As Fast as The Speedtail Might Be, It’s No Match For the F-35 (DUH!)
With those two entries in its resume, there’s no wonder the Speedtail popped up on Top Gear’s radar. And yeah, we know what you’re thinking, we’re overly excited to see Chris Harris having a go at it, but hold your horses. For now, all we can provide is this short trailer.
Coming back to the Speedtail, you’ve probably read somewhere that it hit a top speed of 250 miles per hour during tests at the Johnny Bohmer Proving Grounds, which is part of Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. What’s more, the Speedtail hit this speed 30 times, so a fluke is well out of discussion, just in case the naysayers are on the prowl. It also proved that it doesn’t need special conditions to reach such speeds, which could, on some level, be a tongue-in-cheek way of taking a stab at Bugatti Chiron’s +300 miles per hour speed record set in September, 2019. But that’s not the point here.
Yes, the supercar versus airplane stunt is not new and it has been done before and all that, but there’s something eerily mesmerizing about having two machines that are basically aliens to each other race, even for a couple of brief moments. While it’s obviously no match for the F-35, the McLaren Speedtail is a speed demon in its own right. Motivated by a 4.0-liter V-8 engine working in tandem with an electric motor, McLaren’s latest marvel generates a combined output of 1,055 horsepower and 848 pound-feet of torque. In turn, it can blast from naught to 186 miles per hour in just 13 seconds, while owning a lot of to its intricate aerodynamics. Oh, and it’s even faster than the famed McLaren F1, which was clocked in at 240.1 miles per hour back in 1998.
But let’s also have a look at the Lockheed Martin F-35. The fighter jet has been in production since 2011, when just nine units were assembled, as opposed to 2018, when Lockheed Martin built no less than 91 F-35s. There are three iterations of the F-35, namely F-35A, F-35B, and F-35C. The F-35B is the only one fitted with vertical propulsion, while the F-35C is tweaked for aircraft carrier use. In either variant,
Three factories handle the war plane’s final assembly works: Forth Worth (Texas, USA), Cameri (Italy), and Nagoya (Japan).
As for the short-lived skirmish between the F-35 and the McLaren Speedtail, well, all we can say is we’re counting down the days until that episode airs. But you already knew that.