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What does “strapped to” mean in the following sentence?

This is faster than a cheetah strapped to a race car.

In the dictionary, strapped means short on money, but I could not find any relevant explanation in this context.

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    Your meaning is slang. The usual meaning of strapped, as used here, is "fastened with a strap".
    – Weather Vane
    Commented Feb 2, 2019 at 21:48

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Strapped there is the past participle of the verb to strap which means to fasten something in position by fastening a narrow piece of leather or other strong material around it.

Example sentence:

We strapped the surfboard to the car roof.

"This is faster than a cheetah strapped to a race car" is supposed to be a joke. Cheetahs are animals that can run very fast. A race car is even faster. So, if you strap a cheetah to a race car, then the whole thing is supposedly going to be just super fast in terms of speed. But, whatever it is that they're talking about is even faster than that!

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This is a somewhat uncommon phrase.

What the whole phrase is indicating is that the thing that is being compared to 'a cheetah strapped to a race car' is really fast. The author is using 'strapped to' as a colloquialism meaning putting two things together.

A better way to say that statement may be 'it's faster then the speed of a cheetah and a race car added together'

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    "A better way to say that statement may be …" but that is only better if you have no sense of humo(u)r.
    – alephzero
    Commented Feb 3, 2019 at 0:11

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