FINALLY, IN MAY 2003 WE BROKE THROUGH THE 300KM/H BARRIER Fastest!

TOP-SPEED TESTS WEREN’T exactly a rarity for Wheels back in the ’90s and ’00s. In February 1994, we’d brought together a field of 16 cars and extracted 275km/h from the quickest – a 911 Turbo at the Lang Lang proving ground. We were at it again in May 2001, when the field grew to 17 cars, and we nudged that top speed 10km/h higher to 285km/h thanks to, well, a 911 Turbo... But it wasn’t until January 2003, with a bumper field of 18 cars, that Wheels finally managed to crack the magic 300km/h barrier, not with just one car, but two. The venue was Victoria’s Avalon airport, and our line-up of cars spanned a price range from $40K to $309K. Garth Tander, who’d won Bathurst in 2000 with Gary Rogers Motorsport, was our pro driver tasked with keeping the right foot planted. Tander had a few hundred metres on an access strip to get the cars up to around 120km/h before hitting the runway proper, giving him around 2.5km to extract maximum speed at the timing mark before some very heavy braking in a zone of around 300 metres. Slowest (and second-cheapest) of our field was the Falcon XR6 Turbo, restrained by its speed limiter to 230km/h. The Commodore SV8, on the other hand, used its 5.7-litre V8 to pull 263km/h; pretty handy from a car that carried a tag of just $40,490. The Holden’s bang-for-yourbuck top-whack sure put some higher priced metal to shame, including the mid-engined Honda NSX, which only managed 245km/h, despite its $256,100 tag. But it wasn’t until we got to the Chrysler Viper RT/10, which pulled 286km/h via its 336kW/664Nm 8.0-litre V10, that we were really at the pointy end of the field. But then came the 996-generation 911 Turbo, which huffed and puffed and blew the rest of the field away. The $309K super coupe from Stuttgart proved to be near-perfectly geared for the task of nailing V-max, pulling 304km/h in sixth gear at 6580rpm, a mere 20 revs shy of the 6600rpm Tander took it to in the lower gears. As for high-speed stability? Well, not exactly rock-solid, according to Tander: “You can feel the front-end going a bit light and the steering getting a touch airy as the rear wing exerts more effect and clamps the tail down. It’s not a big deal, but it is something you’re definitely aware of,” he said afterwards. So while the 911 Turbo was the quickest road car on the day, it couldn’t claim overall honours. That went to Tander’s Nation’s Cup Monaro, with its 500kW, 7.0-litre V8 pulling a piffling 3km/h advantage over the Porsche.