#jet

Unconventional to say the least, Lexus pitted its LFA Nurburgring Edition supercar against an Eclipse 500 jet in a race yesterday.

Auto enthusiasts probably know the airplane versus supercar schtick pretty well at this point. It’s old hat. Or is it?

For decades, the recipe for a supercar had always been about stuffing a fire-breathing V12 engine in the middle. Some super cars receive the occasional quad-turbo W16, V10, and supercharged or turbocharged v8, but these all build upon pretty much the same idea. What many car enthusiasts have actually been wondering ever since they witnessed the Batmobile for the first time is whether jet engines could be fitted into cars in real life.

Sometimes we feel like we’ve seen it all, and then something like this comes along. Paul Stender along with Indy Boys, Inc. out of Indianapolis conjured up this crazy idea of building a custom school bus and shoving in an engine from a Phantom jet fighter so it could reach over 300 mph.

Or should we say 367-mph, because that’s how fast the bus went during an event organized at a local airplane runway. And if that isn’t cool enough, the spectacle of 80-foot flames being shot out of the rear is just plain awesome. As mentioned before, the bus was customized with only about 5-percent of its original components being retained. The overhaul consists of metal more normally seen on a 747 jet.

And Stender’s whole reason in doing this? Mostly to promote the fact that technology is cooler than say, drugs; and also that there’s more to technology than just staring in front of a computer. Part of us just thinks you’d have to be on drugs to come up with an idea like this, but hey, he did it and it’s pretty damn awesome.

The insane video of the school bus after the break.

[Source: CNET News]