We Drove The Most Violent Hypercar on Earth - The Smoking Tire

It's a funny thing how short the public's memory is if you're the kind of person comfortable spraying a fire hose of falsehoods. You can lie, cheat, steal, and cover it up with those same three things. Do it fast enough, and no system of accountability will ever catch up. You can see examples of this basically everywhere in our modern world. But what if you do the right things, you try hard, you're honest and professional, and you fumble the bag at the line anyway? What happens then? Think Dan Quayle and his potato, Steve Ballmer and his dancing and cheering. You're branded for life. If you've heard of this car at all, it's probably for the wrong reasons. It's probably not because it has an industry-leading drag coefficient of .279, or because it has a Nelson Racing twin-turbo V8 with 1,750 horsepower. It's probably not that it's gone over 280 miles an hour, which it has. In fact, you've probably heard of it for the one reason SSC wishes you hadn't. See, back in 2020, SSC, in an attempt to break the 300-mile-an-hour barrier in a road car, performed one of the wildest PR bungles in automotive history. They released a video that showed the Tuatara doing 331 miles an hour and claimed victory. But clever internet sleuthing proved the video showed no such thing. SSC got defensive, hemmed and hawed for months, but ultimately blamed a poorly calibrated V-Box and admitted the car didn't actually break 300. Alone in our homes, bored from COVID, we all enjoyed the shot in fraud, even me. But this company and this car still exist. They've sold a handful, and they have a handful more on order. Frankly, it's kind of pretty. It looks like it's made with attention to detail, and friends who have driven them have told me good things. That's why we are here in Richland, Washington, to try one for ourselves. The transmission is a seven-speed from the Italian company called SEMA. It was originally designed for helicopters, but now you find it in a couple different hypercars. The Nelson Racing's 5.9-liter flat-plane V8 engine has $10,000 titanium connecting rods and a billet crank and camshaft. There are sensors all over the place. Heat-resistant ultralight magic known as Inconel is everywhere. The traction control system is motorsport-grade. The suspension comes from a small company called Penske. And all of this is shoved into a carbon tub and body that was penned by Jason Castriota, a man who can list Ferrari, Maserati, and Ford as his past clients. Folks, going all the way to eastern Washington to review the SSC to Attara would not be possible without today's sponsor, Delete.Me. And you know about Delete.Me because I talk about them on this show and our podcast all the time. Look, here's the deal. Your data, and my data, everybody's data, is for sale to places called data brokers. What they do is every time you buy something online or become a member of something or do something where you input your stuff, that place then sells that information to a data broker that then sells it to anybody. This can result in phishing, hacking, scams, all kinds of stuff, and then people are out there making a profit off of you. You're the product. But there is something you can do about it. It's called Delete.Me, and it's not a one-time thing. It is an ongoing service. I signed up for it. I gave them all the information that I wanted off the internet. It sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out. They then scour the data broker sites for that information, my addresses, phone numbers, old places of employment, my family members' information, et cetera, et cetera. They then send me a huge report of what they found, what they deleted, what needs further action, and on and on. It's a huge number of things. But every month, they send me a new report, and that number gets a little smaller. My guess, because I keep using the internet, is that it will never get to zero. But the fact is, the number of spam texts and calls I've gotten has gone down. So check it out for yourself. And here's the special deal we've got for Smoking Tire fans. Just text the word REVIEW to the number 64000. That's it. Text REVIEW to 64000, and we will get you 20% off your Delete Me plan. Again, text REVIEW to 64000. That's it. And thanks to Delete Me for sponsoring today's video. Now enjoy horsepower measured in megawatts. Woo! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! This is the heroin, folks! This is where you run out of all the regular drugs, and you have to go to the crazy drugs. The SSC Tuatara. Woo! To be honest, I wasn't sure if I would ever get to see or drive one of these after what happened back in 2020. I didn't know if they were going to pack up their stuff and go home, but... Jared Shelby doesn't seem to roll like that. It seems like he keeps coming back, over and over. And I like that. Ready? There's a bump. Here. And... Now. Whaaa! What the fuuuck! I always thought of Nelson Racing Engines as a company that put, like, way too much power into, like, a Chevelle or something. I never really thought of them as a pseudo-OEM engine supplier. This engine is apparently $147,000, which Jared said to me like it was a lot, but that sounds cheap for 1,700 horsepower. Do you hear that? I've never heard a shotgun crack like that from a shifter. And apparently it shoots like 10 feet of fire. That's just madness. The gearbox is from Italy. If you ask me, it's the weak point of the car. It's okay. We'll go, look, we'll go slow, right? And if you're just cruising and puttering around... And... Tug. Upshift. Okay, it's... It shifts about the same speed as I would shift an actual manual, okay? And then... And then if you go full-on bananas, it does the shotgun crack thing, right? And it just kicks you and you get, like, a hint of wheelspin in fourth gear. But anything else in between, that sort of 40, 50, 60% throttle where a car like this, you'd spend really a lot of time, it's weak in that area. And I can count it out. I can count paddle, tug, clutch open, clutch closed. Like, ready? And tug, clutch open, clutch closed. And tug, clutch open, right? So there's your weak point. But 3,100 pounds wet. We're running E85 today. 1,750 horsepower. It's just beyond mental. It's very raw. It's very visceral. It's not like a Pagani Utopia. I haven't driven a Venom F5. I imagine that's sort of similar. It feels like you would want a road-legal Group C car to feel. I can feel all the little gravel and pebbles and everything through the carbon tub. The fit and finish is good by hand-built car standards, not good by Pagani standards. The sort of caulking in between these glass bits isn't the best for over $2 million. But the hardware. You've got a carbon tub that weighs just over 200 pounds. You've got this incredible engine, this very, very rigid structure. Insane Brembo CCMRs. Oh, yeah, the boom. If you're a little constipated, you need to get things moving down there. You downshift, and then... You know that line in Spaceballs where it's Rick Moranis and they hit Ludacris and my brains are going into my feet? It's that. But it's my lunch is going into my seat. Now, it's fancy without being fancy because we have no active aero, nothing that moves. We don't have fancy shocks that adjust in different modes. Nothing about any individual component is overly computerized, so you get a very raw driving experience. But we do have air conditioning. Very hot outside, and both coolant and oil temps are staying very cold. I actually trust this thing a lot more in hot weather than I thought I should. We have a comfortable driving position. We have the same Recaro seats they use in the European Audi RS3. There's a trunk. And the tuned intake runners, the titanium exhaust. There's no muffler in this car. They coiled up a bundle of snakes of titanium and Inconel to add over two feet to the length of the exhaust. And doing so, it tuned the tone of it without having to add an actual muffler component. So, there is no muffler, which is pretty wild. It's for sale 49 states in the U.S., no Cali. But it is ultra-low volume manufacturer, so you can get one in the U.S. and drive it legally on the roads. I will say it's not hard to drive, but it's not set up for someone without experience. It's not designed to bring this level of performance to the most number of people. It's designed to attract a hypercar owner-buyer that might want something really even more visceral than is offered. But there's certain things, right? Like this bit of carbon on the doors is not great. This sort of center console would have been really nice 10 years ago, which is when this car was really supposed to come out. If you have enough room to use the top half of the pedal, which in most places you don't, most. If you do, habibi. Might I remind you, this did an average two-way average of 282 miles an hour. Unofficially for the record books, but in reality with V-Box, it went 295 one way. Imagine you're floating in space and you happen to have five cannons with you. I mean cannons that shoot iron cannonballs. And the only way to get back to earth is to point them away and fire each one. That's what this feels like. Wow! Expletive! Wow! I have never, ever, ever been in a car that makes that sound. Unless it was braking. Okay, okay. I gotta say, getting on the brakes from not that far into three-digit speeds, it did not seem to like that. You would think this car would be more famous. Only a few months after the big kerfuffle oopsie-daisy, it went 282 miles per hour average. Two-direction average. I'm sure there was a story about it, but no one really talks about it. And it's hard to gain public trust back. It takes time. You know, even if someone is charged with a terrible crime, if that lie gets around the world, and then they're actually released and exonerated completely, in too short a time, it's almost like the public misses it. Like we have an attention span, it grabs onto a subject, and then we let go of it. And it takes us a while to forget about it, and then come back and find out the truth. And if the truth happens too quickly, it's like, oh no, we've already heard that story. We don't want to hear the revised version. I mean, this went faster than the very famous Remaz Nivera R. And that PR team is doing a very good job of getting all of those records out into the public. The Tuatara is named after a reptile from New Zealand that is known for having the fastest molecular evolution on Earth. Which is a little ironic, because it did take a very long time to build this car and the one before it. The company was founded in 1998. The founder, Jared Shelby, thought it would take about four years and X number of dollars to build the car. But it took three times the cost and a lot longer. Building cars is hard. Very hard. Breaking records is even harder than just building a car. The Ultimate Aero looked a little simple to me. It was pretty crude. Very much a doorstop. It didn't have any of the styling and panache of a Pagani, but it also didn't have the simplicity of a Veyron. So I kind of wrote it off, to be honest with you. But when this concept came out, I remember seeing it on the lawn and I thought it was stunning. And I still do. It is beautiful. It looks every bit as aggressive as a Pagani, but it has a little bit of that more functional shape, let's say, of a Veyron. Put that together and it's no wonder that this thing can do 282 miles per hour and make a huge amount of downforce. Negative, the touchscreen responds a little bit slowly. The gauges look good. They definitely look better than what I've seen in the F5. But the touchscreen is a little slow to respond and, like so many new cars, a lot of the controls are in there. Crap. Good brakes. Other negatives. The turn-in is a little aggressive. The steering is twitchy. Quick. Could be an alignment situation. They've been taking this car to a lot of road courses lately. But if you've ever heard that Ferrari steering is quick, this is twice as fast. If I even think of moving the wheel a millimeter, the car's front end moves several inches. There is an exponential amount of turning there that I don't totally enjoy. It feels like a lizard, like it's just going like this. It is looking for snacks all over the place. I am very alert. I was tired early today. I'm not tired anymore. One question. Why build such a thing? The answer is as pure as the snow falling on the summit of Everest. It was simply Jared Shelby's dream. A successful mechanical engineer who raced cars on the weekend, Jared enjoyed tweaking setups nearly as much as driving. Spend enough time trying to perfect someone else's imperfect vehicle and you start to think you could build one yourself. But that's the same reason there are buildings with Chevrolet, Dodge, Ferrari, or Pagani atop the door. Building a car is not a simple nor easy task. Just ask Henrik Fisker. But I will never fault someone for trying. And the result here is a record-setting experience that underlines the word visceral. Flaws and all. It went for the speed record because it seemed like low-hanging fruit. It's something everyone understands. If you want to sell a car for a couple hundred thousand or more dollars, you can't just say it's really fun. It's really hard to sell a car like that if you're not from a big OEM. You got to say it's the fastest thing in the world or it can jump over a mountain. But boy, that was a more difficult task than they thought. There's so much squat when you get on it. There's so much movement in the car. I'm actually surprised by it. It's what makes it pretty comfortable. And yes, I am in sort of a gentler suspension setting. But you just can't contain that much power is really what it is. I mean, you can probably see behind me. When you get on the gas in this thing, the whole engine moves like it is trying to break out of its restraints. It is trying to unmoor itself from the mounts and fly off into a different dimension. Some of you might have heard about it. I have a new game show called Zack Klappen's Driver's Test. And one of the questions I posed was, why are hypercars good for society? And the teams had very different answers. But I think my answer lines up better more with Jesse Iwoji and Alana Sher, which is that they do inspire cars and people to try. The technology doesn't always trickle down. That doesn't always matter. I mean, the technology behind me is nothing really new. It's turbos, big V8 engine, etc. But I think young people will see a car like this and a project like this and go, I could do something like that. It shows that what seems impossible or difficult is possible. And I think there's merit in that. Sure, it's another toy for very rich people. But sometimes those inspire the rest of us to do something different or special on our own. You've heard these arguments and apologies before about the original American sports cars, the Corvette, which democratized Ferrari styling and performance in the 1950s. But they were never built as well as Ferraris, nor given as much respect as the European cars, even all the way till today. Well, we can now stretch it to American hypercars, more power, more speed, potentially 300 miles an hour, fighter jet looks and two thirds the price point and quality level of the best out of Italy. Ladies and gentlemen, the SSC Tuatara is the Corvette of Pagani's. The problem was that they called their shot. We're going to go 300. And then they said they did it and they did it. And unfortunately, that overshadows the fact for many people that they built a seriously fast car. A very nutty car and a car that would absolutely appeal to a certain number of people, despite its imperfections and hand built flaws. It's a wild bit of engineering. It's insanely fast. Seems to work today. It's fun. It's real. You can buy one. And it has gone faster than any production Bugatti so far. I mean, it just has. So, wow, wow, wow. It's a good time, folks. And don't forget, always fight your tickets. Go to OffTheRecord.com for 10% off all legal services from Off The Record.