By John Farndon Illustrated by Mat Edwards & Jeremy Pyke

MEGAFAST CARS

BY JOHN FARNDON ILLUSTRATED BY MAT EDWARDS & JEREMY PYKE THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK M EGAFAST CARS

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Farndon, John, author. | Edwards, Mat, 1966- illustrator. | Pyke, Jeremy, illustrator. Title: Megafast cars / by John Farndon ; illustrated by Mat Edwards and Jeremy Pyke. Description: Minneapolis : Hungry Tomato, [2016] | Series: Megafast | “Each spread of this high-energy book profiles a different car and delves into records it has broken, races it has won, and other amazing feats related to its speed”—Provided by publisher. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Audience: 8-12. | Audience: 4-6. Identifiers: LCCN 2015031652| ISBN 9781467793636 (lb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781467795814 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781467795821 (eb pdf : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Sports cars—Juvenile literature. | Automobiles, Racing—Juvenile literature. Classification: LCC TL236 .F36 2016 | DDC 629.222—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015031652

Manufactured in the United States of America 1 – VP – 12/31/15

M EGAFAST CARS

by John Farndon Illustrated by Mat Edwards and Jeremy Pyke

CONTENTS

Megafast Cars 6 That Was How Fast?! 8 Bugatti’s Grand Master 10 Bugatti Veyron Viking Thunder 12 Koenigsegg Agera R Fast as a Snake 14 Hennessey F5 Venom Stripped for Speed 16 McLaren F1 The Ultimate in Speed 18 SSC Ultimate Aero Fighting Fast 20 Lamborghini Aventador Formula for Speed 22 Formula One Racing Jet-Propelled 24 Jet-Powered Cars The Wheel Thing 26 Speed Demon, Bluebird CN7, and Buckeye Bullet Flaming Takeoff 28 Top Fuel Drag Racing and Funny Cars Want to Know More? 30 Index and Glossary 32 MEGAFAST CARS

In this book, we feature a selection of the world’s fastest cars. And they are fast—really, really fast. It’s not just their frighteningly high top speeds, but also their astonishing acceleration. When a Lamborghini Aventador takes off at full throttle, the air crackles with a mighty roar and the driver is ﬂ ung back in the seat with breathtaking force as the car gains speed in seconds. In the time it takes you to read this sentence, it will be over a quarter of a mile away! And now it’s half a mile away...

Sensational Schumacher Some say the greatest racing driver of all time was the Argentinian Juan Fangio, who raced in the 1950s when Grand Prix racing was brutally dangerous. Others say it was the Brazilian Ayrton Senna, who won 41 races before being tragically killed at the Imola racetrack in 1994, at the age of just 34. But many think it is the German Michael Schumacher, who scored 91 wins between 1991 and 2012.

Road Speeds On motorways in the UK and many highways in the USA, cars are allowed to travel at no more than 70 mph. For most people that’s quite fast enough! But all the cars featured in this book can go way faster than that. That means they can only reach their top speeds on private roads and racetracks. If a Hennessey Venom could keep up its top speed of 270 mph all the way, it could drive from New York to Los Angeles in less than ten hours! 7 THAT WAS HOW FAST?!

It is easy to see when a plane or a motorcycle, a car or a truck is megafast. But how do you know just how fast it is? Speed is the distance that something moves in a certain time. It is the distance covered divided by the time. If a jet plane travels 2,000 miles in two hours, it travels 1,000 miles in each hour. So we say its speed is 1,000 miles per hour, or mph. The top speeds for the machines in this book are given in mph.

Speed Matters Speeds for vehicles on the ground are typically given in mph (miles per hour) or km/h (kilometers per hour). Rockets may shoot away from Earth at over 11 km per second. If a plane fl ies faster than sound, its speed may be compared to the speed of sound in similar conditions. This speed is called a Mach number. So a plane fl ying at the speed of sound (typically over 700 mph) is said to be fl ying at Mach 1.

8 Getting Quicker One way of seeing how fast something moves is to measure how quickly it gains speed—that is, its acceleration. You can actually measure how much something accelerates every second. But with fast vehicles, the acceleration is usually given by how long it takes to reach a particular speed, typically from a standing start, 0 mph. The shorter the time, the faster the acceleration. So acceleration ﬁ gures for a superbike that takes just 2.9 seconds to get from a standstill to 60 mph would be 0–60 in 2.9 seconds. That’s megafast!

Against the Clock The most accurate way of measuring top speed is to measure how long a vehicle takes to cover an exact distance, such as a mile. That’s how the ofﬁ cial top speeds in this book were measured. To ensure split- second accuracy, the clock is triggered to start and stop when the vehicle cuts through a beam of light. Speed Dial Speed against the clock is average speed. Police speed guns and speedometers in cars, trucks, and motorcycles register the speed at any one instant. Speed guns ﬁ re a radar beam and detect the way it bounces off a moving vehicle. With speedometers, an electronic sensor counts the number of times small magnets on the wheel sweep past it each second and converts that into a speed in mph to display on the dashboard or LCD screen inside the car. 9

FLAMING TAKEOFF

Top Fuel drag racing is all about blistering acceleration. Using nitromethane-fu eled engines, cars are powered to incredible speeds of 330 mph from a standing start in the blink of an eye. They cover the measured 1,000 feet of track in just 3.7 seconds! Nitromethane, which is used to fu el rockets, burns slower than gasoline, so the exhausts shoot out ﬂ ames of burning fu el, adding to the drama.

Don’t Move! The most famous Top Fuel dragster is Tony Schumacher’s US Army, painted in the colors of the US Army. It is the fastest-accelerating machine on land, accelerating ﬁ ve times as fast as gravity. Its 8,000-hp engine can rip it up to over 330 mph in just 1,000 feet. Funny Cars If you want to see ordinary cars transform into monstrously speedy dragsters, then look for Funny Car events. Funny cars have hugely tilted carbon-ﬁ ber bodies that look like ordinary cars. But they are mounted on specially built chassis and equipped with megapowerful engines. The most successful funny car driver is John Force, who now drives cars that look like Chevrolets.

Top Speed 50 100 200 28

Power 8,000 bhp

0 –330 mph 3.736 seconds

Top Speed 330.23 mph

Engine Bore and stroke: 4.187 x 4.500

Torque Unknown

Price $10,199

300 400 500 330.23 mph 29 Want to Know More?

Bugatti Veyron This car uses special Michelin PAX tires that are twice as wide as the tires on a normal car. If one ever gets punctured, it can be run ﬂ at until you get to a garage to get it repaired. But if you ever need a new set, you have to order it from Michelin in France at a cost of well over $40,000.

Koenigsegg Agera

With the One:1 version of the famous Agera, Koenigsegg’s aim was to create a track racing car that could also be used on the street. With one horsepower for every kilogram of weight, the One:1 had a blistering pace that could reach 273 mph. But only six were ever built. Two sold in Britain and four in China.

Lamborghini When the German car tuners Mansory got their hands on a Lamborghini Aventador, they created the Carbonado. They replaced all the body panels with ultralight carbon ﬁ ber and added twin turbochargers to boost power to 1,600 hp. Not everyone likes the result, but it is superfast, with a top speed of 230 mph.

30 Bonneville Salt Flats The most famous place in the world for land speed record attempts is Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, USA. The Flats are a natural ﬂ atland formed by salty water evaporating to leave just a vast, smooth crust of salt. It was here that George Easton and John Cobb vied for the world land speed record in the 1930s, and Craig Breedlove claimed his world records in the 1960s in Spirit of America.

Formula One The cars in Formula One are designed to tight regulations that are continually changing. In the 2015 season, for example, regulators were worried about race teams going too far in stripping off weight for extra speed. So they insisted that every car must weigh more than 1,548 lb (702 kg) without fuel. They also regulated against more extreme nose designs intended to improve stability.

High-Speed Dragster The US Army Top Fuel dragster accelerates faster than any other car on the planet, covering 1,000 feet in just 3.736 seconds. That means the G-forces when it takes off from the start are huge. The driver feels a force of 5G—that is, ﬁ ve times the force of gravity. And when he throws out the parachutes to slow down, he experiences a force of 5G the other way. Tough ride!

31 INDEX GLOSSARY acceleration, 9 land speed record, 24, 25, Aerodynamic Shaped so 26, 31 that air fl ows smoothly Bonneville Salt Flats, 27, 31 Le Mans 24-hour race, 17 around Breedlove, Craig, 25, 26, 31 Bugatti 57SC Atlantic, 11 McLaren badge, 17 Acceleration How quickly something gets faster Bugatti Veyron, 10, 14, 18, 30 McLaren F1, 16–17 Brake horsepower (bhp) F-117 Nighthawk, 20 racing drivers, 7, 25, 28 The power direct from the fl ags, 23 road speeds, 7 engine; 1 horsepower can Formula One cars, 22–23, 31 move 550 pounds one foot Funny Cars, 28 speed, 7, 8–9 every second, written as Speed Demon, 27 550 ft-lb per second Hennessey F5 Venom, 14–15 speed guns, 9 Hennessey Venom GT, 7, 14 speed of sound, 8 Carbon fi ber Special tough, light material made speedometers, 9 by reinforcing plastic with jet-propelled cars, 24–25 Spirit of America, 25, 31 fi bers of carbon SSC Ultimate Aero, 18–19 Koenigsegg Agera R, 12–13, Thrust The pushing force 30 Thrust SSC, 24 of a jet Koenigsegg One:1, 13, 30 Top Fuel drag racing, 28–29, 31 Torque The force with Lamborghini Aventador, 6, 20, which something turns, 20–21, 30 US Army (car), 28, 31 measured in pounds per feet (lb-ft) Lamborghini Carbonado, 30 Turbocharger A device to boost an engine’s power by using the exhaust gases to turn a turbine that rams extra fuel and air into the cylinders

The Author John Farndon is Royal Literary Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK. He has written a huge number of books for adults and children on science, technology, and nature, and has been shortlisted four times for the Royal Society’s Young People’s Book Prize. The Illustrators UK artist Mat Edwards has been drawing for as long as he can remember. He began his career with a four-year apprenticeship as a repro artist in the ceramic industry and has been a freelance illustrator since 1992. Jeremy Pyke left the RAF to follow his passion for illustration. He has worked on many children’s books and uses oil, watercolor, computer-generated illustration, and 3-D animation.

Picture Credits (abbreviations: t = top; b = bottom; c = center; l = left; r = right) © www.shutterstock.com: 7 br, 8 tc, 8 br, 9 cr, 9 bl 7 tl , 7 tr David Acosta Allely/www.Shutterstock.com. 9 tr i4lcocl2/www.Shutterstock.com. 30 tl Max Earey/www.Shutterstock.com. 30 cr Zavatskiy Aleksandr/www.Shutterstock.com. 30 bl Fingerhut/www.Shutterstock.com. 31 tl John Blanton/www.Shutterstock.com. 31 cr cjmac/www.Shutterstock.com. 31 bl Action Sports Photography/www.Shutterstock.com THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK FARNDON/EDWARDS/PYKE

MEGAFAST CARS

Jump behind the wheels of the sleekest, swiftest automobiles, both on and off the race track. Prepare to burn up the tarmac in the . . . • Bugatti Veyron—the latest version of the ﬁ rst supercar reaches 269 mph (433 km/h) • SSC Ultimate Aero—whose carbon-ﬁ ber body weighs less than its driver • Jet-powered Thrust SSC—which carries the world land speed record of 760.343 mph (1,223.65 km/h)

. . . and more. These streamlined supercars blast off the page in true-to-life illustrations alongside facts about top design technology, such as wind- tunnel testing and scissor doors.

Read all the books in the Megafast series: Megafast Cars Megafast Motorcycles Megafast Planes Megafast Trucks

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