Pretoria - What does it take to go from a standing start to 346.74km/h in just 1000 metres?
It takes 18.35 seconds and a Nissan GT-R35 tweaked to 1200kW and running special suspension to keep it going where it's pointed, that's what.
Ask Gauteng businessman Stelios Sissou, who broke his own standing-kilometre record for street-legal cars, set last year at 337km/h, with an official speed of 346.3km/h at ODI Raceway's annual One Kilometre Invitational on Sunday, competing against more than 100 of the country's fastest road cars.
But there's nothing simple or easy about making a road car accelerate that fast. Most of this year's tweaks to Sissou's highly-modified GT-R35 were aimed at improving its handling, including an upgrade from the standard Bilstein electronically controlled adaptive dampers to the company's modular damping system.
These dampers have individual adjustment for compression and rebound damping like those of a standard road-going superbike, via colour-coded rotary adjusters and, with a little more effort, ride height can be individually adjusted to reset the car's attitude and even out weight distribution.
‘WARP SPEED, MR SISSOU’
And it took almost a whole day of dealing with one mechanical gremlin after another - and finally learning that at this level of performance, launch control doesn't. Control the launch, that is…
“The morning was really character-building,” Sissou said after the final, late-afternoon run. “Something went wrong on every run; with the temperature rising quickly and a bit of a headwind I was worried whether we'd be able to get past 340.
“But that last run was perfect. I went for a very conservative start, and didn't use launch control - but when it all hooked up it was like riding a rocketship!”
So much so that Sissou's GT-R35 was running faster at the 800 metre mark than the next-fastest competitor was at 1000 metres.
“We'll be back next year,” added Sissou with a grin, “not just to win but to break 350!”
BY THE NUMBERS
Vbox datalogger data for the record run:
0-200km/h - 8.37 seconds
0-300km/h - 13.48 seconds
Standing 800 metres: 16.24 seconds at 334.1km/h
Standing 1000 metres: 18.35 seconds at 346.74km/h
Maximum speed: 349.6km/h (achieved beyond the finish line)