On Wednesday, SSC announced it had raised the car to an average top speed of 283 miles per hour for two races. But the attempt, which ended on January 17, was made in much more difficult conditions than before. The car was driven by an amateur and non-professional driver. And for that reason, the power of the car was reduced.
But the company will keep trying, Shelby said. His next attempts will begin in the spring, he said. with the car running at full power throughout the race.
The $ 1.9 million Tuatara has butterfly doors and a turbocharged V-8 engine. SSC claims that the aerodynamic design of the model has been inspired by fighter jets and has involved more than a decade of research and development. The Tuatara is named after a New Zealand lizard, which received its name from a Maori word meaning “tops on the back”.
The most recent Tuatara test could already count as a record. But what constitutes a record for “the world’s fastest production car” continues to be disputed, without recognizing any international sanctioning body and without officially defining what constitutes a “production car.” Swedish super car maker Koenigsegg set the fastest production car record for its Agera RS, which reached 278 mph on a Nevada highway in 2017. A modified Bugatti Chiron did 305 mph on a test track in Germany, but this car was considered to be a production prototype.
SSC Tuatara’s first attempt to break the record last fall was made on a closed stretch of road in the Nevada desert, outside of Las Vegas. SSC is making its new attempts on an old space shuttle runway in Florida. Called Johnny Bohmer Proving Grounds, the old runway is now used to test cars at extremely high speeds.
But instead of seven miles of highway to reach more than 300 mph, the SSC Tuatara now has only 3.3 miles. This requires different and more aggressive techniques if there is any hope of passing 300 mph.
During the last attempt in January, the SSC Tuatara was being driven by its owner, Larry Caplin, a dentist and founder of DOCS Health, a company that provides healthcare to large organizations. To get the car to accelerate, Caplin had to keep the gas pedal pressed to the ground for up to 50 seconds. According to SSC, the car reached 244 miles per hour in less than a mile.
“Larry started a career that was a lot harder, at least for four, than what we tried in Nevada,” Shelby said in an email.
Because Caplin is not a trained car driver, the power of the Tuatara was reduced by using the car’s on-board computers to just 1,500 horsepower most of the time. In the last race alone, and only in the seventh gear, the car was allowed to produce 1,750 horsepower, Shelby said.
“I was completely impressed,” Shelby said during an interview. “After we carried it up to 250 miles per hour, I looked at the camera I had in the car during those races. And it was so quiet, without drama. It looked very compound and I thought, ‘We can do this.’ ‘”
With that little bit of power, the car’s highest unidirectional top speed was 286 mph and its combined average top speed, in both directions, was 283 mph, the company said.
SSC has maintained 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 require that speed records be recorded in both directions to ensure that wind or inclinations are not a factor. But after asking serious questions about his video test, Shelby still believed it needed to be asked again to answer the criticism. (Shelby is unrelated 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 commercial,” Shelby said, “and it’s kind of an internal engineering design challenge where we want our customers, the Tuatara customer, to know. who have bought the fastest car in the world “.