I enjoyed reading your writeups, Scott.
I've always admired Vipers, but recently I have witnessed some reliability problems with the Viper engine that make me cringe a bit. A friend has a 94 Viper, pampered, approx 10k miles. He also owns a shop with a chassis dyno. Well, he put the car on the dyno and did some runs. He actually clocked 220 mph on the dyno, with no load. On another run up to 186 mph, the engine started to cough a bit. He shut the car down and checked the valvetrain. Well, on about half a dozen valves, the valves were actually being sucked down into the retainers!
This should not be happening on this engine, period. To bring the car to 220 mph, the rpms were relatively low (less than 7k I believe) and not sustained. Long story short, we saw that the valvetrain on these engines is not impressive. Soft keepers, weak springs. My friend contacted Dodge, which sent engineers out to see the damage first hand. Dodge gave him new parts, including a new set of heads, but he is now going with TRD rockers, Ferrara valves, titanium 10 degree retainers, and K-motion springs.
I'm a Dodge fan, and am not trying to bash Vipers. But this engine issue makes me shy away from Vipers the same way the rotary engine problems make me shy away from the 3rd gen RX7.
My point is, if you ever buy a Viper, be aware that the stock engine is not built to the same standards as an NSX!! It won't take the same abuse that our little 3.0/3.2L engines can.