This unknown hypercar just beat Bugatti's record to become the world’s most effective - hitting 532.9kph

The world includes the new fastest car.

On October 10, the reptilian SSC Tuatara hypercar posted an average speed of 508.7 kilometers each hour while driving on a seven-mile stretch of two-lane Highway 160 beyond Las Vegas. The effect beat, by a large margin, two high marks set this past year by Bugatti’s pre-production Chiron prototype (490.4kph) and one which the Koenigsegg Agera RS set for production cars in 2017 (447.1kph).

Oliver Webb, the 29-year-old Englishman who drove the Tuatara, hit 484.5kph on his first run and 532.93kph on his second run in the opposite direction. The average of those times will count as the official quickest 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 characterized it as a David vs Goliath-style victory.

“People may look at SSC and have if we belong in the hypercar realm, with such stalwart competitors,” he said. “This record is so extremely sweet, understanding that our small organization just achieved a thing that a lot more established brands, with much bigger engineering and development teams, and obviously larger budgets, have not been able to achieve.

“This success tastes even sweeter, taking the news headlines of this victory back again to our home state of Washington, where we'd only imagined this when we'd started the corporation in a garage.”

Advantage: Obscurity

SSC has become the obscure automakers on the globe. 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 first 1990s, Jerod Shelby is not linked to automotive entrepreneur Carroll Shelby, who was simply featured in 2019’s Ford v Ferrari film.

Unlike other record-attempting companies such 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 - for a price of roughly 20 per year.

The tiny footprint of its brand can be an asset, said Shelby. Through the look and development phase of the Tuatara, SSC employees were able to make decisions and pivot instantly whenever testing results required design changes. Larger organizations can get swept up in weeks and months of bureaucratic maneuvers just making a straightforward design decision.

“Many times, where we have observed something during real-world testing of a Tuatara that could require a design change to a component or assembly to accomplish higher performance, we have literally assembled the look and development team, determined, and had newly designed parts on a machine being fabricated within hours,” said Shelby via email. “We'd new, completed parts from the street being tested on the automobile by the very next day.”

Named after a lizard native to New Zealand and created by Jason Castriota, who has created for Pininfarina, the Tuatara looks like a curvier version of its reptile namesake. It includes a low, pointed front with angled headlights that look like eyes, an individual windshield wiper that evokes the animal Tuatara’s third eye, and a rear with air vents that appear to be gills. Within the hood, it has a 5.9-liter, twin-turbocharged V8 engine that gets 1,750 horsepower on E85 and 1,350 horsepower on 91 octanes. It comes with a seven-speed transmission and weighs more than 2,700 pounds. It took 10 years - and multimillions of dollars - to totally develop the car, Shelby says.

A prior SSC car once held the world's fastest title. In 2007, Guinness World Records certified the SSC Ultimate Aero as the world's most effective production car after it averaged a top speed of 256.18 mph over two runs in opposite directions.

“It’s all just starting to sink in,” says the Manchester-born Webb. You should definitely set world records in Nevada, he drives in such endurance races as a day of Le Mans and the FIA World Endurance Championship.

“To go quickly, in a straight line, it’s all mental training, not physical. I ate fast-food all week. In the event that you prepare the automobile correctly, it’s mainly meditative breathing and staying very calm and staying steady - it’s afterward when the gravity of what you’ve done hits home.

“For anybody who knows the physics of what is possible, and how incredible it really is to do something similar to this, it’s an [Neil] Armstrong moment,” Webb says.

The halo benefit remains

SSC can’t claim the “halo effect” which involves one car’s success creating hype that brings attention to a brand’s other products - a prime reason behind these speed tests - but breaking the record will bring benefits. Bugatti’s speed feat was set on a pre-production prototype, while SSC fans know they are able to buy a car accurately just like the Tuatara that hits top speed, as the record was set on a customer car with neither special modifications nor exemptions, right down to the standard carbon fiber seat inside no additional roll cage. The automobile utilized Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2s - the standard customer tires.

“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.”

New models, however, may become. For 3 years, Shelby has been planning for a “little brother” to the Tuatara, a scaled-down version stated in higher volumes and at less price point.

“It will carry an extremely similar DNA to the Tuatara but will be naturally aspirated and also have the horsepower in the 700-800hp range,” Shelby said, estimating a price tag of $400,000 to $500,000. “The Tuatara’s little brother will permit more people to own a car that looks and sounds like it's world-record-toting your government.”

Even better, “little bro” should come at a fraction of the purchase price. The Tuatara starts at $1.9 million. The first production run of 12 units for 2021 was already sold.