View Single Post
Porsche-O-Phile Porsche-O-Phile is offline
Dog-faced pony soldier
 
Porsche-O-Phile's Avatar
 
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: A Rock Surrounded by a Whole lot of Water
Posts: 34,187
Garage
There are lots of cars out there (most are customs) in the 4-digit range for HP numbers these days. Even a few that are over 2,000. It's just stupid - for practical purposes you can't get anything over about 400 to hook up with street tires and even with R-compounds you're lucky to get anything over about 600-700 to hook up. So you'll have your $400,000 cool-looking car that can't do anything except roast sets of $2,000 tires every lap. What's the point of that?

Cars with that much power require very precise driving skill to be really quick. That's just a pointless amount of power and I don't see how it translates into anything other than straight-line performance (the Bugatti Veyrons of the world) and bragging rights. At those levels of speed it's more about tire degradation and aerodynamics anyway. The attainment of top-end speed by the addition of sheer brute force has reached its practical limit - which is in the mid-200 mph range.

It is a pretty cool looking design though. But I question the claims being made. There's more to being able to create a REAL 200+ mph supercar than just force-inducting a big engine, slapping a lightweight CF body on and doing a little wind tunnel testing.

Truth be told for that money I'd much rather have a Koneigseig or (several) TVRs.

Oh, and FWIW a 944 most certainly can kick the snot out of a Rustang in the twisties. I would love to post the story of how my 951 absolutely walked a brand new Cobra on the TRC New Year's run a few years ago. At the time my 951 was only lightly modded and the suspension was freshened stock - no serious upgrades at all. And I'm a decent (though certainly not "great") driver - so I don't think it was necessarily that either. The guy with the Cobra was plenty mad, and humiliated. He was faster on the straights, but it didn't do him much good.
__________________
A car, a 911, a motorbike and a few surfboards

Black Cars Matter

Last edited by Porsche-O-Phile; 07-11-2010 at 04:48 AM..
Old 07-11-2010, 04:44 AM
  Pelican Parts Catalog | Tech Articles | Promos & Specials    Reply With Quote #12 (permalink)