Balls of Depleted Uranium Required!
Like the author of this piece, I ain't the biggest fan of really old cars, but this bastard is a little different. It is an automobile distilled into it's essential parts. I can't imagine doin' 100+ mph in this thing.
The whole story from Hooniverse:
Way back in 1904, a man named Victor Hémery joined Darracq as their chief car tester. He set to work right away in developing vehicles to win races. Even back then, Darracq saw the potential for race victories to raise the profile of their brand and boost sales of their street cars. To that end, Hémery began a project to develop a race car faster than anything else in the world.
By 1905, that project was complete, with the assistance of another French racing driver who had been working for Fiat, by the name of Louis Chevrolet. They had heavily modified two Darracq four-cylinder engines, mating them together to create a 90-degree V8. As each 4-cylinder engine had come from a 100-hp race car, they nominally called the car a 200-hp car and called it a day. In reality, with the heavy modifications they had done on the engine, it was likely producing significantly more. This, at a time when a fairly “powerful” production car would be producing 20 horsepower. Incidentally, the engine displaced about 25.4L.
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