Four builders will settle a summer-long argument tomorrow at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The Dodge Direct Connection Grudge Match finals go down Saturday, Oct. 31, during the Mopar NHRA Las Vegas Nationals powered by Dodge, with a race-modified SIXPACK Charger Scat Pack championship on the line between qualifying sessions for the pro classes.
The field of eight that started at Roadkill Nights in Pontiac, Michigan, this August is now four. John O’Malley of Boosted Motorsports, a Tampa native who took the Roadkill Nights win on Woodward Avenue, enters with an automatic bye into the Vegas semifinals. His opponent will be Johnathan Rimbo, a Texas-based Dodge Badassador who posted the fastest timeslip of the September test-and-tune round at 9.86 seconds in the quarter-mile. That pairing is the bracket to watch: one racer who earned his spot early, one who’s showing the most outright speed heading in. On the other side, the Titan Motorsports team out of Orlando qualified with a 10.42-second pass and will face Rob Dahm of California, who ran 10.7 seconds in his Charger Scat Pack.
The stock baseline for all four cars is 550 hp and 531 lb-ft from the 3.0-liter twin-turbo SIXPACK H.O. inline-six, which Dodge says outperforms the prior 6.4-liter HEMI Scat Pack by 65 hp and 56 lb-ft. From there, the competitors tuned freely. Dodge noted that one racer cracked the 10-second barrier, and two pushed output past 1,000 hp, which puts the SIXPACK platform’s tuning ceiling considerably above what its stock numbers suggest. The engine runs twin 54mm Garrett GT2054 turbos spinning to 185,000 rpm at up to 30 psi of boost, and Dodge says over 90 percent of peak torque is sustained from 3,000 to 6,000 rpm.
Dodge CEO Matt McAlear will present the championship trophy in person, and the winning car earns a display slot in the Mopar exhibit at the SEMA Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Nov. 3–6, the week after the race. That placement isn’t incidental: SEMA is where Dodge typically puts its highest-profile builder showcases in front of the aftermarket industry audience most likely to care about what a tuned SIXPACK can do.
Also at the Vegas event this weekend: the 2027 Dodge Charger Super Bee Launch Edition, which Dodge first showed alongside the Great Lakes Nationals in September before its formal Las Vegas debut. Dodge rates the Super Bee Launch Edition at 600 hp, 50 hp over the standard Scat Pack, calling it the quickest, fastest and most powerful SIXPACK Charger yet and the highest specific horsepower muscle car the brand has built. It will be on display in the Direct Connection area in NHRA Nitro Alley through the weekend, with SIXPACK Chargers joining the pre-race parade on Sunday before elimination rounds begin. Television coverage of the Las Vegas Nationals airs Sunday, Nov. 1 on FS1 at 5 p.m. EST.
The Grudge Match format is new for 2026. Prior seasons ended at Roadkill Nights; this year Dodge extended the competition past Woodward and into a national NHRA event, which pulls the builder program directly into the pro-class spotlight rather than keeping it separate. For a brand that saw overall shipments fall 28 percent to 101,927 units in 2025 as it transitioned away from its HEMI-powered lineup, putting tuned SIXPACK hardware in front of the drag racing audience most likely to influence the platform’s long-term reputation is the kind of investment that matters beyond the trophy.
Source: Dodge. Images courtesy of Dodge.
