426 HEMI 300C SRT8 - "Sweet Ride!" (courtesy: Mopar Enthusiast)

With the scenery whizzing by in a blur and turn one – an exciting uphill right hander that’ll get you airborne if you crest it to fast – coming up in a hurry, my mind kept wandering. All I kept thinking about were Reese’s PeanutButter Cups.

Fortunately, for this lap, I wasn’t the one behind the wheel. My fate – and that of the 300C – was in the capable hands of Stan Wilson, a many-times-overSCCA Championship-winning road racer who can usually be found behind the wheel of his American Le Mans Series GT2 Viper Competition Coupe on the Weekends.

Stan’s a quiet guy, unassuming, and out on the track, he’s got a gentlemanly, Jackie Stewart – like smoothness that made it easy to forget that we were moving at nearly three times the legal speed limit of most U.S. Highways. So, as I sat there in the SRT8’s leather-covered cockpit, I was free to have a little Zen-like moment of being one with the universe (or at least the racetrack) and Ponder how I was going to describe what it felt like inside the 300C on the track.

But all that kept coming to mind were Reese’s Cups.

As any connoisseur of the little candy cups will tell you, what makes Reese’s Cups special is that they’re comprised of “two great tastes that taste great together,” to steal a line from their old advertisements.

When asked what he thought of the 300C’s engine, Stan blurted out: “Fantastic power! When you put your right foot down, It’s like hangin’ onto a missile being launched.” In fact, he commented that the engine had so much power that “I was getting a lot of wheelspin exiting the corners.” Mind you, he was exiting some of those corners at well over 75 mph… and in some cases over 100 mph!

Pedders – which is huge in Australia and even sponsors the V-8 Supercar Series there – takes a practical, “no bull,” as they like to say, approach to suspension engineering.

With the LX platform, they first focus on removing flex and deflection caused by overly-soft bushings – a condition the company’s engineers refer to as “Bush Mush.” The “tuned” polyurethane bushings replace stock hollow – void bushings at the control arms, engine cradle and rear subframe mounts. Special offset bushings relocate the steering rack to minimize bump-steer-a condition that changes the toe in or out when the suspension cycles up down.

With a stable platform from which to build, Pedders then replaces the coil springs and shocks at all four corners with matched units that keep the car from floating and porpoising over bumps.

Finally, Pedders’ adjustable sway bars prevent body roll, thereby allowing the tires to remain in contact with the ground for maximum grip through the corners.

Despite the upgrades, the Pedders pieces don’t go overboard and kill the 300C’s ride quality. Instead, the ride feels “firm but comfortable,” as Pedders’ Peter Basica described it, and we’d have to agree.

Out on the track, Stan – our Precise, technical driver – said the Pedderised 300C was “very predictable, very flat” and that it turned in lap times that were “very repeatable and consistent.”

Chris may have said it best, when he commented: “To take an over – 4,000-pound car like [the 300C]… and to be able to do is awesome.”

The Arrington engine would have made us smile every time we sunk our foot into it – be it on the street, a road course or a dragstrip. Frankly, the Arrington 426 HEMI gave the 300C far more power than we would have imagined could ever have been useful in a car like that.

On the other hand, the Pedders suspension did more than just bring out the best of the LX platform; it redefined our expectations of acceptable handling and ride quality. In fact, now that we’ve driven the Pedders-equipped 300C, we wouldn’t want to own an LX model that hasn’t been “pedderised.”

But the most astonishing part of our day at NJMS with the Pedders and Arrington crews (and a handful of each companys speed-crazed customers) was the realization of just how well each company's product lines complement each other.

The Reese’s folks described it as “two great tastes that taste great together”. But we really liked how our GM-loving racer, Chris, put it: “this car hopped the rumble strips, enjoyed threshold braking, and tore down the straights like a road racing car should. But this thing’s an interstate cruiser with radio, air, leather, a warranty and stock, treaded tires!” Sweet!