Man breaks own remote control car world record

Stephen Wallis's latest car exceeded speeds of more than 250mph, beating the previous record he set with The Beast

An engineer has broken his own world record for driving the world's fastest remote controlled car.

Stephen Wallis from Rugby, Warwickshire, set his previous record with a remote-controlled model called The Beast, which recorded a speed of 234.71mph (377.7km/h) earlier this year.

But after modifying and upgrading his latest aerodynamic car, the Mach Reaper, in an attempt to go even faster, he recently hit a top speed of 256.74mph (413.2km/h).

"You do get a massive rush when you see your car flying past at over 200mph (321.9km/h), it is ridiculous," he said. "It just looks amazing and you're in control of it."

His latest model, the Mach Reaper, has been modified to travel even faster

Wallis began his hobby two years ago and said his secret weapon was using drone motors.

"This actually started its life as a quadcopter drone type thing and that did 129mph (207.6km/h) actually at its first speed testing event," he said of his latest car.

"Whilst not a ridiculous speed - it was more than what anyone was expecting from something so small and a completely custom built car."

The part-time motorcycle engineer designs and builds the models from scratch at his home and also uses a 3D printer, alongside posting videos of the process on YouTube.

Wallis designs the cars at his home in Rugby

After completing testing, he took the car to the Yes Mate Speed event at the LLanbedr Airfield in North Wales to give it a go on the runway.

"What I did was look at all the areas of the car and try to come up with ways of improving them," he said.

"For example, the aerodynamics. I actually made the whole car narrower to make it have less drag. The other thing you can do is give it more torque to help the acceleration and I did that by fitting larger drone motors."

At his last race event, Wallis also trimmed his tyres to help him achieve the record speed and has more ideas to make his cars even faster in the future.

"I have got an idea of putting a rocket booster on one of my cars. So keeping it electric powered but adding a rocket to give it a boost just as it gets towards the speed traps," he said.

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Engineer sets world record with remote control car