As you well know, those folks over at Top Gear never could resist a good old-fashioned irrelevant drag race, where the winner was always going to be obvious even before the flag dropped.
Last month, they brought us a few similar drag racing videos, where you’d have something like the McLaren 675LT in one corner and a VW Golf R in the other. Well, at least those were fast cars in their particular segments, whereas this is a complete mess.
The Ariel Atom 3.5R is the fastest car lined up for this drag race. It’s got a 2.0-liter 4-cylinder 350 HP power unit, that’s also good for 243 lb-ft (329 Nm) of torque. It’ll do 155 mph (250 km/h) flat out in a straight line, but not until it snaps past 60 mph (96 km/h) in just 2.5 seconds.
This leaves the 70 HP Smart ForTwo a little puzzled, because this tiny car needs roughly 15 seconds to get from 0 to 62 mph (100 km/h), while its top speed is just 94 mph (151 km/h). You could argue that the only real “race” here is the one between the ForTwo and the VW California camper van, which uses a 2.0-liter bi-turbo TDI unit, good for 178 BHP and a hefty 295 lb-ft (400 Nm) of torque.
The V-Dub van is surprisingly decent at accelerating for a car its size and while giving you the exact figures might spoil the ending, we’ll just let you see how it fared against the Smart.