Ralph Gilles, senior VP of product design has been appointed president/CEO of the newly recreated Street and Racing Technology Brand, the company’s cross-brand performance unit. Gilles retains responsibilities for the company’s motorsports activities, as well as design responsibility for all exterior and interior design activities for all Dodge, Ram, Chrysler and Jeep Brand vehicles.

Gilles’ former duties as President and CEO of the Dodge Car Brand have been taken over by Reid Bigland, who retains his responsibilities as President and CEO of Chrysler Canada.

Through the end of May, Chrysler Group had sold 2,901 ’11 Dodge Challenger SRT8 vehicles, the only SRT in the ’11 lineup. However, starting this fall, the company will expand the line, to have four members in the SRT family.

Expected are 2012 models of the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8 and the Chrysler 300 SRT8 (both unveiled at the NY International Auto Show), Dodge Charger SRT8 (unveiled at the Chicago Auto Show) and the Dodge Challenger SRT8.

With Gilles’s obvious passion for design, racing and the auto industry in general, he’s the ideal person within the company to assume leadership for the SRT Brand. The additional responsibility is intended to bring a stronger focus on making sure that Chrysler customers have exciting options for Chrysler Group cars.

There are, however, a good number of questions that emerge from these appointments. Formerly as president and CEO of Dodge, Gilles maintained a direct connection between the design studios and the man on the street. While that connection remains for the future SRT line, it is open to question how well that connection can be maintained for Dodge.

For example, Gilles was responsible for porting a number of Viper “cues” onto other cars in the Dodge line. Full length body stripes are now found on the Charger, Challenger and even the Fiat 500, while once upon a time, the Viper was their exclusive domain. In other times, putting the Viper’s V10 engine into the Drag Pak Challenger might have been subject to endless debates, cost analyses and meetings. As president of Dodge, all Gilles had to say was Yes or No.

The stated cross-brand nature of the revised SRT leaves open questions as to how those products will be handled. We presume, for example, that the Chrysler 300 SRT8 will be sold through Chrysler dealers and that a Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8 will be sold by Jeep dealers.

This is a challenging situation for Gilles whose sales are now dependent on other divisions within the company, whose priorities from time to time may not align exactly with Gilles’. This kind of situation has been encountered many times before and seldom ends well for the spider that is trying to hold all parts of the web together.

So, do some of the past rumors about a non-SRT Viper make sense now? Will Gilles be put in the position of having to design a lesser Dodge-branded Viper while promoting his own division’s SRT-10 Viper? Having a range of Viper products make sense, if the objective is to take direct aim on the Corvette lineup.

Overall, it doesn’t sound like Brother Ralph got the best of the deals that were handed out this week. Chrysler still faces a range of challenges and so it really didn’t need to generate some new internal ones as well.