Article 598BX SSC takes Bugatti’s crown with a new 316mph production car speed record

SSC takes Bugatti’s crown with a new 316mph production car speed record

by
Jonathan M. Gitlin
from Ars Technica - All content on (#598BX)
  • LIPMAN_89354-980x653.jpg

    On October 9, SSC North American took the production speed record away from Bugatti with a 331mph top speed run in the SSC Tuatara. [credit: James Lipman ]

If you want a car that can go really, really, really fast, forget about ordering that Bugatti and give the people at SSC North America a call. On October 10, racing driver Oliver Webb got behind the wheel of one of SSC's new Tuatara hypercars and, on a closed stretch of Nevada State Route 160, reached a top speed of 331.15mph (532.93km/h). When averaged with his 301.07mph (484.53km/h) run in the opposite direction, SSC North America set a new world speed record for production vehicles at 316.11mph (508.73km/h).

Until now, the record for the world's fastest production car belonged to Bugatti, which claimed it in 2019. Andy Wallace was behind the wheel for that attempt, driving a 1,578hp (1,177kW) Bugatti Chiron Super Sport to top speed of 304.77mph (490.48km/h) at Volkswagen's massive test track in Ehra-Lessien, Germany. The SSC Tuatara packs even more power than the Chiron: 1,750hp (1,305kW) of power on E85, and it all gets sent to just the rear wheels, too. The Tuatara also has a more slippery shape, with a smaller frontal area than the Chiron (1.672m2 vs 2.072m2) and a lower drag coefficient (0.279 vs 0.319).

Those were conscious decisions during the Tuatara's design-SSC's founder Jerod Shelby has had his sights on the production speed record for some years now. "My goal was always to beat this record by such a substantial amount that maybe it's going to stand in for a little while. I felt like that's what McLaren did back in the late nineties, and they held that record a long time because they just smashed the record. That was my dream in a perfect world," Shelby said.

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