HELLEPHANT HELLUCINATION!

Design icon Ralph Gilles mind melds with SpeedKore for a next-gen Mopar.

- JOHNNY HUNKINS

When you're the chief design officer of a worldwide car manufacturer, and that manufacturer happens to be Stellantis the international umbrella containing the beloved Dodge brand-being a car guy brings with it a gravitas that is a magnitude greater than anything mere mortals can imagine. As much as we'd like to think we have influence over the world of hot rods, we'll never actually make high-performance production cars leap off the page and onto dealership lots like Ralph Gilles does. It's his world and we're just lucky to live in it.

Ralph Gilles, like so many of us, grew up admiring Mopar's muscle car performers and watching Dodge Chargers in movies like Bullitt and TV shows like Dukes of Hazzard. The Dodge Charger, specifically the 1968 model, had captured Gilles' imagination for decades, and when it came time to act on that infatuation there was only one car to consider the Dodge Charger. It couldn't be any ordinary Charger though; when your mind stretches to embrace so many design, history, engineering, and technical fields-to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes-it never goes back to its original shape. Fortunately, Gilles found SpeedKore, a kindred spirit with a lust for Mopars.

You've heard of Speedkore before. SpeedKore burst onto the hot rodding scene at the 2016 SEMA show with a jaw-dropping rendition of a 1970 Plymouth 'Cuda named Menace that was singled-out for its all carbon-fiber construction, a theme that the company has made into its central identity. In the years since, SpeedKore has debuted a string of carbon-fiber creations, most of them Mopars, and every single one of them jaw-droppingly gorgeous. This time around, SpeedKore would create Hellucination, a Dodge Charger with Mopar's 1,000hp Hellephant reactor core as its motivation, hence its namesake.