What to do with 1000 horsepower?
Monday, December 13, 2010 at 4:10PM Today, the Bugatti Veyron is the baddest automotive artillery on the planet. 1000 bhp is its calling card, generated by 16-cylinders, 4 turbochargers, 10 radiators, and an exhaust note like a cow-throwing tornado. With all wheel drive, man-hole covers for brake discs and an engine best described in aircraft terms, it’s easy to put the Veyron's star on top of the Christmas tree.
Of course 1000+ horsepower engines have lived at the drag strip for a long time, but it takes either 9.0 liters of nitrous guzzling displacement or a huge blower to get there. Modern quarter-milers sometimes use turbos to get into the 4-figure horsepower arena, although the size of the snails needed for that kind of application are as easily measured in feet as they are inches.
When it comes to road cars, 1000 bhp is the sole stomping ground of the Veyron, or so I thought until I came across a package offered by Underground Racing in South Carolina. Underground's Ferrari F430 conversion straps two turbos, a snake’s basket of mandrel-bent piping and a gleaming stainless steel exhaust onto an otherwise stock F430. This endows it with an honest 1000 bhp. Custom software is included of course, as well as some gorgeously fabricated intercoolers. It's a terrific looking install, although I’d personally want a guarantee on gold-edged parchment stating that two red hot turbos living that close to a F430’s gearbox wouldn’t result in molten Italian transmission gear sauce.
So that conversion gives you 1000 bhp then, in a car that weighs a cool one thousand pounds less than the Veyron. Deary me, that is exciting. It's even more exciting when you realize all that twist is put to the ground by the rear wheels only. It’s a car that would make you think about going to confession before every drive; square up with the Big Guy before Andy Green-ing yourself down the asphalt.
More research into extreme horsepower brings up additional 1,000+ conversions. Hennessey Performance will twin-turbo your Dodge Viper to 1,000 bhp, or even 1,200 bhp if you order the special option engine package. It walks the walk too, as evidenced by the Road and Track video below where it beats the Veyron in a run to 200 mph. Now I don’t know about you, but the sequence through the gears doesn’t look terribly comfortable….
Hennessey will also squeeze this much horsepower out of your Ford GT if you don’t want it to feel left out.
Perhaps you’re bored with your Lamborghini Murcielago’s mere 640 bhp? In that case, ping it over to Heffner Performance for a double-turbo makeover. 1,100 bhp will be the result, as well as a 5.1 second 60-130 mph blast.
http://www.heffnersperformance.com/heffner_murcielago.htm
OK, so 1000hp doesn’t just belong to Pro Stock drag cars and the Veyron. It’s accessible with a number of exotics and a very capable wallet. Speed costs money after all, and as Jay Leno has shown with his 30 Liter tank-engined car, just about anything is possible.
There is a quandary here though, one I can’t quite get my head around.
Where exactly does one effectively deploy 1000 bhp in a street car?
Let's try the street first. That’s possible, albeit only really legal in Germany and even there it's best at 5:00 am on a quiet autobahn Sunday. Perhaps another place could be the 2-laners criss-crossing Nevada? Fair enough if not technically legal, but those roads hardly get swept for debris every day and one errant nail into a rear tire at 160 will have you briefly dog-fighting Navy pilots out of Fallon before you unceremoniously spear back to earth. There are probably some places in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait you could do it, although I’d bring an interpreter and a passport from somewhere other than America for starters. Rule out essentially all rural and urban areas, unless massive speeding tickets or burnout contests are your thing and nothing else.
So to review, I came up with three street venues on the planet where you could slap all of your car’s 1000 horses on the ass at once; Germany, the Middle East, and maybe Nevada. Anywhere else and you’ll either have police aircraft chasing you or you’ll kill someone.
Let’s try again. If street venues are scarce, how about a racetrack? Perhaps…if you could find a road-course with a long enough straight like Road Atlanta or Mid-Ohio. Even then you’d be battling wheelspin everywhere else. What about a big oval track? Not unless you know the proprietor and sign a phone book's worth of waivers in your own blood releasing liability. Drag strip? Yes, although you would mimic a AA/Altered smoking the tires all the way through. You could try mounting slicks at the strip, but be sure to include a big diaper to put under your car to catch all the shards of CV joint and axle shaft that would disintegrate upon launch.
That leaves airport runways, which would require some serious connections or money....something honestly not out of bounds for people willing to twin-turbocharge a Murcielago. An airstrip is where an event called the Texas Mile is held, a weenie-stretching contest without parallel in the southland where some really incredible cars punch serious holes in the air twice a year.
All in all, there are precious few places to unleash a 4-digit bhp street car to its full potential. Not that tapping every last ounce of performance is required for ownership, but 1000 bhp does strike me as the automotive equivalent of professional bodybuilding. Extreme power, focused dedication, and desire to be the top dog are all required, but the finished product is best off being glossed-up and displayed instead of put to actual use. Real functionality takes a bit of a backseat.
On the other hand where would the world be if everything had limits? I admire the companies who engineer these crazy conversions, but perhaps my practical Swiss heritage dismisses me from the target market for such extremes. I will continue to admire these vehicles…even if their massive power levels confuse and frighten me.
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