Thread: Titanium testicles

Originally Posted by Moa Hunter

I don't know a lot about these type of cars but I thought it was cool but a bit slow for 2019 - I thought the cars would be faster by now. As a kid in the 1970's my brother and I were enamoured with the Porsche 917/30 with 1500 hp. They made a few as street legal ones that were sold as sports cars. At 240 mph on the track they were so stable the drivers could take their hands off the wheel and that was the non turbo 917. Who knows how fast the 1500 hp ones would be with the right gearing in a straight line and that was 1973

Power has very little to do with it. The 70s and 80s produced insane turbo engines with crazy, mostly undriveable deathtrap power. That's why most of them were banned, quite quickly, in LMP, F1, WRC, etc.

It's primarily a function of aerodynamics and particularly tyres. As with lots of physics problems, there are practical limits that once reached, require significant engineering effort to achieve small, incremental increases. That's why the fastest production car records were stuck in the mid- to high- 200s for so long, its damned expensive to fund the engineering gains required. In this case, getting over 300mph is mostly about tyres, and that's not a VW specialty, they need a tyre partner to go in with them, Michelin.

Reading some more about the project, there are some incredibly innovative aerodynamic changes to, stuff like where exhaust gases go, small but measurable improvements that add up!

Don't expect the next car to break the record to break it by much.