This outlandish looking contraption is known as the "Veyron killer" -- and seemingly with good reason.
Say hello to the 9ff GT9, a Porsche-derived tarmac missile that recently sped to a velocity of 409km/h at a test track in Papenburg, Germany. If the claim is accurate, it eclipses the Veyron's 407km/h benchmark (formerly the record for street-legal production cars), and falls just short of the 412km/h record-breaking run of the American-built SSC Aero (more here).
Although spawned from the Porsche 911 GT3, the 9ff GT9 allegedly shares only two per cent of its components with the former. Its appearance is also well removed, thanks to a heavily chopped roofline and a stretched (by about 300mm) chassis in the quest for better aerodynamics and stability.
It might lack comfort features and safety gear such as airbags, but the GT9's sole reason for being is to devour distances.
It's built around a carbon-kevlar subframe and its elongated rump houses a heavily tweaked 4.0-litre twin-turbo flat-six engine that ekes out a bewildering 737kW and 963Nm.
To put things in perspective, these are roughly double the outputs of the Porsche 911 Turbo, which is hardly what you'd call a slouch.
Factor in that the GT9 weighs less than the 911 Turbo and you have the recipe for a car with continent-crushing pace. In tests it has rocketed to 300km/h in just 17.6sec, 0.6sec quicker than the horizon-warping Veyron.
Its engine is constructed using everything from aluminium to zirconium, and it even has a 24-carat-gold air intake (gold happened to have the precise thermal qualities required to keep the incoming air cool, says its maker).
The GT9's creator is Jan Fatthauer, a former RUF employee who felt the latter's offerings were a tad tame. Thus in 2001 he set up his own tuning firm, 9ff, which is named after his wife, Frauke Fatthauer.
The GT9 is truly a low-volume special as, so far, 9ff has built three examples and has 17 more on order. The price? The trifling sum of $720,000… Still cheap compared with the $2.0m-plus Veyron!
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