The controversy over SSC's 331mph claim

Just a little over a fortnight ago, Top Gear published a video of the SSC Tuatara doing a high-speed run on a closed Nevada road, where it appeared to hit a peak of 331mph.

All who saw it were left aghast. Not only had they broken a record they had comprehensively smashed it. It seemed unbelievable, and it would now appear that it might be.

You may be familiar with Shmee150 (real name, Tim Burton). Tim is probably the Godfather of the "HI GUYS" YouTube influencers, in the automotive corner at least.

Tim has made a career documenting his supercar lifestyle, chopping and changing mega-bucks cars and taking part in lavish events, all in the name of content.

I've never been a fan of his and I'm sure he would even admit himself that he is a bit of a Marmite personality. However, this week he published a video that was very different from his normal output and it piqued my interest, as it did many others.

While most of us watched the supposed record breaking video, went "WOW" and went on with our day, Mr. Shmee was suspicious. So suspicious, he went anal on it.

I'll let you watch the video for yourself to see the depth he goes into, but long story short, he did the maths and it doesn't seem to add up.

Now, I'm not going to point fingers at anyone. SSC or the driver of the car, racer Ollie Webb, have yet to make any reply on the issue and I feel they have the right to before they are burned at the stake.

Does any of this matter, you might ask? Well, going really fast in a straight line is a bit pointless, but there is more to it than that.

Getting any car, let alone a road legal car, to go anywhere north of 200mph takes a lot of engineering, the faster you go the more effort and money it takes.

The first company to claim to have broken the 300mph barrier was Bugatti last year, with a special version of their Chiron hypercar in late 2019.

Bugatti spent a lot of time, effort and money to achieve this and they just scraped it, posting a peak speed of 304.77mph.

Then, just a little over a year later, SSC claim to have gone 30mph faster, with less resources available to them. Plus, an additional 30mph at these speeds takes a lot of effort as the air turns into treacle.

Now, I don't think anyone would shed a tear at a big corporation (VW own Bugatti) being one-upped by a small independent company, but it just seems unrealistic.

So while these high-speed runs are a bit silly, those building million+ Euro cars hold a lot of marketing value in their engineering achievements.

People drop the large sums of money so they can say they own the fastest cars in the world. Sure, no one will ever do it themselves, but like an expensive watch that can withstand pressures of the deep-sea, you like to know that it can.

Again, no one is going to lose sleep of over billionaires buying hypercars under false pretenses, but it's the lying that irks even those of us who will never even consider owning these cars.

Regardless how mush value you put into speed and performance, those of us who love talking cars, love stats. If a car is a record breaker, we want it to be true.

As I say, we don't yet have any verification whether SSC are bullshitting or not, but the suspicion is out there now.

I hope the claim is true, but until then, I will follow the saga with interest.

(If you can't stand Shmee, here's an alternative video that dives even deeper)