We're starting off the week with a mechanical marvel: a homemade dragster with dual Rolls-Royce jet engines that's been 17 years in the making – and could potentially hit 400 mph.
Canadian auto enthusiast – probably an understatement – Ryan McQueen dreamed of getting behind the wheel of something truly awe-inspiring, and his Corvette just wasn't cutting it.
Inspired by the Shockwave trucks that thrilled air show attendees for decades with jet engines propelling them to 375 mph (over 600 km/h), McQueen set out to build his own monster machine to show off. His wife aptly dubbed it the Insanity Jet Car.
That turned out to be a massive undertaking. McQueen said the fiberglass body, which uncannily resembles a Ferrari Enzo with a 130-in (3,302-mm) wheelbase, took him five years to craft from scratch. He acquired a pair of Rolls-Royce Viper jet engines from a friend, and strapped them to the chassis he built by hand.
According to McQueen, the twin afterburning engines deliver 18,000 hp (13,442.5 kW), and 14,000 lb of thrust on the 3,800-lb (1,723.6-kg) car. That'll hit you with 6 gs of force under acceleration. He estimates that it'll manage 400mph (643.7 km/h).
Just don't count on getting too far with this, though. The Insanity burns 400 liters (105.6 gal) of jet fuel in only two and a half minutes.
To be clear, all these figures come from McQueen and we haven't seen them verified by an official source. But from what we know about jet engine-powered vehicles like the Shockwave trucks, they're not altogether implausible.
While McQueen had completed the build some years ago, his plans were stalled by the pandemic. He's since been able to test the vehicle in various conditions. In a video from last July featuring the Insanity Jet Car out at an air show, he claimed it hit 134 mph (215.6 km/h).
The jet-powered dragster will likely need more testing before it hits its target speed. Between safety concerns in handling the car so it doesn't burn up, finding tires that can handle that sort of blistering speed, and handling all those g-forces in the driver's seat, it'll need more than just slamming the accelerator.
That's quite a feat of engineering for someone who mostly learned to build the Insanity car through guidance from YouTube. Find more pictures of the build over the years on the project's Instagram and Facebook pages.
Source: Insanity Jet Car via TechEBlog
