SSC Tuatara

Jason Castriota came from Pininfarina, and the Tuatara is a shape drawn to a number rather than to a mood. The number is a drag coefficient of 0.279, low enough to beat most road cars regardless of class and to comfortably beat everything with this much power. The car is 182.4 inches long and only 42 inches tall, and the whole upper surface is one continuous taper from the canopy back to a tail so narrow it reads as a fuselage rather than a rear deck. Cameras replace the door mirrors, which removes the single worst aerodynamic feature a car has. The name does the rest of the work. A tuatara is a reptile found only in New Zealand and its Maori name is generally translated as peaks on the back, which is exactly what the spine running down the car and the winglets standing off the tail are. Castriota's aerospace references are easy to see: the canopy, the ducted flanks and the way the body narrows behind the cabin all belong to aircraft rather than to cars. Whatever else about this car is contested, the shape is not.

The Tuatara has never raced and there was never a plan for it to. SSC is a firm of a few dozen people building a car in the low hundreds at most, with no motorsport department, no series that fits a 1,750 hp two-wheel-drive road car, and nothing to gain from balance-of-performance racing where its one advantage would be regulated straight back out. Its competition discipline is the timed record run, which has real rules and a real convention behind it: two passes in opposite directions, averaged, measured by independent equipment. SSC won at it once already, when the Ultimate Aero took the Guinness production car record on 13 September 2007 at 256 mph. The Tuatara's own verified result came on 17 January 2021 at the Kennedy Space Center's launch and landing facility, where the car's owner Larry Caplin ran 279.7 mph north and 286.1 mph south over 2.3 miles for a 282.9 mph average, logged by Racelogic, Life Racing, Garmin and IMRA satellite tracking. On 14 May 2022 the same car and driver managed 295 mph in one direction at the same site, which is a test result rather than a record.

The Tuatara is the first car to lose a world record to YouTube, and that is what it is known for. On 10 October 2020 SSC announced 331.15 mph in one direction and a 316.11 mph two-way average on Nevada State Route 160 near Pahrump, with Oliver Webb driving, and released video of the run. Within days Shmee150 and Misha Charoudin, among others, had taken the footage apart. The GPS overlay did not agree with the point of view camera. A helicopter appeared to be keeping pace at a speed no helicopter reaches. Timing the car against roadside landmarks, and against the Koenigsegg Agera RS on the same road, produced a figure nearer 280 mph. Then Dewetron, whose measuring equipment SSC had named as validating the run, stated publicly that it had validated nothing, that none of its employees had been present, and that it had not even received the data file. Jerod Shelby conceded the run was ruined, blamed an editing mix-up between two cockpit videos, and invited the people who had dismantled it to attend the re-run. In July 2021 SSC accepted that the original attempt never passed 300 mph.

What owning one is like is shaped by how few there are and how new they are. Every Tuatara is a recent car with low mileage, so this is not a story about wear. It is a story about support. SSC builds in Richland, Washington and there is no dealer network, no independent specialist and no parts counter, so anything beyond fluids and tyres is a conversation with the factory. The engine is SSC's own design rather than a modified production V8, which is unusual at this end of the market and means the good machine shop down the road cannot help you. Fuel is the practical daily question: the gap between the 91 octane and E85 calibrations is 400 hp, and running the E85 tune means sourcing E85 reliably, which is straightforward in parts of the United States and close to impossible elsewhere. The cabin is unusually large for the class, which makes the car easier to live with at ordinary speeds than the shape suggests, though the camera mirror system takes adjustment. None of this is discouraging. It is simply what buying from a company this size has always involved.