Meeting the 308mph man: Driving world's fastest car was "quite easy"

Marc Basseng, the race driver who took an electric hypercar to a staggering 308.4mph last week in Germany, said it was "quite easy" to break the record for the world's fastest production car.

Former GT1 world champion Basseng drove the 3000bhp Yangwang U9 Xtreme hypercar to a record-breaking 308.4mph in a top speed run at Germany's Papenburg test track on Saturday (20 September).

That speed, verified by the ATP testing body, makes the U9X – the flagship from BYD's Yangwang high-performance brand – not just the world's fastest electric car, but also the fastest production car, overtaking the 304.774mph Bugatti Chiron Super Sport.

Basseng said that despite the huge numbers involved – and the massive demand such speed places on the powertrain, bodywork and chassis of the car – it quickly became clear during practice that a record was within reach.

"After the first run, for me it felt like this would be quite easy," he said, "because the acceleration of this car and the power is absolutely unbelievable.

"And then I thought it would not take long as well - maybe two or three days. You always have the limit of a time slot at the ATP, so you can't go as fast as you want all the time."

Basseng said that while he and BYD's engineers were confident about breaking the record on the circuit's 4.0km (2.5-mile) straight, getting there had to be an incremental process in order to evaluate the performance of the car at different speeds.

"Things change dramatically" with tiny increases in speed above a certain point, he explained. "If you go to 400kph (250mph), it's already something special, and then every 20kph [above that] everything changes again and again."