01
Origins
The Tuatara, launched in 2020 with Jason Castriota styling and a 5.9-litre twin-turbo V8 rated at 1,750 horsepower on E85, was SSC's bid to retake the production speed record it had held in 2007. An October 2020 Nevada run claiming over 316 mph collapsed under video scrutiny within days — a rare public unravelling that the company met by rerunning the attempt under tighter verification: in January 2021 at Kennedy Space Center the Tuatara averaged a documented 282.9 mph, restoring credibility if not the original headline. Subsequent runs pushed higher still. The episode made the Tuatara a case study in the record game's modern rules — GPS logs, independent witnesses, scepticism as standard equipment — with a genuinely extraordinary car underneath the controversy.
SSC Tuatara by J.Smith831 - 003 · J.Smith831 · CC BY-SA 2.0
