Testing the Rhys Millen Racing PM580

Ask anybody who's driven a real racecar and they'll tell you about the compromises made in the name of the car's speed and dynamic purity. Most of those compromises are trade-offs to driver comfort — seating position, visibility, heat management, that kind of thing. After all, the driver has to be comfortable enough to drive for a good hour or two at least.

Shrink the race down to 10 minutes, point it straight up a 14,000-foot mostly paved mountain, remove much of the oxygen and almost any rules regulating its construction and a very different kind of machine begins to emerge.

What you get is the Rhys Millen Racing PM580 — a freak show of speed so insanely fast and violent that it's as capable of breaking your ribs as it is of breaking your will. It is equal parts downforce-equipped prototype, dirt-bred rally car, pinpoint-accurate go-kart and potent amphetamine.

And it is — by a large margin — the fastest car we've ever driven.

For Real
Lest you think the above is an exaggeration or cliché, consider the following: The Hyundai-powered PM580 is all-wheel drive, weighs about 1,920 pounds and produces 850 horsepower in race trim. For comparison, the fastest-accelerating production car we've ever tested, the 2010 Porsche 911 Turbo — also all-wheel drive — produces 493 hp and weighs 3,572 pounds.

In June the PM580's 136-mph pace through the speed trap at the 95-year-old Pikes Peak International Hill Climb was the fastest ever recorded. Its 10-minute, 9.242-second run this year is the 5th fastest ever recorded up the 11.42-mile course.

It is a car designed, ultimately, for pavement. And because the famed road will be entirely covered with the stuff inside of two years, this is the machine we believe is destined to hold the overall record.

And today, on a flat, landmark-free piece of Southern California runway, we've been invited to drive it. But now, with the opportunity looming and the $500,000 Rhys Millen Racing PM580 sitting beneath the canopy of the Red Bull/Hyundai transporter, we're not so sure it's a good idea.

Ergonomics? What Ergonomics?
It all comes down to those compromises. The seat, for example, is a raw carbon-fiber shell that's bolted to the tubular frame and backs up flush with the firewall about 2 inches forward of the crankshaft pulley.

Driving the PM580 is an absurd mixture of soul-crushing speed and brain-rattling madness.

Climb in and you'll stumble over a carbon-Kevlar shield covering the driveshaft, which runs from the left side of the driver's hip under his left knee. Both the driveshaft and the steering column terminate between the driver's feet.

The throttle pedal is on the right of this mess and both the brake and clutch pedals are on the left — an arrangement that makes heel/toe work impossible. Fortunately, there's a five-speed sequential transmission that will gladly select the next gear in succession — up or down.

Oh, and the shifter? It's on the left. Nobody told Millen that we Americans prefer to shift with our right hand. All in all it's an unnatural experience — particularly for anyone with years of muscle memory and driving habits, good or bad.

But it is fast. And violent.

Eye Peeler
The violent part of the equation drives itself home with shovel-to-the-spleen clarity just as boost peaks in 3rd gear. This, of course, is only after you've yanked the shifter back twice amid a raging vibratory assault on your nether regions. The car's design, which bolts the powertrain directly to the chassis in which the driver sits, is to blame.

So focused is the Rhys Millen Racing PM580 on the mission of going fast that it is unburdened by simple human essentials. The need to isolate its driver's man parts from destructive high-frequency resonance, for example, has been lost in the quest for speed. Indeed, when driving a car this rapid, it helps to have big ones — for more reasons than one.

Yanking the shifter back for the third time at 78 mph, the accelerative force is, according to our data, greater than that produced by a 2012 Nissan GT-R in 1st gear. Even on a flat runway devoid of career-ending obstacles, the rate at which the PM580 consumes tarmac is nearly beyond human capacity for calculation. This, as they say, is stupid fast.

And then there's the sound, something akin to tossing a chainsaw — at wide-open throttle — into a wood chipper. There's an almost unbearable buffet of mechanical commotion at speed. Combine the roar from the transmission with two differentials constantly chewing away and you get a constant, piercing pain in the ears. The only interruption to the driveline noise is the unmuffled, 4.1-liter turbocharged V6, which hacks away at what remains of your hearing.

Now here's the thing: We've driven plenty fast cars in our day. Racecars, even. Heck, we once tested a supercharged Ariel Atom that we thought might kill us.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, can match the totality of this experience. And that's just in a straight line.

Ludicrous Speed
Perhaps the most staggering number we measured during testing was the PM580's straight-line blast to 143 mph in only 1,220 feet — 100 feet short of the quarter-mile. This, unfortunately, is the car's top speed (redline in 5th gear) and when it's reached — with the world exploding around its driver — there's good reason to lift.

With Millen driving, the best quarter-mile acceleration time we measured was 9.9 seconds at 139.1 mph. Sixty mph arrived in 2.8 seconds (2.5 seconds with a 1-foot rollout like on a drag strip). On the best pass the car reached 143 mph 100 feet early and then coasted through the 1,320-foot mark. Given marginally taller gearing, there's a much better quarter-mile time available.

But this isn't a drag car.

She Turns Quick, Too
Figure in the more critical bits of the PM580's abilities — like the fact that it makes an estimated 1,000 pounds of downforce at 100 mph and the notion that it runs on Hankook slicks at all four corners — and the picture is more complete. Certainly, a road course would offer much greater insight into its abilities, but, quite frankly, we're not upset we didn't have it.

We can say quite honestly, that it's a lot of car even for those accustomed to handling a lot of car. So we were somewhat surprised to find largely benign steering in the middle of this violent, powerful and overwhelming experience.

The RMR crew updated the power steering for this year's race with an electric-assist unit from — get this — a Hyundai Sonata. It's been recalibrated to deliver appropriate weight for steering that is less than one turn from lock to lock. Steering weight, even at speed, is light, but that's a good thing when piloting a car this fast in an oxygen-deprived environment. Plus, there's enough feedback to guide the car with prudence.

No Limits
There are virtually no race series remaining on this planet that allow a car to be "unlimited" in its construction. Even monster truck racing has rules. But the Unlimited Class rules at the Peak are little more than a paragraph dedicated to safety. Tires, as of 2011, can be slicks with as little as one groove — and that's probably all they will be on Unlimited cars as the road progresses to fully paved by 2013.

It's refreshing to see a machine so focused in purpose that it makes virtually no compromises in its pursuit of a single mission. But don't think that makes it friendly. Rather, the Rhys Millen Racing PM580 is a machine of the old-school variety. It perfectly embodies Ernest Hemingway's famous words: "Auto racing, bull fighting and mountain climbing are the only real sports.... All the others are games."

After ingloriously extracting ourselves from the PM580's deafening cockpit and thinking carefully about the drive, we realized Hemingway nailed it. Piloting a car like this is no game, and if Millen can do it for the 9 minutes and 51 seconds required to break the current Pikes Peak record, he deserves every measure of credit that can be extended to a racecar driver. He will, most certainly, have earned it.

After just a few minutes behind the wheel, our nether regions will never be the same. And in trade for this experience, it was worth it.

The manufacturer provided Edmunds this insanely rapid vehicle for the purposes of evaluation.