Tesla may have made column inches earlier this month with the announcement that the P100D is one of the fastest-accelerating production cars in the world, but when it comes to sheer electrifying speed, the Musk-mobile has nothing on the Venturi Buckeye Bullet-3. You may remember reading about VBB-3 back in February; it’s a land-speed-record car built in a collaboration between Monegasque electric vehicle company Venturi and The Ohio State University. Well, the team has been out on the Bonneville Salt Flats the past few days, and on Monday it set a new land speed record for electric vehicles with a two-way average of 341mph (548km/h)!

We spoke to team leader David Cooke last Thursday, when the team was bedding in the car and getting ready for the record attempt. “We’re ready to go fast,” Cooke told Ars, despite the fact that the condition of the salt was less than ideal. Mechanically, the car was much the same as when we saw it last, following a previous land speed record attempt that had to be shelved due to extreme vibrations caused by poor conditions at Bonneville.

“From the beginning we have been fighting the complexity of the powertrain and electronics,” Cooke said. In particular, getting the battery packs and the inverters all talking to each other properly had consumed a lot of time. “We’re very conservative so reliability has been a big focus; we’ve redone all the wiring from the ground up, implementing some new techniques and concentrating on the wiring connections,” he said.