I'll tell you what: With electric vehicles entering the motorsports scenes, things are about to get interesting in the upcoming years. People may tend to underestimate these EVs on the track, but veteran Funny Car driver Bob Tasca III gave everyone a taste of what these machines are capable of back in late June.
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One look at the Mustang Cobra Jet 1400 car, and you would have no clue that it's actually all-electric. It looks mean, aggressive, and fast. During the NHRA Nationals at Summit Motorsports Park in Norwalk, Ohio, Bob drove that Mustang and shattered the world record for a full-bodied electric vehicle in the quarter mile. He ran a time of 8.128 seconds at 171.97 MPH.
It's certainly odd to watch this race car fly down the strip without making a single sound, but it absolutely moves out on the green light. Basically, all you can hear are the tires hooking up on the track. In fact, it hooked up so good that it actually lifted the front end for the first portion of the quarter mile. Once it finally crossed the line at the end, the crew mates had an incredible celebration at the starting line after reading the world record time off the board.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-RSbimDNA8
Ford Performance collaborated with Cascadia Motion and Watson Engineering to build the Mustang Cobra Jet 1400 prototype. It currently sits around 1,500 horsepower, and has the ability to spin up to 10,000 rpm. This makes it equivalent to approximately three 2021 Mustang GT powerplants combined. What's even crazier is that Tasca could have cleaned this run up a bit in order to go even faster. It wouldn't surprise me to see this car burst into the seven-second range in the near future.
Sure, there are faster internal combustion engine race cars out there, but it's truly impressive to see how quickly improvements to electric motors are arriving into motorsports. Trust me, this is only the beginning of what's to come. Congratulations to Bob Tasca III for driving the wheels off this Mustang!
This post was originally published on July 9, 2021.
