The coolest cars that can do 200mph | Axon’s Automotive Anorak

Away from the UK’s highways and speed restrictions, I will also confess to exceeding 150mph for hour-after-hour on an empty autobahn in Northern Germany (where it’s legal) en route to Sweden on one of my regular business trips to Trollhattan, usually in a lively Saab 9-3 Viggen or 9000 Aero. Also great cars, but unlike the Stratos, they always felt fully planted and safe at any speed, inspiring me to push on.

Just a few days before taking over for her record short-lived and fatefully pernicious stint as the UK’s Prime Minister, apropos of nothing in particular, Liz Truss curiously mentioned abolishing the UK’s antiquated 70mph speed limit and making our roads unrestricted, for reasons unknown and never really explained. She soon had much bigger issues to deal with as she moved into Number Ten, before rightfully stepping down just 49 days later. We never did get to learn anything more of her wild “abolish British speed limits” thinking.

In the highly improbable possibility that she would have got that idea through Parliament, the thought of flimsy supercars or elephantine SUVs bearing down on tiny city runabouts at breakneck speeds – potentially up to 200mph – in the outside lane of the M1 doesn’t bear thinking about. Especially in this age of low emissions and high fuel costs and safety issues.

Being able to travel at speeds quite so high as 200mph, though, was something of an impossibility even as recently as 36 years ago, because at that time no road-legal car could yet reach or exceed such a landmark velocity.

There were various overly-ambitious claims over the years: a specially-prepared 1969 Hemi V8 Dodge Charger Daytona (which achieved a timed 200.447mph in 1970, driven by Buddy Baker), or the Aston Martin Bulldog concept car from 1980 (which has yet to pass the magical 200mph barrier, despite various attempts). The Lamborghini Countach came close in 1974, reaching a top speed of 196mph, but until 1987 no actual ‘real’ road-going production vehicle had been able to exceed 200mph.

That all changed when Ferrari proudly claimed that its new F40 ‘hypercar’ was the first production road car capable of exceeding 200mph (321.87 km/h). Over the subsequent 35 years, a surprising plethora of roads cars have since blasted through this magical speed barrier to join the now not-so-exclusive 200mph club. 

There have also been several high-profile names to fall tantalisingly short. The likes of the Mercedes-Benz SLS (197mph), Ferrari F430 Scuderia (198mph), Audi R8 V10 (196mph) and Mercedes-Benz SL65 Black (199mph), with many of the latter’s contemporary German performance rivals electronically limited to a maximum speed of 155mph.

The first ever machine to exceed 200mph was way back in 1926, when Land Speed Record ace Henry Segrave took the mighty 22.4-litre V12 Sunbeam 1000 HP (a.k.a. The Slug) to a phenomenal record speed of 203.79mph on Daytona Beach – a popular Land Speed Record attempt location in its day. It now seems amazing that it took a further 61 years for a production car to reach this sort of permanence level.

Since the Ferrari F40’s speed-breaking debut 35 years ago though, the 200mph Club has expanded rapidly to include these highlights:

(*claimed by manufacturer)

Although the above is not a definitive list of passenger cars that can achieve 200mph or more, it gives a fairly strong flavour of how performance has grown over the past 35 years.

While we may still have to take the ‘top of the tree’ Devel Sixteen’s 347mph claims with a pinch of salt, until proven. The table above illustrates the potential of just how fast passenger cars have become in an age when, ironically, speed restriction devices and limits have become ever more vigorous and anti-social worldwide.