Leah Pritchett resets the 2018 Dodge Demon quarter mile record by Patrick Rall on

Last October, NHRA Top Fuel driver Leah Pritchett set the quarter mile world record for the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, running an 8.77 at 161 miles per hour in the car owned by Alexander Palermo. Earlier this week, Pritchett returned to Great Lakes Dragaway with that same Demon, which has been retuned, fitted with new wheels and tires and wrapped in the colors of Motul USA. Once again, Pritchett set a record, this time running an 8.60 at 159 miles per hour with the twin turbocharged Mopar muscle car.

If you are active on any of the large Mopar social media groups, the odds are good that you are aware that Leah Pritchett ran an 8.60 at 159 in the Demon shown here, but none of those posts offer much detail as to what has been done to this Dodge Challenger to be able to run elapsed times like that. Fortunately, I spoke with Mario Abascal, owner and fabricator at Gearhead Fabrications, who oversaw the engine build for the world’s quickest 2018 Dodge Demon, and we have the full details on this wicked-fast Mopar machine.

Twin Turbo Demon

The first thing that Mario Abascal pointed out was that there have been no significant changes to the drivetrain, so this Dodge Demon is operating on the same boost levels and the same basic power levels. There were a few changes made between the record run last year and the new record run earlier this week – new wheels and tires, a roll cage, some tuning tweaks with help from Matt Kesatie and HPTuners software and a new sponsor in Motul.

As for the engine build, rather than the 2.7-liter IHI supercharger, this Demon features a custom intake manifold from Speedkore and a twin turbo setup featuring custom forward facing headers from Gearhead Fabrications, Precision 6875 billet turbos and a Boost Leash boost controller.

Gearhead also installed a Fore Innovations triple pump fuel system and bigger fuel injectors to feed the turbocharged Hemi, but everything else in the engine is untouched. While we don’t know the exact power output with the new tuning efforts, we know that this Demon is making around 1,200 wheel horsepower (the image below shows a dyno sheet from last year).

This 2018 Demon has the stock camshaft, stock cylinder heads and stock engine block, as well as the stock transmission and the stock differential. On the inside, this Demon didn’t come with a rear seat from the factory, but it does have the stock driver’s seat and passenger’s seat, along with all of the other factory interior features.

The other key upgrade on this Demon is that the entire metal body has been removed and replaced with a Speedkore carbon fiber body, which helps bring the weight down, but with the aforementioned roll cage that was added this year, this Challenger still weighed in at 4,500 pounds shortly before the 8.60 run.

Oh, and we cannot forget that this Demon is being driven by NHRA star Leah Pritchett, who is literally one of the quickest drag racers in the world, so she knows how to get off of the line and down the quarter mile in a hurry.

Unfortunately, we haven’t found any good video footage of the new record run, but the Speedkore Instagram story linked below shows the record run over the course of several short clips, resulting in a new 2018 Dodge Demon quarter mile world record of 8.60 at 159 miles per hour. Hopefully better video footage will surface, at which point we will update this article, but in the meantime, the Instagram story linked below shows the historic run as it takes place.

Images courtesy of the Gearhead Fabrications and Speedkore social media channels.

Patrick Rall was raised a Mopar boy, spending years racing a Dodge Mirada while working his way through college. After spending a few years post-college in the tax accounting field, Patrick made the jump to the world of journalism and his work has been published in magazines and websites around the world.