The SSC Tuatara, The World’s Fastest Car, Is Now More Powerful
The marque just announced two new high-performance variants for the $2-million hypercar.
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The fighter jet-like SSC Tuatara may have recently become the world’s fastest production car, but its maker still saw room for improvement.
The Richland, Washington-based performance marque has just announced two variants of its record-setting hypercar, both of which are even more extreme than the 1304kW vehicle they’re based on. One doubles down on downforce, while the other, a track-only beast, adds an additional 335kW to the mix.
The first of the new Tuataras is the track-focused Striker. The hypercar, has been fitted with a dramatic aero package, which consists of a large frontal splitter, frontal dive plain, directionally vaned side rockers, vertical stabiliser, augmented diffuser, a high-downforce fixed wing and an active rear wing. The splitter, dive plane and side rockers combine to balance out the downforce, with 45.4 per cent applied to the front and 54.6 per cent to the back. Thanks to these changes the speed machine can produce 500kg of downforce at 257km/h, three times more than before.
Up next, is the track-only Aggressor. Whereas the Striker is powered by the Tuatara’s stock twin-turbo V8, this variant has been fitted with upgraded mill that’s capable of producing a stunning 1640kw. It also features the Striker’s aero package—but that’s not all. Because it’s not street-legal, SSC says you’ll be able to customize the hypercar to your heart’s content, including, presumably, modifications that would not be allowed on a road car, though it is not clear what those might be.
SSC has yet to announced performance numbers for either of the cars, aside from downforce figures, but we expect they’ll be special. Earlier this year, the Tuatara became the world’s fastest production car after it averaged 455km/h across two runs at the Kennedy Space Center’s Johnny Bohmer Proving Grounds in Merritt Island, Fla. That mark bested the 447.18km/h benchmark set by the Koenigsegg Agera RS in 2017.
As you might expect, the high-performance Tuatara variants will be limited. SSC North America plans to build 100 examples of the standard version and the Striker combined, as well as an additional 10 of the Aggressor. Pricing hasn’t been announced, but the meat and potatoes Tuatara starts at $2 million, so we’d expect it to be even higher than that. World-record speed comes at a price, after all.
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