3,000-hp Venturi VBB-3 battles wet salt to set electric land speed record

August 30th, 2015

Awake Goy

Wet salt isn’t all that useful in land speed record racing, either. Wet conditions and bad weather shut down Bonneville Speed Week for the second year in a row this summer, and they didn’t much help Venturi and Ohio State in their electric land speed record hopes last week. The team battled through, and while the VBB-3 streamliner didn’t reach the high speeds it’s capable of, it did set a new category world record of 240.320 mph (386.757 km/h).

The last time we caught up with French electric car specialist Venturi Automobiles, it was showing a rather awesome electric dune buggy at last year’s Paris Motor Show. About a year before that, it first revealed the Venturi Buckeye Bullet 3 (VBB-3), a 3,000-hp battery-powered land rocket designed to best Venturi’s own 2010 electric land speed record mark of 307 mph (495 km/h). At that time, it estimated that the VBB-3, developed with Ohio State’s Center for Automotive Research, would be able to hit speeds in the 440-mph (708-km/h) ballpark.

Problem is, the VBB-3 hasn’t gotten the chance to properly stretch its legs. Wet weather at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats in 2013 forced the Venturi/OSU team to reschedule its first record attempt for the following summer. Summer 2014 came, and so did the storms, leaving Venturi to settle for a 212-mph (341-km/h) electric vehicle record in the over 3.5-tonne class (FIA Category A Group VIII Class 8) in place of the absolute record the VBB-3 was engineered for.

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