Spectre Performance Tries For 400 MPH Through The Wheels

One of the things I love about land speed record racing at the Bonneville Salt Flats (and there is much to love there), is that it's literally up to you, as far as what you want to race. You want to see how fast you can make an original Volkswagen Beetle can go? Have at it. You somehow got your hands on some "lightly used" NASA rocket engines? Hey, as long as you can pass the safety inspection,, they're fine with it.

There's a class for everything out on The Flats, and even though the big speeds and all the glory started going towards the jet and rocket stuff decades ago, there's still a lot of work and effort put into what used to be the top dogs: Wheel driven internal combustion engined cars.

When people like Craig Breedlove and Art Arfons first showed up with their jet cars, a lot of the old guard looked at it as sort of cheating. From an engineering perspective, a jet car is an "easier" answer. All you need is the room to get it up to speed and then haul it back down. There's so much air being pushed out the back, you end up going down the road, whether you want to or not.

Now, designing and racing a car that has to put its power to the salt via the wheels, a wheel-driven car in the parlance, that's a totally different thing. First off, you have to come up with an engine powerful enough to overcome air resistance at very high speeds (in this case, around 400 miles an hour). And once you've built an engine capable of that, you have to build a drivetrain that can put all that power to the ground.

If you think about it for a while, you can see why this can be a tough nut to crank. And some guys that go by the name of Spectre Performance have been thinking about that for a while now, and they're going to have a go at setting a new wheel driven record soon.

Their car is called the Spectre SpeedLiner and it uses an 8.8-liter Cadillac engine running on high-octane pump gas. The plant features a pair of intercooled 88 mm turbos and it can crank out close to 2000 HP. It looks more like something Major Kong would ride down to Earth in the finale of Dr. Strangelove, but it sort of has to.

When you get going at speeds like this, aero-concerns will become paramount (assuming you've got the traction for all 2000 ponies). So, assuming Spectre has their sums right, in the aero regime as well as in the drivetrain, the Spectre SpeedLiner could theoretically set a new LSR of over 400 MPH.

Source: Jalopnik