I never expected to be in the woods behind the wheel of a 550 hp full-sized coupe at full throttle, passing trees and dodging boulders, but there’s not much normal about my job in the first place. Thanks to the Team O’Neil Rally School and Dodge, I spent a few days sideways in Northern New Hampshire behind the wheel of a 2026 Dodge Charger Six Pack Scat Pack Coupe.
Aren’t Rally Cars Supposed to Be Micro Hot Hatches?
If you know rally racing at all, you know that rally cars that win are all hot hatches. Usually tiny ones with big power and all-wheel drive. As it happens, the 2026 Dodge Charger does have a hatchback. And it is all-wheel drive. And with 550 hp, it has power to spare. The only odd thing about it in a rally setting is that it’s one of the largest cars you can buy today. It’s full size in a world of too small. That didn’t hold it back one iota on the rally course I navigated.
Rally In the Woods During Cold Winter? Why?
Rally is a great type of racing. One can drive a tarmac section, a dirt road section, snow and ice-covered sections, public roads, woods, and all of the above in any given race. We were invited by Dodge to attend a mini rally course set up by Team O’Neil at their facility in NH to wring out Dodge’s new gas-powered Charger lineup. It made sense once I got behind the wheel.
Why The Dodge Charger Six Pack Scat Pack On a Rally Course?
The Dodge Charger is gas-powered again. You can still get the Daytona EV version, and you should absolutely try one; the EVs are a blast. However, America wants muscle cars, and nobody does muscle better than Dodge. With it being snowy across much of America and many of us having kids, Dodge needed to create a new Charger with more than one trick. So, the new one is all-wheel drive of a type I’d never driven before, crazy powerful, and also very practical and luxurious. Somehow it works.
The Dodge Charger has rear-biased all-wheel drive that can be turned to rear-wheel drive with the tap of a menu button. I’ve tested, owned, and tracked so many AWD vehicles that I’ve lost count, but none of them, even the performance ones, handled like this Charger. It feels rear-drive all the time. No understeer, no power-on tugging of the steering wheel as you wait for the rear to kick in. It drives like an RWD muscle car all the time. Except that it can deliver more power to the ground than any RWD car can.
Doge wanted to show some folks in the media and influencer world how this worked without risking a messy cleanup on public roads, so they enlisted the folks at Team O’Neil to set up a big circular track like a huge skidpad and also a short through-the-woods rally section where we could go balls to the walls in the Chargers. With high snowbanks all around, and the Charger being a very large car, it felt safe - ish.
What Is A Charger Scat Pack Like On a Rally Course?
Before we hammered the Chargers on the rally course section, we first lapped the big skidpad circle for a while. It was a sheet of ice covered in some snow. My journo peers and I were graduates of performance driving schools, so we could skip the intro stuff. The big circle gave us the chance to re-learn two things. How to steer with one’s right foot and to always look where you want to go, not where the car IS GOING.
The Chargers have so much power, they are kooky. You can do Starsky and Hutch-type tail-out slides with a stab at the throttle and small steering inputs. Until you go a smidge past the point of no return, and then you have to unwind the steering fast and use opposite lock. I’ve done this in all types of cars. Front drive, rear drive, four-wheel drive, and all-wheel drive. This was not my first rodeo. I’m a Team O’Neil Winter Driving Course graduate in good standing. All those other types of powertrains have their own tricks, and front drive in small cars can even be fun. However, nothing I had ever driven before was as easy to have fun in as the Charger.
With so much power and a rear-wheel drive-biased AWD system, the Charger is a tail-happy muscle car that you can drift like a pro with just minutes of practice. And I do mean YOU. I’m nothing special on a racetrack. The Charger makes drifting and sliding so easy, it’s almost cheating. We toggled the cars to Rear Wheel Drive, and they just got slower, so most of our driving was with the AWD system enabled. The Charger knows you want that power slide and lets you do it. We never felt traction control intervene the whole day. Tap Sport mode, and have fun.
Can A Charger Be Fun In the Woods?
The course Team O’Neil uses for the rally section has short straights, lots of tight turns, and a few turns that happen as you go up and a few that happen as you go downhill. There is even one small section that you would look at and say, “Hey, that’s a jump!” They didn't cut the trees down. They left the big hug boulders in place. In the turns, there are snow banks, but they are now ice-hard and would for sure mess up the car if you smacked one hard. Luckily, I didn’t. I can officially NOT comment on whether anyone else did. I certainly cannot say anything to make you think that any attendee went hard into a corner snowbank. Any inference you draw is your own.
A Team O’Neil employee who looked younger than my youngest son was my expert co-pilot. Jamie number one demonstrated the course at a speed in a manner that had me tugging the seat belt hard and wondering why my helmet was in the hotel room and not on my head. In each corner, he’d go in with the left pedal to the floor, stab the right, pivot the car, and then execute a perfect rally turn with full throttle and opposite lock that would make Colin McRae nod with approval from above, may he rest in peace. There were three Team O'Neil "Jamie" instructors, making me think it may be a nom de gurre.
Then it was my turn. I had three initial laps. Lap one was messy. Jamie was saying in a loud, half-bored, half-amused voice, “Stay on it, stay on it, stab the brake, turn it in, get on it!” I wasn’t staying on it. I was sure that Jamie and I, along with about 4,000 pounds of very shiny and expensive pre-production muscle car, were about to find out what was behind the snowbank. I was also not looking where I should be going, but rather at that snowbank. On the last turn, I said a mental “F-it,” and flung the car instinctively in the turn as hard as I could, and I was able to do a decent exit. Blah. I stink at this.
However, in lap two, I went full-send on every turn. I caught about half the exits just right. By lap three, I was feeling my inner Jamie. I was a freaking hero! I should quit my day job and be a rally instructor! I don't even need the brake. I don’t look out the windshield at all anymore! I only need side windows, the throttle, and a can-do attitude! Whoo Hoo!
Trust the Dodge AWD system, the twin-turbo six, and the perfect balance of the Charger, and you can rally the wheels off this car. I later had a second run, and it was all permagrin and sideways slides. What a car!
Back to the Point. Why Rally A Big Muscle Car?
Nobody who buys a $69,355 top-trim twin turbo Dodge Charger Six Pack Scat Pack Plus Coupe is ever going to take their car to a rally course. So why did Dodge set this up? They did it to sort of safely but very clearly illustrate to a bunch of journos and influencers that the new 2026 Dodge Charger can dance. This car is the real deal. It handles like a rally car, has gobs of low-end torque and power aplenty, and a nifty all-wheel-drive system that somehow sidesteps the negatives of other brands’ AWD setups. Simply put, the thing rocks. There is no way we could have experienced this (sort of) safely on a dry high-speed road course track.
The Only Hard Question Is Which Charger
Dodge is making the Charger with your choice of two engines, 485 hp or 550 hp, in coupe or four-door body, and you can also get an EV version with 670 hp. With all of these choices, the only real question is which one is right for you? Here’s my answer.
John Goreham is 14 year veteran of Torque News. An accomplished writer and a long-time expert in vehicle testing, Goreham also serves as the Vice President of the New England Motor Press Association and has a growing social media presence. He’s also a 10-year staff writer and community moderator for Car Talk. Goreham holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and an undergraduate Certificate in Marketing. In addition to vehicle and tire content, he offers deep dives into market trends and opinion pieces. You can follow John Goreham on X and TikTok, and connect with him on LinkedIn.
The images in this story were supplied by Dodge and are of the event the author attended.
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