BAKERSFIELD, CALIFORNIA - The battery-powered Rimac Nevera has broken its own ‘unofficial’ quarter-mile acceleration record for production cars.
With Brooks Weiselblat from Dragtimes at the wheel, the Rimac Nevera achieved a quarter-mile time of 8.582 seconds, with an exit speed of 269.5km/h, at the Famoso Raceway in California. The car was fitted with standard Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tyres and the air temperature was 37 degrees celsius.
This narrowly beats the Nevera’s previous quarter-mile record of 8.62 seconds, which was achieved at an unprepared air strip in Rimac’s home country of Croatia earlier this year.
However, you can expect more from this battery powered Rimac, which has four electric motors producing a collective 1427kW, as the hypercar maker says that there is still “lots” of performance to be unlocked through future over-the-air software updates.
“This was our first test on a VHT (glued) surface, so we did not know what to expect. At first we were hitting less than expected quarter-mile times (8.7 and 8.8 seconds) than we did on a normal, non-prepped surface in Europe,” said test and development driver Miroslav Zrnčević. “The track temperature was 65°C and we had to do some adjustments. Our traction control learns the surface on each run and adjusts the torques on the wheels. After some adjustments and different tire warm-up strategies we managed to get better results.
“Still, we are confident that the Nevera has much more to give and that we can go even quicker with more experience and testing on this kind of surface. We will be back,” Zrnčević concluded.
Rimac hit the headlines in July this year after the hypercar specialist became Bugatti’s majority shareholder, and that most certainly means that the latter - which has built its hypercar reputation on a mammoth 16-cylinder engine - will have an electric future.
“Rimac and Bugatti are a perfect match in terms of what we each bring to the table. As a young, agile and fast-paced automotive and technology company, we have established ourselves as an industry pioneer in electric technologies,” Rimac founder and CEO Mate Rimac said at the time of the acquisition.