2011

Great Britain/Hanover. Seventy-five years after CLAAS launched the first combine harvester onto the European market, a LEXION in England has set a new world record in combine harvesting. Under the supervision of a Guinness World Records adjudicator, a commercially available LEXION 770 with TERRA TRAC track roller unit harvested a record breaking 675 tonnes of wheat in eight hours. 

At the Agritechnica in Hanover (13th – 18th November), the world's largest exhibition of agricultural machinery, the record performance was announced and was officially authenticated by a certificate from Guinness World Records. Helmut CLAAS and his daughter Cathrina CLAAS-Mühlhäuser were presented with the document by Jack Brockbank, official representative of Guinness World Records, at the CLAAS trade fair stand – standing in front of the world record machine, the LEXION 770 TT with 12-metre-wide VARIO cutter bar. Also present was the 13-man world record team.

From a quarter to ten in the morning on 1st September until half past six in the morning on 2nd September (exactly 19.2 working hours plus some small breaks), the LEXION was in continuous operation on a farm in the English county of Lincolnshire. After precisely eight hours (with the straw chopper activated), the CLAAS combine harvester, with exactly 675.84 tonnes and a throughput of 85.5 tonnes per hour, smashed the eight-hour record of 551.6 tonnes that was set by a competitor in 2008. Furthermore, in contrast to the record figures from 2008, the increased threshing output was achieved by the CLAAS LEXION at a lower engine output and almost 11% lower fuel consumption.

The world record combine harvester has an engine output of 431 kW/586 PS, and is fitted with the APS HYBRID SYSTEM with closed threshing drum, plus it is also equipped with the CEMOS driver assistance systems (settings wizard), GPS PILOT (automatic steering) and CRUISE PILOT (throughput control). Thanks to the modern CLAAS threshing system and the driver assistant systems that come as standard, the two world record pilots Jens Broer and Christian Meckmann were always able to select the optimum settings for the machine and all threshing conditions.

But the high-performance combine harvesting in England was not yet at an end after eight hours. After a short break from the world record, the team continued until the next morning. In doing so, during the morning and evening hours, the machine had to cope with grain humidity levels of up to 18%.

At 6.34 a.m., after more than 19 hours of threshing work, they took stock: The LEXION had cleared almost 130 ha of wheat and harvested a massive volume of approx. 1,362 tonnes of wheat. CLAAS has therefore proven that the effective threshing time can be significantly increased with the LEXION and that highly efficient threshing can continue even throughout the night and under adverse conditions.

The key advantage of the LEXION is the APS HYBRID SYSTEM. This highly efficient threshing system from CLAAS unites the tangential APS threshing system with ROTO PLUS residual grain separation, and thus achieves a performance advantage of up to 20% when compared to conventional threshing systems – and all of that with a lower diesel consumption.