508kph SSC Tuatara: The world has a new fastest car!

On Oct. 10, the reptilian SSC Tuatara hypercar posted an average speed of 316.11 mph (508.73kph) while driving on a seven-mile stretch of two-lane Highway 160 outside Las Vegas. The result beat, by a large margin, two high marks set last year by Bugatti's pre-production Chiron prototype (304.77 mph) and one that the Koenigsegg Agera RS set for production cars in 2017 (277.87 mph).

Oliver Webb, the 29-year-old Englishman who drove the Tuatara, hit 301.07 mph on his first run and 331.15 mph on his second run in the opposite direction. The average of those times will count as the official fastest time. The record-breaking event was verified by two witnesses sanctioned by Guinness World Records.

In an email about the record-setting run, company founder Jerod Shelby characterised it as a David vs. Goliath-style victory. "People may look at SSC and ask if we belong in the hypercar realm, with such stalwart competitors,” he said. "This record is so extremely sweet, knowing that our small organization just achieved something that much more established brands, with much larger engineering and development teams, and obviously larger budgets, have not been able to achieve. This success tastes even sweeter, taking the news of this victory back to our home state of Washington, where we'd only dreamed of this when we'd started this company in a garage."

"Now that we have this first record, there's no arguing that we're dealing in the same currency as our hypercar competitors,” Shelby said. "Performance, not history, is our pedigree."

Named after a lizard native to New Zealand and designed by Jason Castriota, who has designed for Pininfarina, the Tuatara looks like a curvier version of its reptile namesake: It has a low, pointed front with angled headlights that look like eyes; a single windshield wiper that evokes the animal Tuatara's third eye; and a rear with air vents that look like gills. Underneath the hood, it boasts a 5.9-litre, twin-turbocharged V8 engine that gets 1,750 horsepower on E85 and 1,350 horsepower on 91 octane. It comes with a seven-speed transmission and weighs just over 2,700 pounds. It took 10 years "and multimillions of dollars" to fully develop the car, Shelby says.

SSC is among the most obscure automakers in the world. Formed in 1998 and counting just 24 employees, the privately held company was formerly called Shelby SuperCars Inc., which inspired its current name. A trained engineer who co-founded a medical device company in the early 1990s, Jerod Shelby is not related to automotive entrepreneur Carroll Shelby, who was featured in 2019's Ford v Ferrari film.

Unlike such other record-attempting companies as Bugatti, Koenigsegg, and Lamborghini, which draw on deep production runs, deep histories, and deep pockets, SSC boasts no large, supportive automotive group and claims minuscule production volumes. Only 100 of the Tuatara will ever be made - at a rate of roughly 20 per year.

New models, however, may be coming. For three years, Shelby has been planning a "little brother” to the Tuatara, a scaled-down version produced in higher volumes and at a lower price point. "It will carry a very similar DNA to the Tuatara but would be naturally aspirated and have horsepower in the 700-800hp range,” Shelby said, estimating a price tag of $400,000 to $500,000. "The Tuatara's little brother will enable more people to own a car that looks and sounds like its world-record-toting big brother." Better yet, "little bro” will come at a fraction of the price. The Tuatara starts at $1.9 million. The first production run of 12 units for 2021 has already been sold.