Funny Car driver Bob Tasca III, with a long family lineage with the famous Ford blue oval brand in the sport of drag racing, bettered his own previous standard for full-bodied electric racecars at last weekend’s Summit Racing Equipment NHRA Nationals in Norwalk, Ohio behind the wheel of the all-electric Mustang Cobra Jet 1400. Tasca, who ironically makes his living behind the wheel of an 11,000 horsepower, supercharged, nitro-burning internal combustion engine that is inarguably the loudest racing machine on planet Earth, has been eschewing his specialized earplugs to pilot the Cobra Jet 1400 in exhibitions over the last year, continually plotting out runs in the 8-second zone.

At the Norwalk event, Tasca powered the one-of-a-kind machine to an 8.26 at 167 mph, bettering the mark of 8.27 not set in its debut last fall. Tasca later returned to the starting line and improved the record by a bunch, to an 8.12 at 171.97 mph.

The Cobra Jet 1400 utilizes inverters coupled to a pair of dual-stack Cascadia Motion motors that spin up to 10,000 RPM. Operating at 800 volts and up to 700 amps, these motors deliver upwards of 350kW output per motor, all of which is managed through a custom control system developed jointly by AEM EV and Ford Performance. The car, initially advised to produce in the neighborhood of 1,400 horsepower equivalency, has according to some sources shown to actually deliver in excess of 1,500. Regardless, it’s enough to propel the heavy production Cobra Jet to laps down the 1/4-mile less than half a second behind its supercharged, internal combustion sibling — and that divide is narrowing as time goes on…the team behind the project already shaving half a second off its elapsed times since early testing.

Despite its impressive performance, which we should add is a scant half a second off the all-time e.t. recored for all-electric cars of any kind, opinions are still rather mixed on the Cobra Jet 1400 and the silent revolution.

“I was in the stands and watched it…was cool to see how fast it ran, and I respect the amount of engineering it took to make it do so, but it was very boring to watch,” one fan commented, another noting, “I hate electric cars with a passion, but the sheer performance can’t be denied. It’s a masterpiece of engineering and technology.”

“Doesn’t sound near as good as a nitrous V8, but hard to outrun,” one fan said.

“This is the future whether we like it or not. Ask steam enthusiasts what happened when the upstart internal combustion engine showed up,” another added.

As the automotive landscape transitions to electric propulsion over the next decade, there are certain to be parts of that felt within our sport — there will be more electric cars, and they will become both quicker and faster, leaving the numbers produced by the Cobra Jet and other current-day cars like it in the dust. Whether we’ll ever see fans line up to fork over their hard-earned money to watch a field of silent vehicles go head-to-head remains to be seen, but they no doubt face an uphill battle in a sport defined by an assault on each and every one of the senses — something an electric vehicle simply cannot match.