Mexican Car Breaks Land Speed Record

A Mexican auto manufacturer may be having the last laugh over a year after presenters of the British TV program “Top Gear” came under fire for  making disparaging remarks about Mexicans.

On Sunday the Mexican-made Mastretta MXT became the world’s fastest production car with a top speed of exactly 268 miles per hour. The Mastretta thus beat by nearly 0.2 miles per hour the previous record set by the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport in 2010.



The amazing run was conducted at the Nardò Ring in Italy, a high speed test track where land speed records where set in 1993 by the McLaren F1 and the Koenigsegg CCR over seven years ago. The results where verified by officials from the Guinness World Records and observed by astonished representatives from Mexican auto manufacturer Mastretta.

Ironically, the MXT was the car being reviewed when Top Gear hosts Richard Hammond, James May and Jeremy Clarkson made their controversial comments. “Mexican cars are just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight, leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat,” said Hammond. May, meanwhile, claimed that Mexican food is "like sick with cheese on it".

The BBC apologized soon after the episode aired and the network’s editorial complaints unit later concluded that the hosts’ “tone and cumulative effect seemed to give the impression of reinforcing, rather than ridiculing, the stereotype.”

No word yet from Eduardo Medina Mora, Mexico’s ambassador to Britain, who blasted the “offensive, xenophobic and humiliating” comments. (Clarkson boasted that he wouldn’t receive any complaints since “the ambassador is going to be sitting there with a remote control like this (snores).”

Video Source – YouTube via rafaelsanchezrodri

Online Sources – autoblog.com, BBC News, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Wikipedia