Did the SSC Tuatara hit a top speed of just 224 MPH?

Last month, SSC North America announced that their Tuatara hypercar had broken the production car top speed record. The company claimed that the car hit 331 mph and averaged 316.11 mph over two runs. But, just days following the announcement doubts were raised about the accuracy of the video that was shared by the company.

Shmee150, Misha Charoudin and Robert Mitchell put out videos explaining why they thought the video of the record run had major discrepancies. Their analysis was based on the data that was publicly available and the video that was released by SSC.

Now, Julian Thomas, Managing Director & Founder of Racelogic has shared his analysis of the Tuatara’s top speed record run. Julian’s analysis is again based on the data that is available in the public domain. But, since the hardware used for the Koenigsegg Agera RS’ speed run was supplied by Racelogic, this data was used to corroborate SSC’s data.

After Julian extracted the speed data from the Tuatara’s video, he found that it was out of sync. A huge discrepancy was also observed in the distance covered by the Tuatara. Using this, the scale factor was calculated and fed into a software to finally arrive at the estimated top speed of the car, which was found to be 223.75 mph.

As Julian has pointed out in his video, the video overlay isn’t accurate and may not be displaying the actual GPS data. Meanwhile, SSC has confirmed that they will redo the top speed run to finally put an end to this controversy.