On Wednesday, SSC announced that it had brought the car to an average top speed of 283 miles per hour during two runs. But the attempt, completed on January 17, was made under much more difficult circumstances than before. The car was driven by an amateur, rather than a professional driver. And for that reason the power of the car was reduced.
However, the company will keep trying, Shelby said. The next attempts 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 turbocharged V-8 engine. SSC says the model’s aerodynamic design was inspired by jet fighters and involved more than a decade of research and development. The Tuatara is named after a New Zealand lizard, which takes its name from a Māori word for ‘spikes on the back’.
The most recent run of the Tuatara could already count as a record. But what constitutes a record for “the fastest production car in the world” remains in dispute, with no international sanctioning body recognized and no official definition of what a “production car” is. Swedish supercar maker Koenigsegg claimed the fastest production car record for its Agera RS, which hit 278 mph on a Nevada highway in 2017. A modified Bugatti Chiron drove 305 mph on a test track in Germany, but that car was considered a pre-production prototype.
The SSC Tuatara’s first attempt to break the record last fall was made on a closed stretch of highway in the Nevada desert outside Las Vegas. SSC makes its retries on a former Space Shuttle runway in Florida. The former runway, called Johnny Bohmer Proving Grounds, is now used to test cars at extremely high speeds.
But instead of seven miles of highway to hit over 300 mph, the SSC Tuatara now has only 3.7 miles. That requires different, more aggressive techniques if there is any hope of passing 300 mph.
On the last attempt in January, the SSC Tuatara was run by its owner, Larry Caplin, a dentist and founder of DOCS Health, a company that provides healthcare to large organizations. To get the car up to speed, Caplin had to hold the accelerator on the floor for 50 seconds. According to SSC, the car reached 244 miles per hour in less than a mile.
“Larry managed to make a run that was much more difficult, at least a factor of four, than what we tried in Nevada,” Shelby said in an email.
Since Caplin is not a trained driver, the power of the Tuatara was usually reduced to just 1,500 horsepower using the car’s on-board computers. Only on the final run, and not until seventh gear, was the car allowed to produce its full 1,750 horsepower, Shelby said.
“I was deeply impressed,” Shelby said during an interview. “After we got him to 250 miles per hour, I looked at his in-car camera on these runs. And he was so calm, no drama at all. He looked really calm and I was like, ‘We can do this . ‘”
With that bit of full power, the car’s top one-way top speed was 286 mph and the combined average top speed, in both directions, was 283 mph, the company said.
SSC stood up to its claim that his car reached a speed of 331 mph and an average top speed of 316 mph in two opposite directions in its original attempt. Registration bodies such as Guinness require speed records to be recorded in both directions to ensure that wind or slopes are not involved. But because serious questions had been raised about the video evidence, Shelby still felt it needed to be redone to answer the critics. (Shelby is not related to Carroll Shelby, the famous founder of Shelby American, the company that makes Shelby Cobra sports cars and Shelby Mustangs.)
“I think this production car speed record is all marketing,” said Shelby, “and this is kind of an internal engineering design challenge where we want our customers, the Tuatara customer, to know that they bought the car that is the fastest in the world. world. world. “