America's Shelby Supercars has more or less abandoned its world's fastest car claim after eagle-eyed YouTubers pointed out a number of embarrassing, possibly costly discrepancies in its video of the SSC Tuatara making a claimed 316-mph two-way run.
newatlas.com
LOL!! This type of Ego and Reputation Destruction could absolutely obliterate any kind of trust or beliefs people may have for SSC.
What an absolute disaster fitting for 2020.
For starters – and you can see it easily for yourself at around the 0:25-mark above – the GPS speed data appears to show the car doing more than 20 mph (32 km/h) before it even starts moving. But when YouTubers
Shmee150 and
Misha Charoudin, among many others, started digging further, things got a whole lot weirder.
Since the Tuatara run was done on the same bit of road as the Agera record, it's possible to
put those videos side by side and clearly see, thanks to landmarks passed, that the Agera is going faster. Analysis of the SSC engine and gearbox ratios appeared to suggest it was literally incapable of doing the claimed top speed in sixth gear, by a long shot. Measuring the distance between known landmarks and measuring the Tuatara's time between them produced an average speed lower than the GPS data was reading at any point over that distance.
And things continued to pile up; in
another 360-degree video, a helicopter can clearly be seen out the right side passenger window keeping pace with the car up to around 1:17, when the car is approaching 200 mph (322 km/h). This helicopter, an
Airbus H125, has a fast cruise speed of 162 mph (260 km/h) – and a "never exceed speed" of 178 mph (287 km/h) that no sane pilot would get too close to, even without a big stabilized camera hanging off the front of the aircraft. There's no way that chopper could keep up with a car doing 200 mph.
SSC went into a kind of damage control, first saying the company that produced the video had
messed up sync points with the GPS data, and secondly saying that
Dewetron, the GPS speed tracking manufacturer, had validated the speed record.
This appeared to be news to Dewetron, which quickly
put out its own statement saying it had, "neither approved nor validated any test results for the world record attempt by SSC Tuatara." What's more, Dewetron indicated that the equipment in question is highly sensitive to setup and calibration, and not only was there no Dewetron representative present to oversee the SSC run, but no employee of the company had been consulted with regard to setup in the lead-up to the attempt. So even if Dewetron received all the GPS data, they'd never be able to validate it.
Finally, SSC's founder and CEO Jerod Shelby released the three-minute "personal statement" below, more or less admitting he couldn't answer any of the pressing questions around this run: "The more we looked, the more we tried to analyze, the more we were concerned there were doubts in the relationship between the video and the GPS. I took that very seriously."