World's Fastest Car
On April 19, 2005, a Bugatti Veyron EB 16.4 set the new land speed record for a production vehicle by going 253.81 miles per hour.
It was the first car to break the 250 MPH barrier -- one of the many ever changing barriers in the car industry.
First, it was 100 MPH (broken by the Jaguar XK120 in 1949), then it became the 200 MPH (broken by the RUF CTR in 1987), then 275 MPH (broken by a Koenigsegg Agera RS in 2017), to finally rest at its current 300 MPH.
Humans have always been interested in seeing how fast we can go.
Whether it be developing advanced footwear to break the two-hour marathon barrier or building the fastest manned aircraft capable of going faster than Mach 6, we have always challenged ourselves to go faster.
This is especially evident in the car industry.
When admiring new sports cars, we rarely ask, “How comfortable is it to drive?” or “How much luggage space does it have?” instead, we ask, “What is its top speed?” or “How fast does it go from 0-60?”
Since before Henry Ford introduced the Model-T bringing motorized vehicles to the common person, manufacturers have competed to make the fastest car.
The first production car to break the 200 mph barrier was a limited run modified Porsche called the RUF CTR, or Yellowbird, in 1987.
Eighteen years later, in 2005, this record was shattered by French manufacture, Bugatti, when the Veyron EB 16.4 hit 268 miles per hour, making the Bugatti name synonymous with speed.
However, in 2017, the fastest production car title was snatched from Bugatti by Swedish car manufacturer Koenigsegg when the Agera RS hit 278 miles an hour.
Since then, the two manufacturers have dueled to create the first production car to break the 300-mph barrier.
On September 2, 2019, Bugatti, out of the blue, dropped a video on their YouTube channel showing a prototype Bugatti Chiron going 304.7 miles per hour on the Volkswagen test track in Germany.
However, although the car's speed exceeded 300 miles per, it did not count towards the official record.
For the run to count as a record according to the Guinness Book of World Records, it needs to be an unmodified production vehicle, and the car must achieve the speed in two directions on the same road within 60 minutes, with the average of the two speeds the result.
The reason the record is the average of the two runs is to eliminate any external variables such as a tailwind etc. As a result, Bugatti didn’t achieve the record as the car was a modified prototype that did a one-directional pass.
To fight against Bugatti in the battle to 300, Koennisegg revealed the Jesko to the world at the 2019 Geneva Motor Show.
Christian Von Koenigsegg, the founder of the high performance manufacturer, also announced that the Jesko Absolut variant of the Jesko line would have a top speed in excess of 300 mph.
The car, named after Christian’s father Jesko von Koenigsegg, will have a limited production of 125 units, all of which have already been purchased and paid for even though the first Jesko is yet to be delivered.
In order to make the Absolut variant of the track-focused Jesko capable of achieving speeds over 300 mph, Koenigsegg needed to implement various changes to the advanced card.
First off, they replaced the rear wing of the Jesko reducing the whopping 5,00 pounds of downforce that helped it quickly corner turns in the track, with two small fins reducing the helping the car remain stable at high speeds and reducing the downforce to 150 pounds and lowering the drag coefficient to a ridiculously low 0.278 cd.
To further help reduce the drag, Koennisseg removed the front splitter, lengthened the car by three inches, smoothened the car, all while keeping the Twin Turbo 5.0L V8 engine and custom revolutionary nine-speed multi-clutch “Light Speed Transmission” identical to the track focused variant.
While the production of Jesko is not scheduled to start until late 2020, COVID-19 permitting, it is still the strong contender to win the 300 MPH record.
Written by Thomas Braun, Edited by Michael Ding, Jack Argiro & Alexander Fleiss
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