Hennessey Jeep Trackhawk: A Closer Look
Hennessey Jeep Trackhawk: A Closer Look
Posted on September 20, 2017
It was inevitable and only a matter of time before a tuner took the awesome Jeep Trackhawk and did something clever with it. That tuner turns out to be Hennessey and their Jeep delivers 1,012 hp and does 0-60mph in 2.8 seconds.
The stock Jeep Trackhawk was already regarded as the world’s quickest SUV but in this guise there is no doubt whatsoever. Hennessey have taken the 6.2-litre V8 engine and its 707 hp and 645 lb-ft of torque and turned it up to 11.
Hennessey Performance Engineering have taken the standard Hellcat engine and extracted an extra 305 hp and 624 lb-ft of torque to deliver a stonking 1,012 hp and 969 lb-ft of torque.
To achieve this, Hennessey have added a 4.5-litre supercharger boosted to 14psi, stainless-steel headers, high-flow bypass valve, upgraded fuel pump and injectors and a high-flow air induction system. With fuelling and breathing sorted, the tuners then set about extracting as much power as practical from the setup. The result is a quarter mile in 10.5 seconds in an SUV that weighs almost 2 tons.
Jeep had to do a lot of work on the Trackhawk package to make it stable at speed and improve the driving capability with 707 hp on board. How much extra work is needed to manage over a thousand?
The good news with this Hennessey upgrade is that it focuses on air, fuel and supercharging so the strong internals of the Hellcat engine have been left alone. This eliminates one of the key weaknesses of heavily tuned engines, that of making the engine so brittle and with such narrow tolerances as to be impractical. As long as this thing can hold the road well, it will sell by the hundred.
2018 Jeep Trackhawk
It isn’t as if the donor car was a weakling to begin with. The 2018 Jeep Trackhawk is already an awesome SUV. The Hellcat engine is proving itself, the handling and road holding has been tweaked and tuned to make it easy to drive and the new transfer case introduced by Jeep for this model is making controlling all that power much easier than you might think.
While some may question the logic behind a performance SUV, drive one and you quickly understand the appeal. Sure they don’t corner like a Mustang or are as flickable as a BMW M3 but they are serious fun. The 2018 Jeep Trackhawk has gotten a lot of positive attention and I think this Hennessey version is going to do just the same.
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