Today's clue:
Looking for the name of a warbird.
1. Single-engine fighter.
2. Fast. Perhaps the fastest fighter in existence when it first flew.
3. First flew during the one war in which it was used.
4. An order for the production version was placed more than a year before the end of the war in which it served.
5. Only one pilot shot down as many as five enemy planes while flying this airplane.
6. Not many were produced, for reasons that seem unconvincing today. It was somewhat unconventional by the standards of the country in which it was designed and built, although other countries had produced roughly similar designs, one of which had been quite successful, for a while.
7. After the war, some were sold to civilians, and some of those were raced. One of them, which had a different engine than all the others, won a major race.
8. Total production was somewhat more than 100, and only about a quarter of those were sent to combat zones.