Every now and again on a dried out salt covered lake bed in Utah, USA a collection of oddly shaped machines gathers. The designers, owners and drivers are there for one reason and one reason only, to prove that their machine is the World’s Fastest Car. There are many classes and many records but there is only one record the cars here have been designed to beat, the outright land speed record for wheel driven cars.
This is not a record that should be compared to the supersonic battle that is shaping up in 2016 (see: The fastest vehicles on earth), where vehicles which are closer in design and engineering terms to missiles and fighter jets than they are to automobiles. This is a record mainly fought for on the Bonneville Salt Flats and it is one that started back in 1898 when Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat pushed his electric car to a giddying speed of 39.24mph. Yeah thats right fastest car in the World was an EV, indeed that was the case until 1902!
But the really important date everyone looks to is December 1964, when the FIA decided to allow Jet powered cars to contest the land speed record, and that eventually saw Thrust SSC exceed the speed of sound. But the record for what many still saw as cars, the purists record if you like became a separate thing. In 1964, Donald Campbell set the record at 403mph in Bluebird CN7, and that stood for around a year until American Bob Summers took it away in his quadruple engined 2,400bhp streamliner ‘Goldenrod’, by clocking up 409.277mph. There the record remained until 1991 when Al Teague in his car, Spirit of ’76 raised the bar to 425mph, where it remained for another decade until a man called Don Vesco turned up with hit turbine powered streamliner ‘Turbinator’ which achieved 470mph on the flying mile and 458mph over the flying kilometre, and so the record remains, for now…
New technology, new ideas (and some old ones) have all come up and a group of cars has been built to challenge the record and they all have only one objective, to push the record to 500mph+
The following pages cover what are the fastest cars in the world, some of the cars on the list may surprise you others may not. Most of them were set to attempt the record at Bonneville in late 2014 but all of the events were rained out leaving them to wait for the ultimate showdown in 2015
Read on to find out about each of these amazing and very different cars.
Spirit of Rett
