Drag races offer multiple delights for onlookers to enjoy, and when you’ve got a three-way drag race, it’s extra intriguing. Although UK-based automotive YouTube channel Carwow is known for its drag race content, today’s video is special even for that crew. Why? The lineup for today’s race features a Koenigsegg Agera RST, a Tesla Model S Plaid, and a TTS Performance SuperBusa.
All three vehicles and their entourages showed up at an airstrip on the day, entirely ready to both do big, smoky burnouts and also take names. As is frequently the case, Carwow presenter Mat Watson handled driving duties on one of the cars. In this case, he helmed the Koenigsegg Agera RST, which he said made him more than a little nervous because it’s a car valued at about 3.5-million pounds sterling (that’s about $4,455,902.50 as of June 20, 2023). It’s also one of only 25 ever made and is thus special even among its insane hypercar brethren. While he looked forward to driving it, he was of course absolutely keen for nothing bad to happen during the run.
Carwow collaborator Yianni drove the Tesla Model S Plaid, while Richard Albans of TTS Performance sat astride his creation, the TTS Performance SuperBusa. This supercharged Suzuki Hayabusa makes around 350 horsepower on the dyno, as the TTS team has illustrated through its own videos on its YouTube channel. Although Bike World’s Chris Northover frequently rides bikes in most of the car vs. bike drag race videos that Carwow posts, having Albans handle the honors this time just made sense—it's his baby, and he’s been drag racing the things he’s built for the past 50 years. Who’s going to know this bike better?
In this race particularly, there are so many interesting variables to consider. While the Koenigsegg Agera RST has a ton of power on tap, Watson estimates that it’s probably not running at full horsepower thanks to its fuel mixture that day. He’d estimate that it’s running at around 1,250 horsepower, give or take—but it’s still got nearly a one-to-one power ratio. The Tesla Model S Plaid, meanwhile, is a bit heavier, but all the power of its three electric motors is on tap instantly, so getting off the line from a standing start should theoretically be no trouble at all for this car.
The TTS SuperBusa, meanwhile, has a greater than one-to-one power ratio. Just like the Agera, though, the issue here isn’t only in how much power is available, but how (and when) it’s applied, and how each vehicle’s operator gets it down the track.
As you can likely guess, whether it’s a standing or a rolling start also matters. For those familiar with some of the Bike World vs. Carwow drag race videos we’ve posted in the past, the format is the same. The first competition is a best-out-of-three standing start drag race down the quarter mile at the air strip. The second is a rolling start competition, and the third is a braking competition to see which vehicle’s brakes stop it in the shortest distance after it hits a prescribed speed.
How did the SuperBusa do? Very well in the standing start; less well in the rolling start, and probably as poorly as you expect in the braking test (bikes almost always lose the braking test to cars, particularly the kind of high-performance cars that appear in these Carwow videos).
Be sure to check out the behind-the-scenes video that TTS Performance posted, which offers a few more views of what happened in each of the races, as well as an interview with the owner of the Koenigsegg Agera RST at the end.
