Roy Sjoberg and Bob Lutz get ready to take the white mule on its maiden voyage. Photo courtesy Roy Sjoberg.
The exhaust wail from a Chrysler V-8 bounced off the brick and concrete walls of the Chrysler Highland Park complex, and though the car producing that wail had long vanished from sight, the engineers huddled together could hear it revving, growling and hissing up and down the access roads and around the corners of the old industrial buildings. It was a cold December night in 1989 and the Dodge Viper had just been born.
That car tearing around Highland Park, nicknamed the “white mule,” might not have much resembled any other Viper with its fiberglass body, Dzus fasteners, tiny sealed beam headlamps and small-block V-8 engine. But Roy Sjoberg, the man in the passenger seat that night and the man many consider to be the father of the Viper, considers it one of the three key cars in the development of Dodge’s V-10 supercar, and has managed to free it from Chrysler’s vaults to have it appear along with him at the upcoming Southwest Michigan Concours d’Elegance.
Sjoberg, at first glance, might not have seemed the likeliest guy to head up the development of an all-new Dodge sports car. By 1989 he’d been with the company for four years as the chief engineer for its minivans. Before that he worked on the Corsica and Beretta for Chevrolet. “No, nothing in my time with the minivans really prepared me to do the Viper,” Sjoberg said. “Other than that it certainly helped me learn the Chrysler system and the people and to figure out who the believers would be in a project like this.”
(Not for lack of trying, though: Sjoberg said he did propose a rally version of the Chrysler minivans, but Hal Sperlich decided to do the Town and Country luxury versions instead.)
Sjoberg did have performance car chops, however. He’d raced Porsches (and later Neons) for years, and before working on the Corsica, he’d worked alongside Zora Arkus-Duntov on a mid-engine Corvette proposal. “I knew from years of sports car ownership and road racing that the American public would appreciate and yes even love an all American designed and built performance vehicle,” he said.
So in January 1989 when Dodge showed off the Metalcrafters-built concept version of the Viper, Bob Lutz, at the time president of Chrysler, approached Sjoberg to see if he’d like to head up the team that would take the car from concept to reality.
The Dodge Viper RT/10 concept car. Photos courtesy Chrysler Media.
“At the time, if you went into a special project at Chrysler and it didn’t work out, you were out on the street,” Sjoberg said. “So a lot of people were hesitant about leaving their normal positions. But with Bob’s help, I convinced them that it wouldn’t be a problem.”
From a volunteer meeting that attracted 140 potentially interested people from throughout the company, Sjoberg selected 21 people for the Viper project, most of them “hot rodders, motorcyclists, rallyists, sports car enthusiasts, even one drag racer.” He even convinced a handful of high-performance guys to come out of retirement specifically to work on the project, including famed engine developer Bill Weertmann.
They started not with the white mule, but with another car that Sjoberg called Felicity, a third-gen Corvette that the team fitted with a Viper-spec suspension and wheels and tires. “Because the Viper wheels were so much wider than the Corvette body, we had to bubble out the wheelwells to fit over the tires,” Sjoberg said. “From Felicity we learned that we needed even more track width, and we figured we oughta build another mule closer to the Viper aerodynamically.”
The white mule on the surface plate. Photo courtesy Roy Sjoberg.
To that end, the team, under the direction of Ken Nowak, built the white mule – technically VM01 – using a fiberglass body and an LA-series V-8 with a number of performance modifications. “We were looking for the right wheelbase and track and the appropriate stiffness to evaluate the handling,” Sjoberg said. “We didn’t necessarily need the V-10, just the power of one.”
With some input from Lamborghini, the work on the Viper’s V-10 proceeded at Highland Park under the direction of Dick Winkles in parallel to the development work on the Dodge Ram truck V-10, which took place at the Plymouth Road facility. “We shared information back and forth with the truck team, but by the time we finished, our V-10 didn’t resemble the truck V-10,” Sjoberg said. “Our combustion chamber, for instance, was much closer to the Hemi’s.”
The team intended the white mule to be fully functional, so Nowak cribbed parts from wherever he could to get the project done. “I saw an open top car being tested in December, so I liberated a B-van rear seat heater core, found a blower motor and squirrel cage, and I built the mule heater from Masonite and aluminum siding scraps at home on my dining room table,” Nowak said. “We had no door and hood hinge designs, so I did Dzus fasteners. For the frame, I found out what Craig Belmonte (frame design engineer) needed and drove to a steel supply house, loaded all the tubing into my Dodge Spirit lease car, and personally unloaded everything into the metal shop in Highland Park. I built that car on my American Express because I couldn’t wait for Purchasing to figure it out.”
Nowak also recalls painting VM01 white as a subtle nod both to Sjoberg’s background with the Corvette and to the Polo White paint that constituted the only paint option for the first-year Corvette. “I knew I was building history and wanted to somehow respect the past,” Nowak said. “Had I asked, someone would have told me to paint it red…. Better to apologize than ask permission.”
The team finished the white mule in 90 days – despite having to add two inches in width and two inches in wheelbase to the car during construction – and showed it off to Chrysler executives December 8. Lutz would get the honor of wringing the white mule out that evening while worried engineers hoped that it would hold together and validate the work they – and about two dozen other people at Chrysler – put in on it.
The white mule with the Viper development team. Photo courtesy Roy Sjoberg.
After that test, Sjoberg and his team refined the white mule but then directed their attention to the next testing and development car, VM02, which they painted red and which used a prototype V-10. “These test mules confirmed our design direction and provided management confirmation that this skunk works team knew what they were doing and gave us substantial development freedom avoiding excessive oversight,” Sjoberg said. Six months after the team finished the white mule, Lee Iacocca approved the Viper for production. The white mule for a short time after its completion became a show vehicle, then was ultimately sent to the Walter P. Chrysler Museum.
Sjoberg, who to this day owns one of the pre-prototype Vipers he purchased from the company, remained on the Viper project up until his retirement from Chrysler at the start of 1997. “It was an absolute dream assignment,” he said. While he went on in his retirement to form his own consulting company and work with Ferrari and other manufacturers, he has always maintained close ties to the Viper community and to his original development team, most of which turned out for the white mule’s 25th anniversary celebration last year.
First-generation Dodge Viper. Photo courtesy Chrysler Media.
So with the Lake Bluff Concours d’Elegance of Southwest Michigan featuring Vipers this year – concours chairman Dar Davis said he hopes to have about 25 to 30 Vipers on hand, including at least one from each of the Viper’s five generations – it only made sense to invite Sjoberg as the concours’s featured guest. Sjoberg said that while the white mule has made appearances at Viper Invitationals, he said he believes this will be the first time it has appeared at a concours.
The Lake Bluff Concours d’Elegance will take place August 8 in St. Joseph, Michigan. For more information, visit ConcoursSWMI.com.
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