It matters not what age you are, where you come from, or what your automotive proclivities are, once Matt Leischer's battle-weary 190,000-mile '06 SRT8 Chrysler 300C heaves into view, you are compelled to get much closer to it. You immediately want to know things. Is there a movie being shot around here? Where's the car show? Is that blower real? Is the circus in town? Why, why, why? Then you spot the guy with the Mohawk driving it. Should you call the police, or is he the police?

Instinctively, young and old get the reference to Mad Max, the dystopic '79 cult classic that featured a baby-faced Mel Gibson as a rogue cop who drove a supercharged '73 Ford Falcon XB GT. What's so amazing is that everyone who encounters Leischer's 300C gets the connection right away, in spite of the vast disparity in year, make, and model. What's more, folks old enough to remember the original movie dig this 300's old-school street machine vibe, while millennials are drawn to the late-model Hemi, slammed look, and murdered-out paint. It's a rare one-size-fits-all crowd pleaser.

And the super-dirty rat-rod look? It's not so much a calculated style move as it is the product of the car's utilitarian nature. Leischer lives in the dusty suburb of Laveen, Arizona, and he drives it to work every day. Anywhere. A lot. With almost 200,000 miles on the clock, it has more in common with an over-the-road semi truck than a toy weekend hot rod. The exterior finish is composed of real splattered bugs, rock chips, desert sand, mud geysers, blower belt dust, and extraterrestrial micrometeorites. And no, you won't find it in a Mothers ad anytime soon.

With almost 200,000 miles on the clock, it has more in common with an over-the-road semi truck than a toy weekend hot rod.

A few things the casual observer wouldn't know that are impressive: Leischer built it at home from parts of his own manufacture, which might not seem like such a big deal, except for the fact that he had to completely reassemble the car, from whatever state it was in, every time he needed to get somewhere. ("I could have the stock intake and fuel system off the car in under five minutes," jokes Leischer.) And as you'll see, in all but a few instances, Matt took the road less traveled by opting to fabricate or adapt hardware and software rather than buy blister-packed, off-the-shelf stuff. As you'll see, Matt is not a "bolt-on" type of guy.

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Matt took the road less traveled by opting to fabricate or adapt hardware and software rather than buy blister-packed, off-the-shelf stuff.

All this madness started innocuously enough. Leischer cites that in 2007, the then-silver Chrysler 300C SRT8 was his choice of car at that moment. Like most, he left it stock during the warranty period, then started digging into simple mods once the factory cut the service cord. Then we see nascent signs of Matt's iconoclastic hot rodding behavior. A self-styled fabricator, electrical buff, heavy metal guitarist, and all-around counterculture rebel, he built his own cold-air intake and exhaust system in his Arizona garage from cobbled parts. Between 2007 and 2012, a steady flow of "ordinary" mods flowed from Leischer's garage, including shaved rear doors, a lowered suspension, bigger sway bars, stiffer poly bushings, a bigger camshaft, a custom tune, 22-inch replica SRT8 Charger wheels, and the black plasti-dipped paintjob.

That wicked semi-satin paint, however, wasn't your typical spray can job typified by the import crowd. Here, Leischer made the first of many breaks with tradition by buying clear plastic dip in industrial-sized buckets, adding his own homebrew of black iron-oxide pigment, then spraying it on with a Wagner Power Sprayer. (A tip from Leischer: "An HVLP spray gun doesn't work that well with plasti-dip. ") After eight coats of that, he followed it up with his own recipe of semi-satin clearcoat plasti-dip. He's driven the car with that rubberized paintjob—leaving it for the most part unwashed—for years.

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Then an idea began to grow in Matt's head. That gave way to harmless research, then eventually a rendering. Matt tells it like this: "I photoshopped a Chrysler promo shot of the SRT8 and added the top end of an injected blown engine, just kind of as a joke. The more I looked at it, the more I thought it was plausible. At first, it was just the mechanics of it. Nobody had a blower manifold at the time that I was aware of. The drive system was going to be the other stumbling block. The OEM system is a serpentine accessory drive, and I had to figure out how to fit a 3-inch drivebelt and pulleys in the limited space. I started to see some photos on line of cars that were being built with a blown Gen III Hemi, but they were all dedicated race cars and were pretty well modified in the engine bay. I set a goal for myself to do the same, but with the stock engine bay and minimal cutting."

"My wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I gave her a one-word response: blower." —"Mad" Matt Leischer

Eventually, Leischer had come up with enough solutions—in theory at least—to convince himself that such a mad plan could really happen. That was September of 2012. "It was my birthday when I got the go-ahead to start doing some of this. My wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I gave her a one-word response: blower." As Matt would soon find out, picking up an old-school 6-71 GMC huffer on eBay was the easy part. At this point, it's also worth mentioning that he also made the decision to convert the fuel system to run on E85, which would give him much needed resistance to detonation, an especially important move toward making the stock high-compression hypereutectic pistons live reliably under boost.

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Leischer continues: "It took me about a year after that to get it together. One of the first things was looking at manifolds. I had come across Indy Cylinder Heads. They had the modular-style open plenum Gen III intake that was designed to have interchangeable top plates, and one of them was a blower plate. I'd seen some blown Gen III Hemis put together, but they were mostly retrofitted into street rods. The pulley and belt placement was way far forward, and that wasn't going to work for this, so I started cruising eBay and Craigslist to see what combination of pulleys and drive snouts would work."

Matt knew he was going to need a long snout compared to a big-block Chevy drive, and to solve that, he mounted the blower pulley backward to get it further out. That gave him the distance necessary to clear the serpentine system. But the lower pulley presented problems of its own. "There was a trick on the lower pulley I had to work out," says Leischer. "Your standard blower pulley bolts on to a v-groove pulley, so I went with a Gen III Hemi damper from ATI, which is built with a standard three-bolt Chevy pattern which would allow me to use the big-block Chevy blower pulley. I found a guy on eBay who machines pulleys, and asked him to machine the drive pulley so it would mount directly to the ATI damper, thus eliminating the intermediate V-groove accessory drive pulley. That got me the room I needed to fit it behind the stock radiator."

To get the blower drive to fit within the bounds of the stock 300C engine compartment, Matt also had to relocate the radiator forward. "I took a trick out of the Procharger playbook and used some spacers to move it out a bit." The fit looks impossibly tight with the 3-inch blower belt threading the needle, but it works well.

At this point, Matt had his sights set on building it to look like the Mad Max interceptor, which has an idler that can't really be seen with the hood shut. To make that happen, he designed his own idler bracket that mounts to the stock water pump. "I bought a water pump from AutoZone, took some digital pictures of it, and used photoshop to get the dimensions of the water pump. From that, I made a paper template to do a test fitting. Happy with that, I had it cut with a water jet from half-inch aluminum, then machined some spacers to mate it to the water pump."

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With the basic physical layout solved, the real challenge of the electronics and tuning began. From the beginning, Leischer consulted with DiabloSport about the tuning. "My concern was how the OEM electronics were going to react to this type of induction. My mindset is that it wasn't going to be any different than any draw-throughtype supercharger. Knowing that the inlet restriction of a draw-through was critical, I knew a single throttle body wasn't going to work. I still wanted to use the OEM drive-by-wire control so I decided to look into using two stock throttle bodies. Those would get me around 1,800 cfm, and would be cheap. I think I paid $75 for the two throttle bodies I used."

During the first part of the process, Leischer used a single throttle body mounted on another custom plate that was water jetted. He knew he was going to end up with the dual throttle bodies and the '60s-style Scott FI scoop like on the Mad Max interceptor, and the single throttle body was just to prove the concept and get it up and running. Once he breathed fire into the SRT 6.1L for the first time with the provisional setup and the E85 fuel system, Matt knew he had the end in sight.

"I set out to design a controller for the second throttle body, teaching myself open-source processor controller programming code" —"Mad" Matt Leischer

Matt then toyed around with making a mechanical linkage to drive the second throttle body, but just couldn't come up with a reasonable solution. "You can't just split the signal, each one has to send and receive a signal to the computer independently," Leischer says. "I set out to design a controller for the second throttle body, teaching myself open-source processor controller programming code based on something called Arduino. It's rampant in the hobbyist robotics world. It worked, but not as well as I wanted it to. That's when I found OZMO out of Australia, and they had a dual throttle-body controller for the LS motors. I ended up adapting that. That thing worked beautifully."

The first start-up tune worked surprisingly well, Matt relates. It only took a couple of rounds of data-logging and emailing tunes back and forth with DiabloSport to get it working perfect. "The main thing was going to be the driveability," Leischer says. "Everybody seems to get the idle and full-throttle tuning just right, but it's all the mid-throttle tuning that needed to be right for everyday driving. DiabloSport nailed it."

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The result of Matt's madness is a one-of-a-kind 6-71blown 300C that puts out 452 hp to the rear tires with a modest 5 pounds of boost, and thanks to E85 fuel, does it with squeaky clean emissions. The blower whine resulting from all that supercharged mayhem is pure sweetness to a gearhead's ears, and if you don't see it first you'll surely lock onto it with your ears if it's anywhere in your vicinity. What's more, the souped-up SRT runs flawlessly around town and on the highway. Its only drawbacks are the reduced fuel economy from E85 fuel (Matt reports about 17 mpg), and the need to plan out long trips (such as to our LA-based studio) to include stopping at E85 fuel stations. That, however, has not cramped Mad Matt Leischer's rebellious style one bit!

"It's like getting all the attention of driving a Ferrari, but without all the resentment." —"Mad" Matt Leischer

FAST FACTS

2006 Chrysler 300C SRT8

Matt Leischer, 37, Laveen, AZ

ENGINE

Type: 6.1L Gen III Hemi

Bore x stroke: 4.055 (bore) x 3.58 (stroke), 370 ci

Block: factory cast-iron SRT

Rotating assembly: factory forged steel crankshaft and rods, stock 10.2:1 cast-aluminum hypereutectic pistons

Cylinder heads: factory (unported) SRT8 with 2.08-/1.60-inch stock valves

Camshaft: Inertia Motorsports hydraulic roller, 218/222 degrees, 0.566-/0.556-inch lift, 112-degree LSA

Valvetrain: factory hydraulic roller with stock shaft rocker system

Induction: street-converted GMC 6-71 supercharger and drive snout found on eBay, 3-inch drivebelt, DPI rear bearing cover, unknown front cover, Indy Cylinder Head Mod Man intake manifold

Fuel system: 80-lb/hr injectors, billet fuel rails, Aeromotive regulator, OZMO Engineering throttle body controller, AEM E85 fuel pump

Exhaust: OEM tubular manifolds, 3-inch mid-pipes, original 2.75-inch mid-section with Flowmaster Super 40 mufflers, deleted OE resonators, Flowmaster four-inch tips

Ignition: factory

Cooling: stock (no issues whatsoever!), 180-degree thermostat

Oiling: factory

Fuel: E85

Output at 5 psi boost: 452 rear-wheel hp at 5,700 rpm; 425 lb-ft of torque at 5,050 rpm

Engine built by: Chrysler and owner (top end)

DRIVETRAIN

Transmission: OEM five-speed automatic WA580; 3.59 (First), 2.19 (Second), 1.41 (Third), 1.00 (Fourth), .83 (Fifth)

Driveshaft: factory SRT8

Rearend: factory SRT8 with 3.06:1 gear ratio

CHASSIS

Front suspension: factory LX/SRT8 SLA with Street Edge adjustable coilovers, Eibach sway bar, Whiteline poly bushings, SPC tubular control arms

Rear suspension: factory LX/SRT8 multi-link independent with Street Edge adjustable coilovers, Eibach sway bar

Steering: factory power-assisted quick-ratio rack-and-pinion

Brakes: factory Brembo four-piston calipers all around, factory 14-inch vented rotors (front and rear)

Chassis: factory unibody LX platform



Wheels: 22x8 Dodge Charger SRT8 replica wheels, plasti-dipped black

Tires: 256/35R22; Nitto NT420 (front), Goodyear Eagle GT (rear)