Two hundred fifty three miles per hour – Where are we going with this?
Automotive one-ups-manship has undergone a not so subtitle evolution in the last decade or so. Used to be that 0-60 time was king, but with the introduction of the McLaren F1 in the 1991 and the setting of the fastest street legal top speed in 1994, things have changed. Top speed in now king and 0-60 time is just another statistic. And I think the world of the car enthusiast is poorer for it.
Take a look at this Youtube video http://tinyurl.com/5cgg7. Two hundred and fifty three miles an hour in the current fastest production car in the world, the Bugatti Veyron! That is an insane speed. The best I have ever done is a hundred miles an hour slower than that! Now I think most enthusiasts would like to give it a try, but how? That youtube run took an unbelievable amount of coordination and preparation to pull off. Not the kind of thing you do on any sunny afternoon. Lots of other cars, even Corvette, now have bragging rights for an over 200 mph top speed. And car magazines are constantly churning out features on 200 mph match-ups. Test drivers comment that everything changes for a production car when you get over something like 170 mph. Of course everything changes at a much lower speed if you are on a public road; which is what these cars are built for.
Bragging rights are nice; but, as with owning a Rolex or a Mont blanc pen, what more can you do with it than you can with a more ordinary model? On the other hand, 0-60 time is something an enthusiast can exercise practically everyday they are behind the wheel. And how exhilarating is that? There is nothing like nailing it and hanging on for the few seconds it takes to get to 60 mph; and most places you can do it without even attracting the attention of the authorities. Try that with 200 mph.
So, rise up enthusiasts and demand that car makers and car mags bring the emphasis back to a “go fast” capability that us ordinary folks can relate to. I’ll even settle for the metric version of that, 100kph.
