Jeep SRT8 is supercharged and ready

The team at Rob Green Motorsport say they don’t know of a four-wheel-drive “off-roader” as fast as their Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8 shown here. Tested on Gerotek’s famed long straight recently by their race driver Jacques “The Stiglet” Joubert, it is claimed to have humbled the 0-100km/h sprint in a VBOX-verified 4.74 seconds.

Then it blitzed to 400m in 12.85 seconds at a speed of 177.2km/h. And as a finale it dispatched the standing kilometre in 23 and-a-bit seconds, the 1 000m board flashing by at 230km/h.

Let anyone with a faster road-going, street-legal SUV “haal uit en wys…” says Rob Green of RGM. He was impressed at just how fast his team’s latest creation is, as in the same test session it achieved a 0-250km/h sprint time of just under 30 seconds, only requiring 1 408m to get there.

By comparison, the stock SRT8 – no slouch by any standards – needs an extra 23 seconds and 1.3km to clock the same speed.

“This is a monster,” says Green with a grin. “But it is a monster which remains easy to drive in day-to-day traffic. We’re in the business of making our customers’ performance dreams come true, but the reality is they still want a car they can use daily without compromises.”

Often, highly-modified vehicles do sacrifice driveability, which is one of the reasons RGM makes decisions in consultation with the client and with one eye firmly on long-term enjoyment: engineered solutions that’ll last.

Bearing testament to this is the success of projects such as the supercharged Nissan 350Z (of which 33 were successfully modified) and more recently the Toyota 86 Supercharged, heading for the half-century mark and counting.

Forced induction through a supercharger is the route most frequently chosen by RGM – a solution which doesn’t sacrifice responsiveness or breadth of power band.

In the case of the SRT8 Jeep, a RGM-Whipple twin-screw “blower” sits atop the 6.4-litre V8 and has a self-contained lubrication system, as well as a dedicated air-to-liquid intercooler. An end-to-end RGM-Techniflow 76mm exhaust, high volume cold air induction system and customised RGM engine software finish off what is a 520kW/1 000Nm package.

Upgrades on the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8 (and the similarly-engined Chrysler 300C SRT8) start from R190 000, including RGM’s six month/20 000km warranty on parts and workmanship.