Letter from the Editor: The World’s Fastest Septuagenarian
12/01/2007
Records are made to be broken. Case in point: On October 9, 2007, Chuck Bigelow, 71, drove himself and the SSC Ultimate Aero into the Guinness World Records. Traveling down two-lane highway 221 in rural southeastern Washington—without wearing a racing suit or even a helmet—Bigelow piloted the supercar past 257 mph before turning around and reaching nearly 255 mph in the opposite direction, for an average of 256.19 mph: the new world-record fastest speed for a production car.Bigelow’s achievement breaks the previous record held by the Koenigsegg CCR by more than 15 mph, and it bests the Bugatti Veyron’s unofficial 253 mph claim by more than 3 mph. Moreover, it marks the first time the production speed crown has been held by an American car manufacturer since 1967, when the Ford GT40 laid claim to the title.
The record itself "was one of our top priorities," admits Jerod
Shelby, eponymous founder of SSC, which stands for Shelby SuperCars
(www.shelbysupercars
.com), and has no relation to that other Shelby of
racing and sports-car building fame. "I wanted to design the best all-around
vehicle as far as zero to 60 [mph] and quarter-mile times—the best sprint
car—but also with the best top speed capabilities."
Shelby had no misconceptions about why achieving the record would be crucial to his business. "I knew from the beginning the only way a small American car manufacturer was going to get credibility was to achieve a record of this nature," he says. Bigelow, a family friend, was enlisted to try for the record because "I wanted to show the world that we didn’t need a pro driver to achieve these speeds," Shelby explains. "His dream was to drive 200 mph, and we thought: ‘Why not give him that?’"
As a result of their historical collaboration, the Ultimate Aero finally lives up to its name. Aerodynamically speaking, the car is built for ultimate speeds. It boasts a super-slippery drag coefficient of just 0.357, which means that it cuts through the air like a scythe. The car’s tubular chrome-and-steel chassis is covered with a carbon-fiber composite body-shell that weighs only 131 pounds. Total weight is 2,750 pounds, a mass easily motivated by a thoroughly tuned and twin-turbocharged Corvette C5R V-8 racing engine that is bored and stroked to produce a whopping 1,183 hp. The Ultimate Aero is nothing if not a raw speed machine. There are no electronic nannies, such as traction control, to save you, and the Michelin Pilot Sport PS2 tires are not equipped with ABS.
Thus far, SSC has sold seven cars, and more orders are in the works as the company hopes to build 50 vehicles within the next two years. The base MSRP of $579,000 may seem high, but to put that price into perspective, the extremely limited edition Bugatti Veyron Pur Sang pictured on this month’s cover costs $2 million—making it the world’s most expensive, if no longer the fastest, car.