The First American Car To Break 200 MPH

Regardless of where we are in the world, we always seem to try to find a way to go as fast as possible. Across generations, lots of different automakers have tried making Sports Cars, Supercars and even Muscle Cars that can break through top speed barriers. One of the big numbers that everyone tried to reach for many years was 200 mph.

While it took until the ’80s for a road-legal production car to cross that threshold, there were race cars that were routinely going faster than that decades before. One of those machines is perhaps one of the most iconic Dodge stock cars ever made.

America Felt The Need For Speed Just As Much As Europe Did

Outright speed is something that we associate more with the European supercar manufacturers than anything stateside. But, the need for speed was just as strong over in the good ol’ US of A as it was on the other side of the Atlantic. The super speedways of American stock car racing were a prime proving ground for automakers to try and make the fastest race cars possible. This resulted in the creation of some absolutely crazy big-block performance monsters. One of those speed demons is the car we’re about to talk about.

The 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona Was A Special Muscle Car With A Crazy Design

The 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona has to be one of the most striking American muscle cars ever made. It looks fast just standing still. Thankfully, it can also back that up. This machine came with two big block engine options, the 440 Magnum and the 426 Hemi.

The Hemi was the more powerful of the two, producing 425 horsepower and 490 lb-ft of torque. That was genuinely incredible for a street-legal car in the late ’60s, and made it one of the fastest things you could find on America’s roads. The less-powerful Magnum-engined Charger Daytonas were no slouches either, with 375 horsepower and 480 lb-ft of torque.

A Daytona was based on the 1969 Dodge Charger R/T, which is why it featured these legendary engines in street-going versions. It also got the Charger R/T’s brakes and its heavy-duty suspension setup. That set the Charger Daytona up well to be a serious performance monster.

It Was A Homologation Special Designed For Nascar – The Race Version Was The One That Broke 200 MPH

The Charger Daytona’s crazy looks weren’t just for show. It was part of an attempt to make a car for NASCAR that was more aerodynamically efficient. That huge rear wing helped to create more downforce, while that more rounded-off nose cone with pop-up headlights was meant to reduce drag, as was the flush-mounted rear window. While these modifications were great and did work, they wouldn’t be legal unless Dodge made a production version of it. So, they went ahead and built a limited batch of street-legal cars.

It was the racing version of the Daytona that finally broke the 200 mph barrier. On March 24, 1970, at Talladega Speedway, Buddy Baker managed to hit a top speed of 200.447 mph. While that’s only a hair more than 200 mph, it still counts as the first car in history to cross that line on a closed course track.

It Had A Corporate Cousin – The Plymouth Road Runner Superbird

You might think that the 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona is one-of-a-kind in the world of crazy, homologation special muscle cars. But, it had a twin sold under another Mopar brand. That was the Plymouth Superbird. It used a similar design and engineering philosophy as the Dodge Charger Daytona; make a big-block stock car as aerodynamic as possible to dominate superspeedways.

As a result, it looks a lot like the Charger Daytona. It also has the same 426 Hemi and 440 engine sizes. The only difference in the engine line-up is that the Plymouth Road Runner Superbird has two iterations of the 440, including the legendary Six-Barrel variant.

Both Cars Were So Good That NASCAR Effectively Banned Them

As you might have expected, both the Dodge Charger Daytona and the Plymouth Superbird were incredible stock cars. The Daytona won 2 races in 1969 and 4 in 1970, giving it 6 race wins overall. The Plymouth Superbird was incredibly dominant, winning 18 out of the 40 races in NASCAR’s top championship in 1970.

These super-engineered race cars ended up being so good that NASCAR introduced rules to make “aero-cars” less dominant. They either had to have engines that were no larger than 305 cubic inches in size, or they had to carry additional weight to give them parity with their not-so aerodynamic competitors. Mopar decided it wasn’t worth running the Daytona and thenSuperbird after this change was introduced, and they both disappeared after the 1970 season.

Modern American Cars That Can Go Faster Than 200 MPH

200+ mph American tyrants aren’t limited to the golden age of muscle cars. In fact, with the emergence of more modern technology, there have now been plenty of US-built performance monsters that can pass that mark. A couple of these cars are among the fastest and most powerful production cars ever made.

Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Redeye

The Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Redeye is a legendary model among Mopar enthusiasts, and muscle car nuts in general. That’s for very good reason. It has the high-output version of the 6.2-liter supercharged Hellcat V8, producing 797 horsepower in regular Redeyes and 807 horsepower in the limited-run Jailbreak variants. This amount of power is good enough to take it up to a top speed of 203 mph. That makes it the fastest Challenger model by top speed. The SRT Demon and SRT Demon 170 are limited by their drag-specific tires, so they can’t quite match it on the top end.

Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 (C8)

The C8 ZR1 is one of the most powerful Corvettes ever made. It generates over a thousand horsepower from its twin-turbocharged flat-plane V8. This engine is a turbocharged variant of the C8 Z06’s unit, and it has all the same brilliant character as its naturally-aspirated starting point. The ZR1’s massive power also took one example up to 233 mph, making it the fastest production Corvette ever made.

It’s yet to be seen whether the hybrid-boosted ZR1X variant will be able to top that. But, with even more power than the ZR1 in the same kind of package, it’s likely that it can.

Hennessey Venom F5

The name Hennessey is symbolic with the extremes of American performance. It’s not surprising, then, that it makes one of the fastest and most powerful cars in the world. The Venom F5 is an absolute monster of a hypercar, generating as much as 2,031 horsepower if you go for the Evolution version. Even the regular version is still a beast, producing 1,542 horsepower if you run it on regular gasoline and 1.817 horsepower on E85.

The Venom F5 is intended to be able to reach speeds of over 300 mph. While it hasn’t got there yet, it has got close. The regular Venom F5 has managed a top speed run of 271.6 mph. That still makes it one of the fastest production cars ever made, and it’s an incredibly impressive feat for a small all-American brand.

SSC Tuatara

SSC is another name that’s synonymous with building absolutely crazy all-American performance cars. The Tuatara is the brand’s latest hypercar, and like Hennessey’s Venom F5, it’s an absolute monster. The regular version of the SSC Tuatara has up to 1,750 horsepower on E85, while the track-only Tuatara Aggressor has a claimed 2,200 horsepower. These power levels helped make it the fastest production car in the world, maxing out at 282.9 mph during a run at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Sources: Chevrolet, Dodge, Hennessey, Plymouth, SSC North America, YouTube (@HennesseyPerformanceF5)