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An exclusive club for experts
What turns a car into a sports car? Its line? Its features? One could safely say that the determining factor is performance.
High power is not always enough to deliver sport performance. Other qualities are required, such as maximum lightness, a transmission part capable of absorbing and channelling the available power, and a chassis that conjugates both these features to perfection.
Of all the sports cars that we have selected, a few are very familiar. The name Ferrari always conjures up images of a sports car, as do Porsche, Aston Martin and Lamborghini. But sports cars are not always synonymous with Mercedes-Benz, paradigm of class and style, or Lexus, the luxury models division of Toyota. The latter has recently joined the list of the world’s super sports cars with the LFA, an example of state-of-the-art technology and solutions applied to the pleasure of driving.
Limited editions, infinite power
It is interesting to note that the Olympus of sports cars does not just belong to the famous car manufacturers. There are some brands in this market segment dedicated to building the most high-performance sports cars in the world in numbers so limited that can barely be described as production cars. And when we talk about limited editions we are not referring to a few hundred cars, but perhaps half a dozen or, in the best of cases, a dozen cars built per year.
The most striking example of this type of sports cars is the SSC Ultimate Aero. The abbreviation SSC makes reference to the American firm, Shelby Super Cars, managed by Jerod Shelby, who despite the surname is not related to the well-know former driver, Carroll Shelby. It is the fastest limited production car in the world, with 1,300 hp, nearly 20% more than the Bugatti Veyron. It is surprising, for example, that accustomed as we are to using highly evolved gearboxes –which change through cams–, the SSC has a manual 6-speed transmission.
Something similar occurs with the engine, as whilst other companies dedicated to breaking speed records with their designs use engine parts from other vehicles, like the famous Corvette, SSC produces its own engines, in an effort to achieve maximum performance from the initial design stage.
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Published in Cars, Ships and Aviation by Chimo Ortega on 08/09/2010
This article has been read 1235 .
