At a point in time where doorslammers are achieving speeds that frequently call into question the safety element, it’s great to see drivers and teams are still willing to risk it all in an effort to rewrite history and entertain all of us watching it unfold. Perhaps even moreso than the elapsed time record, it seems that teams around the world are more motivated to chase the outright speed record, as evidenced by a host of competitors that have taken cracks at it over the last couple of seasons.
Well, the all-time time mile per hour record has a new standard bearer (at least for now), as EKanoo Racing driver Khalid Mohammed drove Ebrahim Kanoo’s wicked twin turbocharged Lexus RCF Pro Modified machine to the fastest 1/4-mile speed in history by a suspended, full-bodied door car with a blistering 277.99 mph blast at the Bahrain International Circuit. Mohammed paired that otherworldly terminal speed with a 5.508-second elapsed time, putting he and the EKanoo team, already the third quickest Pro Modified team in history, just a little bit closer to the 5.40s. And, if you watch how deep Mohammed put the Lexus into the beams, we’d say the sub-.50 run was there for the taking.
Nevertheless, Mohammed has now been faster than any man or woman in history in a passenger car in the 1/4-mile, and the EKanoo team says they aren’t finished yet — Ebrahim himself sharing that the ultimate goal is to make the Lexus RCF, built entirely in-house in Bahrain, the quickest and fastest doorslammer on earth.
Mohammed accomplished the feat with just a set of 94 mm turbochargers, while tipping the scales at 2,550 pounds. Mohammed went .987 to 60-feet, 3.740 at 216.93 mph to the 1/8-mile, and 4.700 to 1,000-feet. The backhalf speed gain was an impressive 61.06 mph.
Will we see 280 this year? We’d put our money on it, but it certainly isn’t as easy as it might seem to cross that threshold.
Photos courtesy of EKanoo Racing