SSC announced on Wednesday that it has raised the car to an average top speed of 283 miles per hour during two runs. But the attempt, completed on January 17, was made in much more difficult circumstances than before. The car was driven by an amateur, rather than a professional driver. And for that reason, the car’s power was reduced.
However, the company will continue to try, Shelby said. The following efforts will begin in the spring, he said: with the car running at full power throughout the run.
The $ 1.9 million Tuatara has butterfly doors and a turbo V-8 engine. SSC says the model’s aerodynamic design was inspired by fighter jets and required more than a decade of research and development. The Tuatara is named after a lizard from New Zealand, which got its name from a Mori word for ‘peaks on the back’.
The recent run of the Tuatara could already count as a record. But what exists as a record for ‘world’s fastest production car’ remains disputed, with no international sanction body, and no official definition of what a ‘production car’ is. Swedish supercar manufacturer Koenigsegg has set the fastest production record for its Agera RS, which hit 278 km / h on a highway in Nevada in 2017. A modified Bugatti Chiron went 305 km / h on a test track in Germany, but the car was considered a pre-production prototype.
The SSC Tuatara’s first attempt to break the record this fall was made on a closed highway in the Nevada desert outside Las Vegas. SSC makes new efforts on a former Space Shuttle runway in Florida. Johnny Bohmer Proving Grounds The former runway is now being used to test cars at extremely high speeds.
But instead of a highway of more than 300 km per hour, the SSC Tuatara now has only 2.3 km. It requires different, more aggressive techniques if there is any hope of passing 300 km / h.
During the latest effort in January, the SSC Tuatara is run by its owner, Larry Caplin, a dentist and founder of DOCS Health, a healthcare company for large organizations. To get the car on track, Caplin had to hold the gas pedal on the floor for as long as 50 seconds. According to SSC, the car reached 244 miles per hour in less than miles.
“Larry kicked off a run that was a lot harder, at least by a factor of four, than we tried in Nevada,” Shelby said in an email.
Because Caplin is not a trained race car driver, the power of the Tuatara with the car’s on-board computers has been reduced to just 1,500 horsepower. Only on the last ride, and only in seventh gear, could the car deliver its full 1,750 horsepower, Shelby said.
“I was thoroughly impressed,” Shelby said in an interview. ‘After we got him to 250 kilometers per hour, I looked at his camera during these runs. And he was so calm, not drama at all. He looked very composed and I thought ‘We can do this. ”
With that bit of full power, the car’s highest one-way top speed was 286 mph and its combined average top speed, which follows both directions, was 283 mph, the company said.
SSC stood by its claim that its car reached a speed of 331 mph and an average top speed of 316 mph in two opposite directions in its original attempt. Record-keeping bodies like Guinness need to record speed records in both directions to ensure that wind or slopes are not a factor. But with serious questions about the video evidence, Shelby still felt it needed to be done again to answer the critics. (Shelby is not related to Carroll Shelby, the famed founder of Shelby American, the company that manufactures Shelby Cobra sports cars and Shelby Mustangs.)
‘I think this production car speed record markets everything,’ ‘Shelby said,’ and it’s an internal engineering challenge where we want our customers, the Tuatara customer, to know that they are the fastest car, bought. world. “