Aspark has claimed the title of the fastest electric car in the world with the latest version of its Owl hypercar, racking up a lofty 272mph.
The Aspark Owl SP600 is tagged as an “evolution” of the original four-motor Owl first revealed way back in 2017. Aspark hasn’t yet gone into details about the differences between the two, or the significance of the “600” in the name, but there’s a few details we can spot right away.
For starters, the SP600 has a significantly longer tail, which will aid with straightline stability as it keeps the air attached to the car for longer. The rear adaptive wing also appears to have been deleted, replaced with a small sharkfin in the center of the rear section.
There’s also more aerodynamic aids around the rest of the car, with vertical winglets on the nose, new louvers above the owl-eyes headlights, more bodywork around the side, and discs over the wheels to reduce turbulent air. Bridgestone also created some special rubber for the vehicle based on the road legal Potenza Race tire.
Built by Manifattura Automobili Torino (MAT) in Italy — which also built the original Owl, and the Apollo Intensa Emozione — the Owl SP600 has been undergoing testing over the last few months, and proved capable of routinely hitting 420km/h (261mph).
For the top speed attempt on June 8, the Aspark team headed to the Automotive Testing Papenburg (ATP) facility in Germany to use the 7.6-mile oval course. Nurburgring 24h winner Marc Basseng was the driver enlisted for the high-speed runs, down the 2.5-mile straight — a relatively short space for such an attempt, compared to the 5.5-mile run at nearby Ehra-Lessien.
According to the official press release, the Owl SP600 hit a maximum logged speed of 438.73km/h, or 272.61mph — although the onboard shows the display hitting 438.6km/h (272.5mph), the logger recorded the higher figure. Either way, it’s the fastest recorded by an electric vehicle of this kind — if a little shy of the 342mph EV land speed record of the Buckeye Bullet 3.
There’s a good chance you can sense a “but” at this point… and there’s a few. Although the original Aspark Owl very definitely is a production car — if you have the $3m required to buy one of the 50 produced — the SP600 isn’t, yet.
Additionally, it’s not even a road legal example. The car used for the run has, among other things, no wing mirrors. That’s great for top speed records, as it reduces both cross-sectional area and drag, but not so much for a road car. The side windows appear to be single-piece, riveted Lexan rather than the postbox-opening items on the original Owl.
Finally, and significantly for a land speed record, the run only appears to have taken place in one direction. Records require two runs in two directions no less than an hour apart, which is what also accounts for Bugatti’s 300mph Chiron not being officially classified.
However, the roadgoing, 1,984hp Owl already claims production records for speed (260mph, just ahead of the Rimac Nevera’s 258mph) and acceleration, with a 1.7s 0-60mph time. Last year it also claimed official EV records for fastest flying eighth- and quarter-mile at 192mph and 198mph respectively, at Elvington Airfield in the UK.
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