TOP 10 FASTEST ROAD-LEGAL CARS

Back in the late 1800s, during the dawn of the motorised carriage, the fastest cars in the world - such as Karl Benz's Patent Motorwagen - could achieve a heady 10mph.

On a good day. With a lightweight driver and a favourable wind. Today, nearly 140 years of development has pushed the very fastest cars past the 300mph mark.

The Benz’s brave driver could cover just 4.4 metres per second; while in 2019, with Andy Wallace behind the wheel, the Bugatti Chiron covered 136 metres per second.

It’s a fearsome prospect, and there are only a handful of places on Earth where cars of this calibre can reach their V-max, yet there’s no shortage of car manufacturers vying for top honours.

These include Bugatti, SSC, Hennessey, Koenigsegg and Zenvo, all of which hail from different countries around the world and are looking to become the successors to the current record holder. As a result, many of these cars are also the world's fastest-accelerating cars. 

With that in mind, here are the fastest production road cars by the numbers, judged against manufacturer figures when they were tested on an airfield or a dedicated test track.

The fastest cars in the world

The undisputed top speed champion is once again a Bugatti.

Limited to 30 customer cars, like the Veyron Super Sport, this purpose-built speed machine was taken to 304.773mph by British racing veteran Andy Wallace at the Volkswagen Group’s Ehra-Lessien test track.

Appropriately nicknamed Thor (because it brings the thunder), the Chiron Super Sport’s quad-turbocharged W16 engine produced 1578bhp in record-setting guise. It was given a new gearbox with longer ratios and front and rear bumpers optimised for high-speed runs.

Mired in controversy from the outset, the SSC Tuatara’s initial claim of an ‘official’ 331mph top speed run was quickly debunked following accusations of misleading video ‘evidence’ and some belated admissions that there may have been ‘accuracy’ issues with the data logging kit.

However, with its twin-turbocharged 5.9-litre V8 developing 1750bhp when running on E85 bioethanol fluid, the Tuatara is clearly no slouch, as owner Larry Caplin proved when he logged a verified 295mph at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in early 2022.

This quad-turbocharged V12 hypercar also packs three electric motors, giving it a combined output of 1850bhp.

That's enough for it to arrive at 62mph from a standstill in a claimed 2.3sec – 0.1sec quicker than the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport – and it will go on to hit 280mph, according to Zenvo.

Perhaps more impressive is the acceleration of the shorter-geared Aurora Agil model, which dispatches a 0-186mph sprint in roughly 10sec.

When it used a customer's Agera RS to earn the outright world record top speed in 2017, Koenigsegg also took the record for the highest speed ever recorded on a public road.

Mercedes had held that particular crown since 1938, when a highly modified W125 grand prix car managed 268mph on a closed stretch of autobahn.

As an indication of 80 years of progress, the Agera RS was entirely standard, with Koenigsegg's optional 1MW engine package producing a colossal 1360bhp.

Unlike its Lotus Exige-based predecessor, the Hennessey Venom F5 is a bespoke build from the ground up - a first for the American firm.

Featuring a carbonfibre tub and a twin-turbocharged 6.6-litre V8 that packs a monstrous 1817bhp and gearbox-shredding 1193lb ft, the F5 sprints from 0-250mph in just 15.5sec – half the time of the Bugatti Chiron.

Hennessey also promises a top speed of 341mph, although 271.6mph is as fast as the car has gone so far.

It was the Venom GT (which also used the Lotus Exige as its foundation) that would go on to steal the record from Bugatti – although not without controversy.

In February 2014, on the 3.2-mile space shuttle landing runway at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, it recorded a one-way speed of 270.49mph.

However, Nasa wouldn’t let Hennessey attempt a run in the opposite direction, so it didn’t qualify for an official Guinness World Record.

Unhappy about losing the record – and at the hands of American upstart SSC – Bugatti gave the Veyron a substantial overhaul in a bid to reclaim the top-speed title.

The Veyron Super Sport was limited to just 30 cars, each one boosted to 1184bhp and featuring an aerodynamic overhaul to cope with the forces generated beyond 250mph.

In July 2010, Bugatti test driver Pierre-Henri Raphanel lapped the Ehra-Lessien oval at 267.856mph.

It seems as if a new hyper-EV is launched every week, but few can lay claim to bragging rights like Japan's Aspark Owl can.

Like the Rimac Nevera, it claims a clutch of records: at 258mph, it's the fastest electric car money can buy, and it recorded a 192mph average speed over an eighth of a mile and 198.12mph in the quarter mile.

Aspark says the Owl is fitted with a “unique” battery pack and claims a 280-mile range – although its 64kWh lithium ion pack is smaller than those fitted by Rimac and Lotus.

If ever there was a car that put to bed the myth that electric cars were slow, it was the Rimac Nevera.

The Croatian hypercar has clocked 258mph, making it the joint-fastest electric car in the world. It’s also the world’s fastest-accelerating production car over the quarter mile (8.582sec), it can accelerate from 0-62mph in 1.95sec and it can do 0-100mph in 4.3sec.

If there’s a caveat, it’s that customer cars are limited to ‘just’ 219mph, but Rimac can override this to achieve V-max at official Rimac events.

SSC, then known as Shelby Supercars, produced the Ultimate Aero for seven years – not an especially long lifespan but long enough to overtake Bugatti in the top speed stakes.

In September 2007, the 1183bhp, twin-turbocharged V8 hypercar used a temporarily closed two-lane stretch of public road near the company’s Washington headquarters to set an average top speed of just over 256mph.