This is a Dodge Viper RT/10 8.0 liter V10 crate engine that was mistakenly ordered by Chrysler dealership in 1996. It was never fitted to a vehicle, and it’s now being offered for sale along with the original factory crate in unused condition.
The V10 fitted to the Dodge Viper was famously co-developed with Lamborghini. The Italian supercar marque was a Chrysler subsidiary at the time, and their help was required with casting the complex aluminum V10 block.
When it was released in 1991 with its 8.0 liter V10 engine, the Dodge Viper was like nothing else on the road. Image courtesy of Dodge.The Dodge Viper was originally conceived as a modern version of the Shelby Cobra. This may seem odd given that the Cobra had been based on a Ford drivetrain, but Carroll Shelby had been hired by Chrysler in 1978 specifically to help resurrect the performance image of Dodge.
The man who had hired Shelby to work with Chrysler was the same man who had hired him to work with Ford, the great Lee Iacocca. Iacocca and Shelby had worked together on the Shelby Cobra, Ford GT40, and Shelby Mustang programs – delivering a black eye to Ferrari with the dominant performances of the GT40 at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, winning the event four times on the trot from 1966 to 1969.
Once working on contract with Chrysler, Shelby and his team set to work creating a series of Dodge production cars with a series of performance upgrades. This was right in the midst of the Malaise Era, so these cars weren’t fast by today’s standards, but when viewed in the context of their time there were some genuinely quick Shelby-badged Dodges being built.
It would be in the middle of the 1980s that the idea of working with Shelby to develop a modern Shelby Cobra, within the Dodge family of course. The project was largely undertaken within Dodge, though Carroll Shebly did have input and would even drive a pre-production Viper as the pace vehicle in the Indianapolis 500 in 1991.
The difficulty of casting a V10 aluminum block led to Chrysler getting Lamborghini onboard to help, as they had decades of experience casting complex aluminum V12 engines, and they were more than happy to help with anything that would compete with their age old arch rivals at Ferrari.
The first generation Dodge Viper entered production in 1991, the model series would be built over three generations until 2017, all of which were two-door V10s with displacement ranging from 8.0 to 8.4 liters, and horsepower figures from 400 bhp up to 645 bhp.
The engine you see in this article is one of the relatively rare Viper V10 crate engines that were produced. These were largely intended for use as replacement engines for Viper owners who had V10 failures (which weren’t all that common).
The Dodge Viper was very much a halo model for the American automaker, and it helped set the tone for the company for the coming 20+ years. Image courtesy of Dodge.As noted in the introduction, this engine was bought by mistake by a Chrysler dealership in 1996. It was never fitted to a car and remained in its original factory crate (a plastic tub) for decades. It’s now being offered for sale and it’ll be up to the new owner if they fit it to a car or keep it preserved as is.
The engine is being sold out of Wheatfield, New York on Bring a Trailer with no reserve. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid you can visit the listing here.
Images courtesy of Bring a Trailer
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
