challenger" or "Avenger." The "four fathers" didn't like that idea, however, because it didn't make the clear statement that this was son of Cobra... We knew it had to be some kind of snake.

Finally, on the corporate airplane taking us from California back to Michigan, Francois Castaing, Tom Gale and I agreed on "Viper." The marketing folks caved; the name was instantly assimilated, and one of our designers was sufficiently muse-kissed to generate, spontaneously, the now-famous emblem of the slyly grinning reptile, seemingly sharing some intimate joke with the viewer.

When we unveiled the car in January of 1989 at the Detroit auto show, it blew the roof off. It was blatant (subtle was its polar opposite). It defiantly made no excuses for lacking many basic creature comforts, being not just windowless and topless, but door-handleless (like many great roadsters of yesteryear). We suspected (correctly) that Viper customers couldn't care less about such lapses. They wanted excitement and exhilaration. "Zero to jail in four seconds" was this car's message!

Thanks to the boldness, exuberance and self-assertion of our designers, Chrysler-the dull, stodgy, beleaguered K-car company-was suddenly a flag-waving champion of high performance.

Much to the chagrin of many of the guardians of Chrysler's purse, at that time, we proceeded to explore the possibility of actually manufacturing the car.

We knew the project would have to be lean in terms of investment. We knew it would have to be done fast, before the public forgot the show car's impact. And we knew that to execute it quickly we needed a small, agile, highly motivated cadre of commando-type car buffs, not a docile herd of plodding, business-as-usual engineers. To that end we called a meeting at which anyone, regardless of rank or function, could come forward and volunteer for the Viper team. The meeting was packed with eager faces, spanning the age spectrum from recent college graduates to combat-hardened veterans on the brink of retirement.

From these, Francois Castaing picked 80 shock-troops. At their head we put a strong and capable leader-Roy Sjoberg, an experienced engineer who had been an instrumental member of the Corvette team when he had worked at GM.

We housed the Viper group in old facilities in the former AMC engineering center on the west side of Detroit. Hourly UAW members fabricating and assembling prototype parts worked side-by-side with technicians and engineers. Whenever a problem arose requiring input from several team members, Roy Sjoberg would ring a handheld school bell, the signal for everyone to drop what they were doing, gather around, and hammer out a solution. This was "real time, right now" problem solving, with no reports or focus groups to slow its progress.

In retrospect, it's clear the Viper team really was confronting two challenges at once. One was building the car. The other, no less important, was testing in microcosm our thinking about how platform teams should work.

We knew that if the Viper were to stand a chance of getting a green light from all of senior management, we would need to show the car had more going for it than our own right-brained passion and gut instinct. So, we subjected the car to an unflinching, left-brained analysis: for how little could we build it; how many enthusiasts might buy it; where in the market should it be priced?

Luckily for the Viper (and Chrysler!), senior management ultimately sided with the enthusiasts-but only because we'd done our homework and had marshaled a persuasive leftbrained case to go along with our right-brained instincts. At long last, in mid-'89, Lee Iacocca, in a nicely staged bit of showmanship during a West Coast financial analysts' meeting, tossed me a set of Viper keys. "Go build it, Lutz," he barked. He didn't have to tell me twice!

To this day, I have Japanese car executives coming up to me and saying, "Tell me, Mr. Lutz, exactly what market research led you to build the Viper? That research must certainly have been quite in-depth." My response: "We didn't do any research at all-we just did it!''

By null