SSC Tuatara swung at the speed record

It's time for companies like Bugatti and Koenigsegg to step aside as hypercar manufacturer SSC North America is set to reclaim its title as the world's fastest car maker! The speed record belongs to the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+, with a top speed of 490,484 km / h, and this haunts other hypercar manufacturers. Recently, the Swedes who built the Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut announced their desire to break the record. On tests, this hypercar reached a speed of 499 km / h, but the record has not been officially confirmed. Now the Americans are in the game, determined to surpass these figures, with the new SSC Tuatara. The races were held at a test site in Florida.

Technical details

The SSC Tuatara at 475 km/h is the same car that hit 455 km/h on the same runway a year ago. Now, changes and improvements have been made to the engine and transmission, as a result of which the power plant has become more productive and more reliable. Few engines in the world of production cars develop more power than the 5,9-liter twin-turbocharged V8 found in the SSC Tuatara. We are talking about 1350 horsepower on gasoline, about 1750 hp. With. on E85 fuel and about 1861 horses on methanol!



The motor is mated to a seven-speed gearbox and is mounted on a monocoque chassis made of carbon fiber in the center of the monocoque. The wheels and body are also made of carbon fiber, so the Tuatara's curb weight is 1247 kilograms, 270 less than the Lamborghini Aventador SVJ.

First try

According to the rules, two races in opposite directions are required to set a speed record. To avoid mistakes, the Tuatara has been equipped with several GPS tracking devices, including the Racelogic VBox and Life Racing.

During the first attempt, Larry Caplin, who works as a pediatrician, accelerated to 474,756 km / h. According to SSC founder and CEO Jerod Shelby, the car was two seconds short of reaching 300 miles (482 kilometers) per hour! But on the second try, things didn't go according to plan. Initially, Caplin was going to hit the runway at a speed of 100 km / h to get an additional 16 kilometers of maximum speed, but ...

Track

The Johnny Bomer Proving Ground is a three-mile airstrip part of LLF Space Florida located at the Kennedy Space Center. The first 300 meters of the runway that the team used is asphalt, which turns into 4,5 kilometers of concrete, which ends with another 300 meters of asphalt. The braking zone is the last 1100 meters, which means that it starts on concrete and ends on asphalt. To get more space, the team used OSR, which stands for Oh Shit Road, which leads to the ends of the runway for planes to use in case they can't stop in time. Shelby's team installed the brake cones in both directions of the runway, instead of moving the cones for each run as is customary. This change turned out to be a fatal mistake.

Second attempt

On the 300-meter mark from asphalt to concrete, the Tuatara was moving at a speed of 25 km / h faster than on the first run. But then Caplin saw the cones left over from the first run and let off the gas for a moment, ruining the attempt. At that moment, the Tuatara was driving at 458 kilometers per hour, and there were still three and a half kilometers to the braking zone! After that, Shelby, of course, did not apply for a record.



Thus, we will soon continue the duel for the title of the fastest car on planet Earth, between Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut and SSC Tuatara. By the way, if you are suddenly curious: the Americans borrowed the name Tuatara from a lizard that lives in New Zealand.