An Indiana businessman and a race car-driving chauffeur have built what they and the World Record Academy call the world's fastest street-legal car, a 1,600-horsepower beast that does zero to sixty in just 2.1 seconds.

That's right. Two-point-one seconds.

Designer Marlon Kirby and financier David McMahan unveiled the Maxximus G-Force this morning in Beverly Hills, and they'll happily sell you one for $3 million. That kind of money buys you a car with a 7-liter twin turbocharged Chevrolet V8 engine powerful enough to leave the Ferrari Enzo, McLaren F1 and even the mighty Bugatti Veyron in its dust. When Kirby let 'er rip at Rockingham Raceway in North Carolina a few months ago, the car did zero to 100 in 4.541 seconds and peeled off a zero-to-100-back-to-zero time of 8.861 seconds.

"Racing the Maxximus G-Force, well, it's like coming down from the top of a roller coaster ride," Kirby told Wired.com. "You're experiencing so many Gs that there is just no other way to describe it."

Kirby is the founder of Maxximus Technologies. McMahan is the president and CEO of Argent Funds Group. The two met when Kirby was driving the limo that carried McMahan home from the airport in Indianapolis. They started talking about cars and discovered they shared a dream of building a record-breaking street-legal car.

"Building a record-breaking performance car is something I always dreamed of as a kid, ever since I was strapping motors to my Radio Flyer to the time when I was drag racing Studebakers at Paradise Airport," said McMahan. "So, we exchanged numbers in the limo, and I called Marlon back about two weeks later, agreeing to finance his next project.'"

Kirby spent four years developing and building the car. He started with an Ultima GTR 720, a British super-exotic already capable of zero to 60 in 2.6 seconds. Kirby yanked the Ultima's drivetrain, gearbox and a good portion of the chassis because, he said, they couldn't handle the acceleration he was looking for. Maxximus uses an all-aluminum 434-cubic inch small-block V8 and two Turbonetics turbochargers to produce 1,600 horsepower at the flywheel. Power flows through a custom-made paddle-shifted three speed transmission. Six-piston AP Racing calipers grab 14.2-inch rotors to bring the car to a stop. The mid-engined car weighs 2,700 pounds and will suck the fuel tank dry in 9 minutes.

McMahan calls building the car a dream come true. And though it costs about twice as much as the Veyron - which does zero to 60 in 2.8 seconds - McMahan says he's had a couple of inquiries from buyers in the Middle East. Perhaps that's why the car will be featured at the Big Boy's Toys Super Show in Abu Dhabi on April 30th.

Photos: John Bragg Photography. Used with permission.

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