Your Lucky Number is 500; New Viper promises 500 of just about everything.

500/500/500-you remember those figures from the new Viper's introduction at the Detroit show. More specifically, that's 500 horsepower and 500 lb-ft of torque coming from a 500-cubic-inch V10. Those are the numbers the world is waiting to experience in the 2003 Viper, which goes into production a little over a year from now. Nice, round figures that reel the mind and fry the imagination. In a world where 400 hp is considered pretty good for your average semi-supercar (BMW Z8, Ferrari 360, Porsche Turbo), the new Viper will be more powerful by a long stretch of quarter-mile.

How did the Viper team come up with such a lofty performance goal? Surely the designers had some high-minded concept when they aimed at these targets, some technically complex engineering formula? As they say in Hollywood, what was their motivation? To find out, we asked the man with the longest title we could find in all of DaimlerChrysler, Herb Helbig, senior manager, vehicle synthesis for specialty vehicles engineering/Team Viper. We expected an answer so complex it would be presented in binary code, with lots of x and y axes and little arrows pointing at strange-looking diagrams of Greek letters in lower case, then transferred onto a floppy and analyzed by a Cray supercomputer. We braced our brains, then he said, ``We thought it would be real cool.''

Turns out it wasn't all that hard to do. The current Viper already makes 450 hp and 490 lb-ft of torque. From there it was just a matter of tweaking and tuning.

``We did a lot of the traditional hot rodding tricks,'' said Helbig.

Like his colleagues in the engineering group, Helbig is a self-admitted lifetime hot rodder, and he knows

hot rodding tricks. While growing up he street-raced '56 and '57 Corvettes of his own making. He also had

a flathead Hi-Boy roadster and has run on the dry lakes, setting a record of 180 mph at Muroc in a Viper