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Friday, April 8, 2011
There's a power struggle being fought in the world today: a struggle to top the mega-power charts. Not so very long ago, 500bhp was all it took. Now if your supercar doesn't have at least 1,000 horsepower, well, it's not a supercar.
Racing cars reached the magic 'grand' as early as 1972, with Porsche's 917-10. And Formula One turbo engines were running up to 1,300bhp in qualifying in the mid-1980s (although they tended to blow up).
The first road car with 1,000bhp was the 1985 Ferrari-based Koenig Competition. But without question, the Bugatti Veyron was the car that revolutionised the mega-power landscape. Its headline-grabbing power output of 1,001bhp set the four-figure bar that others had to attain. Now there's a new generation of monster-powered supercars with anything up to 2,500bhp.
A claimed 2,500bhp, that is. This is a landscape populated by number chasers and, occasionally, fantasists, and reality may not always match the claims.
There are now so many cars with more than 1,000bhp that we've had to drop at least a dozen from our line-up. We could have filled our table with all sorts of mega-power specials, from Jay Leno's 1,600bhp Tank Car, through tuned Skylines, Supras and RX-7s with well over 1,500bhp, right up to 2,000bhp classic US muscle cars. But we've also only selected street-legal cars from commercial operations.
Racing cars reached the magic 'grand' as early as 1972, with Porsche's 917-10. And Formula One turbo engines were running up to 1,300bhp in qualifying in the mid-1980s (although they tended to blow up).
The first road car with 1,000bhp was the 1985 Ferrari-based Koenig Competition. But without question, the Bugatti Veyron was the car that revolutionised the mega-power landscape. Its headline-grabbing power output of 1,001bhp set the four-figure bar that others had to attain. Now there's a new generation of monster-powered supercars with anything up to 2,500bhp.
A claimed 2,500bhp, that is. This is a landscape populated by number chasers and, occasionally, fantasists, and reality may not always match the claims.
There are now so many cars with more than 1,000bhp that we've had to drop at least a dozen from our line-up. We could have filled our table with all sorts of mega-power specials, from Jay Leno's 1,600bhp Tank Car, through tuned Skylines, Supras and RX-7s with well over 1,500bhp, right up to 2,000bhp classic US muscle cars. But we've also only selected street-legal cars from commercial operations.
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