John Hennessey vs Wolfgang Dürheimer: TG chats to the 300mph masterminds

Hitting 300mph in a road car. What are the challenges? Is it even achievable? The current fastest speed in a road car is 270.49mph. It’s held by a Hennessey Venom GT, only 2.63mph above the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, and achieved in only one direction. Clearly, at these speeds, adding another 1mph is difficult, so how likely is it that their next-generation cars – the Chiron and Hennessey’s F5 project – will be able to add another 30mph to that?

Words: Ollie Marriage

Indeed, is 300mph even on their radar, or is it a step too far? At 300mph (482.8kph) 100 metres would take 0.746secs. If it happened in a stadium, you could barely turn your head fast enough to keep up. Over to Wolfgang Dürheimer (outgoing Bugatti CEO) and John Hennessey (founder of Hennessey) to tell us more…

So, Wolfgang, what would you say are the main challenges of going very fast in road cars?

Well, when you are out to break new ground in an area where nobody was so far, you cannot 100 per cent predict the problems you will face. But it starts with the tyres, because at that speed you have a stress load on the tyres, especially on the surface, that is immense. Once again, we are working with Michelin – I think we are their most challenging tyre-development partner – but in the whole of Europe, we did not find a test bench to cope in terms of durability and high-speed capability.

We actually found a bench in the US that is used for aircraft tyres, and it’s been used to extremes to make sure the tyres are stable enough.