What Does The Red Key On A Dodge Hellcat Do Exactly?

Let's cut to the chase – the red key on your Hellcat-powered Dodge is the full power key. It's what gives you the 700 demented ponies you wanted when you bought the thing. Still, since we have the space to do so here, let's get more specific with the power levels. With that red key, your standard Charger and Challenger Hellcats make 707 or 717 hp depending on the year. Redeye models push out 797 hp, while Challenger Super Stock Hellcats go up to 807 hp. If you were lucky enough to get one of the original Challenger Demons, you'd be making 808 hp on pump gas or 840 with 100-octane and the ECU from your Demon Crate.

For those of you who managed to secure a Challenger Demon 170 — first of all, congratulations. It's running 900 hp on 91-octane or a Bugatti Veyron-beating 1,025 hp on E85, and we'd be happy to stop by and make sure it's putting out full power anytime. There's nothing quite like the otherworldly loud Hellcat supercharger whine and the accompanying G-forces. 

Anyway, point is, you 170 owners just get that red key and nothing else. Hellcat Durango owners may also notice the keys come in red only, meaning there's no separate black key to limit power to 500 horses like there is in other Hellcat Dodges. Both the Demon 170 and the Hellcat Durango do get a valet setting in the drive modes that acts like that black key, though.

So the black key in your Dodge Hellcats keeps the car at a piddling — 500 hp? Wait, wait, wait. What valet can't have a blast with 500 hp? This is something that Car and Driver pointed out with the 375-hp C4 Corvette ZR-1 35 years ago, when people referred to the second key as a valet key. Those ZR-1s still made about 230 hp in low power mode, which was pretty much what the standard 'Vette's L98 was making. So, yeah, valets could still leave multiple feet of burned rubber. Of course, with sub-$20,000 1990 Corvette ZR-1s available, valets could just buy their own at this point and drive around with full power all the time.

You might have also noticed that a reduction to 500 hp still puts your Hellcat above any 392/6.4-liter Hemi-powered Dodge, which ranged from 470 to 485 hp. So, yeah, still enough to fry tires and get yourself to extra-legal speeds in a hurry. As an aside, the 392 cars also have a valet mode, but it's not nearly as exciting. YouTube channel R/T Life tested a 392 Challenger Scat Pack and found that it went from an earth-shattering 485 hp down to an earth-gently massaging 167 hp. 

It's a good thing there wasn't a valet mode on the Pentastar V6 in the SXT, because if power dropped by the same percentage as the 392, our math shows that the standard 303 hp would have plummeted to 104 hp.

It's also worth mentioning that in addition to dropping to 500 hp, the Hellcat's black key also keeps rpm from going over 4,000. Hellcat redlines range from 6,200 rpm for the regular Hellcat — although it still feels weird to talk about a 700+ hp engine as anything other than ludicrous — to 6,500 rpm for Redyes and Demons. Interestingly, the Super Stock redlines at 6,400.

Let's look at this 4,000 rpm limit for a second, though. Assuming there's not anything else going on in the programming to restrict how you drive in valet mode, a Hellcat is, according to dyno testing, still making 575 lb-ft of torque at 4,000 rpm. That's more than the Callaway Twin-Turbo Corvette was making in 1989 (562 lb-ft), and that car had more torque than literally any car in the world at the time save the Vector W8 (600 lb-ft). Even if you bought a Dodge Ram with a Cummins 5.9-liter inline-6 in 1989 for towing purposes, you only got a comparatively paltry 400 lb-ft, and that was a monster torque figure for the time.

Valet mode? Pray you're the valet that gets to enjoy a black-keyed Hellcat. Besides, with judges taking away Charger Hellcats from their owners, it's not like valets are the only ones who might need a more judicious right foot.