The Buckeye Bullet 2 (BB2) is the world's fastest hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, with an international speed record of 302.9 mph. In order to achieve the power levels necessary for reaching the top speed, a unique gas supply system was designed to feed the PEM fuel cell modules. Stored Heliox with 40% oxygen content was used as the oxidizer and supplied to the cathode at high pressure. The high oxygen concentration at the cathode leads to a high rate of water formation in the GDL, with considerable influence on the pressure dynamics. For this reason, a precise monitoring of the pressure and water formation is required so that the cathode can operate at the maximum allowable pressure. This paper presents a novel control-oriented modeling approach to predict the cathode pressure dynamics of the BB2 PEM fuel cell system, developed for system optimization, monitoring and control. A distributed-parameter model was designed to characterize the liquid water formation and transport in the cathode channels, starting from the conservation laws for viscous fluid flow. The model was validated against a set of laboratory tests and actual race data. In this context, the proposed model is compared to a well known control-oriented PEM fuel cell model, to illustrate how the ability to predict the water transport at high reaction rates allows for an improved prediction of the pressure dynamics. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.