Questions about the fastest things

What is Fastest Things?

Fastest Things is an encyclopedia of speed. It publishes ranked lists of the fastest animals, vehicles, athletes, and other measured things. Every ranked figure names its source, a certainty label, and a date it was last checked.

The short version of who the site is for is on About.

How are figures verified and sourced?

A number is not saved without a source. Governing bodies and peer-reviewed papers come first, then independent tests, then manufacturer and owner claims. Claims are published and labeled as claims. Forums and wikis are leads, not sources. Evidence excerpts stay internal. The public page shows the publisher, the title, and a link.

The full order of sources, the rule for disagreeing numbers, and how a correction is handled are on How we verify.

What do claimed, verified, and official mean?

Official: ratified by a governing body such as the FIA, World Athletics, or Guinness World Records. Verified: independently measured and published, for example in a peer-reviewed study or with certified timing. Claimed: stated by a manufacturer, owner, or publication without independent timing.

Estimated: calculated or approximated rather than directly timed. Disputed: contested by experts or contradicted by other evidence. The ranked row is the best-supported figure. Other figures for the same thing stay on the entry with their own labels.

Why are some lists short, and why are some left out of search?

A category or list stays out of Google until it has at least 10 published, sourced rows, counting descendants. Fewer rows would be a thin page. The page still works, and its links can be followed. The tag on the page is noindex. It flips on its own once the list is long enough.

Lists with placeholder figures, and comparisons that do not yet have an approved introduction, stay noindex as well. An entry can be indexed on its own before its list is. Sample pages and legal drafts that still say they are placeholders stay noindex on purpose.

How do units and context mode work?

Every speed is stored in metres per second and converted when it is shown. The everyday units are km/h, mph, m/s, and knots. Air-scale figures can also show Mach against the speed of sound at sea level. Space-scale figures can show km/s. The choice is saved in the browser. It is not a separate URL, so a unit setting is not a second page for Google to index.

Context mode puts a familiar comparison beside the sourced figure, such as a travel time. It never replaces the sourced number. Query strings such as ?unit= are ignored for indexing and point back at the bare page.

How does the daily puzzle work, and when does it reset?

The daily puzzle is 6 head-to-heads drawn from published rankings. Everyone gets the same six. A new puzzle starts at 00:00 UTC. Top speed meets top speed. Sprint times, laps, orbits, and winds only meet their own kind of measurement, and only when the gap is large enough to be a real question.

Your score and streak stay in this browser. Game data and fiction are not in the puzzle. Past days have archive pages, and those archive URLs stay out of search so the index is the live puzzle, not a copy for every date. Play it at the daily puzzle.

What are Fastest Right Now's sources, and what are their limits?

Fastest Right Now is a live board, not a record book. The space station position and speed come from Where the ISS at?, with Open Notify as a position-only fallback when that feed fails. Place names come from OpenStreetMap Nominatim when it answers.

The airplane is the fastest ADS-B contact in four sampled regions (the North Atlantic, the United States, Europe, and East Asia), from adsb.lol, about every two minutes. It is not every aircraft on Earth. A global OpenSky snapshot is used only when that account is configured. Gusts are the strongest report in the latest NOAA METAR cycle, which is aviation weather stations over roughly the last hour, not every anemometer. Storms are active cyclones from the National Hurricane Center, Atlantic and eastern Pacific only. Earth's spin and orbit are computed here. The board is Fastest Right Now.

What is the for-fun section?

For fun is game data, fiction, and live speedrun leaderboards. Pokémon base Speed is an official battle stat, not a running speed. Fictional characters are an editorial order with quoted canon, not invented metres per second. Speedruns are world records from the public speedrun.com API. Each page says which of those it is.

None of it is mixed into the real-world rankings or the daily puzzle. The hub is For fun.

How do I report a correction or send feedback?

Every ranking and entry has a Report an error control. A correction that includes the page and a link to a better source is the fastest to check. The same request can be sent from Contact. Press inquiries use that form too.

Where is the press kit?

Logos, colors, and a short boilerplate are on the press kit. Quote a figure with its original source as well as this site. The source is linked on the number. Other press inquiries can go through Contact.

What is the fastest car in the world?

Yangwang U9 Xtreme leads Fastest Cars in the World at 496.22 km/h (308 mph). The figure is labeled Claimed. Source: BYD. The entry is Yangwang U9 Xtreme.

That leader is also on the production-car list at Fastest Production Cars in the World.

A claimed top speed is not the same thing as a two-way timed run. The label on the row says which one it is. Acceleration lists, such as 0–60, are different measurements and do not change this ranking.

What is the fastest animal?

The highest ranked top speed among the animal lists on this site is Peregrine falcon at 140 km/h (87.2 mph), on Fastest Birds in the World. The label is Verified, from Ibis. Lists measure different trials, so a lower number is not a slower animal in every sense. A dive, a hunt, and a timed run stay separate.

Blackbuck leads Fastest Mammals in the World at 105 km/h (65.2 mph). The figure is labeled Estimated. Source: Journal of Zoology. The entry is Blackbuck.

The entry is Peregrine falcon.

What is the fastest plane?

There is no published ranking of air-breathing planes yet. A list stays off the site until it has at least three sourced rows, and out of search until it has ten. Published vehicle lists are on Vehicles.

Military jets are also separate. Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird leads Fastest Military Jets in the World at 3,529.56 km/h (2,193 mph). The figure is labeled Official. Source: Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. The entry is Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.

A level-flight record, a dash, and a cruise speed are not interchangeable. The list page says which measurement it uses.

How fast is the ISS?

The cached reading is 7.66 km/s (17,130 mph), observed 2026-10-10T03:36:54Z, from Where the ISS at?. It changes as the station's orbit changes. This is not a record we store beside the car and animal lists.

The source link and the latest pass are on Fastest Right Now. The upstream page is Where the ISS at?.