Since its debut in 2021, the Croatian electric supercar Rimac Nevera has set more than two dozen different records, but the record for maximum driving speed backwards among them is perhaps the most unusual and most senseless.
The Rimac Nevera is not the most powerful production supercar in the world (the Lotus Evija is more powerful), but it is the most effective: it already holds the record for maximum speed among production electric vehicles (412 km/h), the best lap time on the Nürburgring Nordschleife in the class of production electric vehicles ( 7 min 5.298 sec) and the best time on the Goodwood hill climb section among production electric vehicles (49.32 sec).
This spring, Rimac Nevera at the ATP (Automotive Testing Papenburg) test site in the German city of Papenburg (Lower Saxony) set 23 acceleration and braking records at once, surpassing its own passport figures, and recently representatives of the Guinness Book of Records and engineers gathered here in Papenburg company Dewesoft (produces electronic measuring equipment) to record a rather curious record – maximum speed when moving in reverse.
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In a conventional internal combustion engine car, the speed of reversing is usually limited by the rear gear ratio, but electric cars and hybrids, which use an electric motor for reversing, are usually equipped with an electronic speed limiter to prevent the driver from causing mischief when backing up. The Rimac Nevera, in theory, can go backwards as fast as forwards, but its natural limit when moving in reverse is the aerodynamics and balance of the chassis, designed for moving forward.
Let us remind you that the maximum total output of the Rimac Nevera four-engine power plant is 1914 hp. and 2360 Nm, single-stage gearboxes are installed on each axle, allowing you to achieve maximum speed when moving in both directions. Even at the design stage of Nevera, Rimac engineers carried out calculations and realized that an experienced pilot could relatively safely set a record for maximum speed while driving in reverse with this supercar, and this crazy idea was realized. Test driver Goran Drndak, after a series of training sessions, was able to accelerate the car in reverse mode to 275.74 km/h.
The previous similar record was set in 2001 by British racer Darren Manning driving a Caterham 7 Fireblade with a Honda motorcycle engine and a motorcycle gearbox, which initially had no there was no reverse gear, but when applied to the car it was modified in such a way that all gears could be used for reversing. Darren Manning dared to push the light Caterham up to 165 km/h when moving backwards, although in theory he could push it to 200 km/h.
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