This GT-R Only Makes 1,760 Horsepower, But That IS At The Wheels, You Know

Jack Baruth
by Jack Baruth

Three-plus years ago, your humble E-I-C pro tem was quite impressed by an 800-horsepower Nissan GT-R. After a couple of years racing in the NASA Performance Touring “E” class, where “big power” cars have 160 horses at the crank, having a chance to boot the proverbial ten-second car around for a while was quite a hoot.

At Switzer, however, I suspect they look at those old 800-horsepower days the way Justin Timberlake does at his N’SYNC records.

Switzer’s sales honcho, human gorilla weight-lifting enthusiast Neil Switzer, announced yesterday that a new build of their ethanol-fueled “X” engine had bopped the 1760whp mark on the dyno. There’s a lot of yakking on the forum as to whether it’s a stock block, a sleeved block, a cyrogenic block, a new block, and so on… but right now Switzer isn’t being forthcoming on the details.

Stuff like this both makes the point that the “glory days” of internal combustion engines are far from over and kind of trivializes all the cool stuff from the Sixties and Seventies. Hemi Darts, Cammer 427s, Yenko Chevrolets… all utterly feeble next to this two-thousand-crank-horsepower doorslammer of a car with air conditioning and two LCD screens on the center stack. This thing would be competitive in NHRA Top Fuel meets of the Sixties, and you could drive it home with the trophy.

Will the day come that all-electric street cars run as hard as the Switzer GT-R? Probably, but I’ll tell you this: I don’t want to be anywhere near the kind of capacitors you’d need to make it happen.

Jack Baruth
Jack Baruth

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