In years gone by, Jeep Cherokee’s were little more than weekend canoe carriers that served dutifully as soccer mom rides during the week, but today’s SRT8 Grand Cherokee, with nearly 500 horsepower on tap from their 6.4L Hemi engines, are a whole new breed, to say the least. And when you’ve got that kind of power and potential for power on your hands, well, there’s no reason not to get a little carried away.
Of course, that’s the basis for a number of really, really quick Jeeps that have had some finessing here and a few well-chosen aftermarket parts installed there, with the resulting product delivering quite a bit more than the 470 horsepower the thing came with from the factory.
D3 Performance Engineering out of Houston, Texas did just with this SRT8, bolting up their new ‘D3PE1200’ package, which includes a big Precision turbo and cranks out a staggering 1,100 horsepower and 1,150 ft/lbs. of torque at full song.
Once the build was complete and dyno tuning commenced, a little eighth-mile testing was done at the Houston Motorsports Park. While the clocks were turned off at the time, we do know the Jeep trapped 114 miles per hour, and our less-than-accurate stopwatch count put it at just a little under seven seconds flat after the all-wheel drive SUV ripped its way down the strip.
But the true potential of this badass Jeep was put right out in the open this weekend at Bayou Drag at the Lonestar Motorsports Park when, during its first outing on a quarter-mile track, it rolled to a very impressive 9.91 at 143.31 miles per, by way of a 1.65 short time and a 6.47 at 112 to the eighth-mile.
It’s hard to call even a bone-stock SRT8 Jeep Cherokee a ‘sleeper’, but our guess is that absolutely nobody would expect what was coming to them if they were to line up alongside this monster.
Credit to the gang at Speed Society for the footage.