Ever wake up to something you never knew you wanted, but now totally need? That, my friends, is a speed record-setting tractor, here to haul the hay much faster than you can call the cows home.
Tractors are the unsung heroes of the vehicle world, doing the dirty work to put food on our tables, clothes on our backs and cultivate other resources we need. So, it only makes sense that we’d have to determine the fastest tractor in the world—because speed is cool. The new king of the fast tractors is a JCB Fastrac Two, which recently set an average speed of 135.91 miles per hour, as certified by the Guinness World Records crew.
Yee, and I cannot emphasize this enough…haw.
Racer Guy Martin piloted the Fastrac Two on Elvington Airfiled in York, England, ultimately reaching a top one-way recorded speed of 153.771 mph, Top Gear reports. Yet it’s the average speeds that ultimately get used to set speed records, just to make sure it’s not some one-off set of circumstances that made your tractor faster than usual. The tractor must complete two runs in either direction through a one-kilometer speed trap within the allotted time to do so.
“Getting a five-ton tractor to safely reach 150mph, and stop again, is not an easy task,” JCB’s innovation and growth officer Tim Burnhope told Top Gear. “But we’re all so proud to have not only reached these goals, but to have exceeded them.”
Any time I get to see a drag parachute fly out the back of a tractor is a good time.
The previous tractor speed record was an average time of 103.6 mph set by the JCB Fastrac One in June. To go even faster, the Fastrac Two is 10% lighter than the Fastrac One and features a more streamlined design that cuts through the air better.
