On Wednesday, the SSC announced that it had placed the car at an average maximum speed of 283 miles per hour during two runs. But the attempt, completed on January 17, was made in much more difficult conditions than before. The car was driven by an amateur driver, not a professional. And so, the car’s power has been reduced.
The company will continue to try, however, 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 says the model’s aerodynamic design was inspired by fighter jets and took more than a decade of research and development. The Tuatara is named after a New Zealand lizard, whose name comes from a Maori word for “spikes on its back”.
The most recent execution of the Tuatara can now count as a record. But what constitutes a “fastest production car in the world” record remains disputed, with no recognized international sanctioning body and no official definition of what constitutes a “production car”. Swedish supercar maker Koenigsegg claimed the fastest production car record for its Agera RS, which reached 278 mph on a Nevada highway in 2017. A modified Bugatti Chiron reached 305 mph on a test track in Germany, but that car it was considered a pre production prototype.
SSC Tuatara’s first attempt to break the record last fall was on a closed stretch of highway in the Nevada desert near Las Vegas. SSC is making its new attempts at an old Florida space shuttle runway. Called Johnny Bohmer Proving Grounds, the former airstrip is now used to test cars at extremely high speeds.
But, instead of seven kilometers of highway to reach more than 480 km / h, the SSC Tuatara is now only 3.7 kilometers. This requires different and more aggressive techniques if there is hope of going over 300 mph.
During the last attempt in January, SSC Tuatara was being run by its owner, Larry Caplin, a dentist and founder of DOCS Health, a company that provides healthcare to large organizations. To make the car accelerate, Caplin had to keep the accelerator pedal pressed to the ground for up to 50 seconds. The car reached 244 miles per hour in less than a mile, according to the SSC.
“Larry managed a race that was much more difficult, at least by a factor of four, than the one we tried in Nevada,” said Shelby by email.
Since Caplin is not a trained racing driver, the Tuatara’s power has been reduced using the car’s onboard computers to just 1,500 horses most of the time. Only in the last race, and only in seventh gear, was the car allowed to produce its 1,750 horsepower, Shelby said.
“I was totally impressed,” said Shelby during an interview. “After taking him at 400 kilometers an hour, I looked at his camera in the car during these races. And he was so calm, with no drama at all. He looked very serene and I thought, ‘We can do this. ‘”
With that maximum power, the car’s highest maximum unidirectional speed was 286 mph and its combined maximum maximum speed, going both ways, was 283 mph, the company said.
SSC maintained its claim that its car reached a speed of 331 mph and an average maximum speed of 316 mph going in two opposite directions in its original attempt. Record-keeping bodies such as Guinness require that speed records be recorded in both directions to ensure that wind or slopes are not a factor. But with serious questions raised about his video evidence, Shelby still felt it needed to be done again to respond to criticism. (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 a kind of internal engineering design challenge, where we want our customers, the Tuatara customer, to know that they bought the car more in the world. “