Story originally published 29 March, 2006
You know a car is fast when the valet key “limits” the vehicle’s top speed – to 375 km/h.
Imagine the owner: “There you go, son. Don’t even bother trying any funny business, as you won’t get it a whisker over 375 km/h!”.
If you want to attempt to reach the Bugatti Veyron’s 407 km/h top speed
– officially the world’s fastest production car by some considerable margin – you’ll need the second, “speed” key.I’m not about to attempt a top speed run. I’ll be happy to bring the Veyron (and me) back alive after negotiating afternoon peak-hour traffic. After all, what good is having the world’s fastest, most powerful and most expensive car if you can’t jump in it to head down to the shops?
The clouds above Bugatti’s headquarters in Molsheim, on the French side of the border of Germany and France, are dark and the surrounding roads are cold, wet and crowded. Worried? Moi? How do you say “yes” in French again?
Riding shotgun and watching my every move is former Le Mans racer Pierre-Henri Raphanel, although I pretend he’s coming along for the ride because he wants something from the shops too.
“There is only one trick to starting the Veyron,” he says. “Turn the key, wait five seconds for these lights to illuminate, then hit the start button.”
Cute. We’re in the world’s fastest car but anyone in a Toyota Echo can beat you out of a car park.
The delay allows for the fuel to be sprayed into each of the 16 cylinders and to prime the engine internals with oil.
The quad-turbo, 8.0-litre, W16 engine produces a mammoth 736kW, or 1001 horsepower, so it needs a little TLC.
The gentle buzzing of fuel pumps and the sound of the engine as it whirs into life is eerily similar to a jet on start-up.
That the Veyron made it into production at all is as much of an achievement as its performance credentials. It overtook the previous supercar benchmarks by such margins, it’s likely to take the best part of a decade for another car maker to beat it.
The Veyron was developed by German car maker Volkswagen (which bought Bugatti in 1998) after five years’ of delays, technical barriers and countless meetings where the answers were “no”. If the Veyron was sold in Australia it would cost $3 million by the time all the relevant import duties and taxes are added.
And yet Volkswagen says it will make a loss on every car it sells.
If it weren’t for the determination, stubbornness and egos of certain high-ranking Volkswagen officials, the Veyron would have been shelved long ago. According to insiders, there was a reason to stop the Veyron on every day of its development.
Even though the most powerful engine ever fitted to a road car is centimetres behind my head, at idle and moving away at a crawl it hums like an aircraft in the Thunderbirds.
What becomes quickly apparent is how basic the controls are and how simple it is to drive. The steering and brakes have a similar feel to those of a Volkswagen Golf, the instruments and controls also have “the people’s car” touch.
Visibility is not a strong point, though. Because the Veyron is low and sleek, there are two types of reactions from other motorists.
Some don’t notice it until you’re alongside them, and others are so busy looking at it they begin to wander from their lane.
Having caused enough havoc in peak hour, we head to the hills behind Molsheim, where the roads are still greasy from recent rainfall and there’s the odd wet leaf to help focus one’s attention on grip.
Fortunately, the makers of the Veyron saw fit to install an all-wheel drive system. According to the engineers, it was the only way they could get all the power to the road.
The seven-speed manual gearbox is similar to those used in Formula One. There is no clutch pedal; just click the paddles behind the steering wheel to change up or down. It’s the same technology used in the latest Golf GTI and, remarkably, it’s just as smooth.
Million-dollar supercars are not supposed to be like this. They’re supposed to stall, be fiddly, uncomfortable and have oversensitive steering, brakes, clutch and accelerator pedals.
Significantly, their performance is supposed to be out of reach to mere mortals.
As the traffic fades and the roads become more remote, we begin to sample the Veyron’s idea of urgency. What I said the first time I squeezed the accelerator is not printable here. Nor was what I said the second, third, fourth and fifth times. Or afterwards, for that matter.
Bugatti won’t be drawn on how much the Veyron cost to develop (one insider says it was “tens of millions of Euros over budget”) but admits it’s similar to what Mercedes-Benz and BMW spent on their Formula One programs.
But Bugatti put its race car on the road. The Veyron is faster than the cars on the grid for the weekend’s Australian F1 Grand Prix in Melbourne (the top speed recorded for a modern F1 car is just shy of 360 km/h) and yet, incredibly, the Bugatti can be driven by anyone who can afford it.
The Veyron has made headlines around the world because of its 407 km/h top speed but it’s how quickly it reaches that speed that is even more amazing. How does zero to 100km/h in 2.5 seconds sound? That’s also quicker than an F1 car, which usually takes about three seconds to complete the same feat. Furthermore, the Veyron can reach 200km/h in the time it takes most high-performance cars to reach half that speed.
As the revs rise, the engine’s whir changes to a gruff mechanical noise that sounds like a diesel freight train, as big pockets of air are sucked into the engine and pumped out through the exhausts.
As the road climbs and I become increasingly brave with the accelerator pedal, the Veyron becomes too fast for the brain to comprehend. It accelerates with such force over bumpy backroads, it feels like a rock being skimmed across a lake. The scenery blurs beyond recognition. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. You can feel the weight of your chest pushing you back into the seat. All this while you’re trying to comprehend the fast-forward view through the windscreen.
Where’s that corner again? The only way of knowing when to hit the brakes was by casting my memory back to how far away the corner appeared to be when I started to apply the accelerator and then brake early for good measure.
Each time the scenery slowed down to a point that it became clear, I found that braking “early” meant you were merely braking at the right time, if not a touch too late. The brakes are almost more impressive than the acceleration.
Truth be known, I’d have got down on my hands and knees and kissed the discs, except they were really hot.
Time to take a breath and get reacquainted with how tame the Veyron can be when not hurried along. Two hours behind the wheel of the Veyron felt like two minutes.
As we head back to the Bugatti factory, the Veyron’s placid nature is even more obvious moments after you have had the wits scared out of you. I can’t believe how easy it is to drive “normally”. This must surely be the first supercar that can be driven like a humble hatchback.
The fastest and most powerful road car on the planet also happens to be a cinch to drive.
And therein lies possibly the greatest tragedy: that most Veyrons will spend much of their time locked up in garages when they should be used at every opportunity. Even to go and get the milk.
Veyron’s fast facts
- The Veyron blasted its way into the record books late last year as the world’s fastest car. The benchmark figure of 407km/h was recorded in a two-way run, as demanded by the Guinness Book of Records, at Volkswagen’s Ehra Lessien test track in Germany. In the process, the Veyron overtook the 388km/h top speed of the Koenigsegg CCR established at the Nardo track in Italy in February 2005 and the 386.7km/h set by a McLaren F1 road car in March, 1998. The Veyron also shattered the previous top-speed kings: Ferrari Enzo (350km/h), the Mercedes-Benz SLR (334km/h) and the Porsche Carrera GT (330km/h).
- A top-speed test run in a Veyron can only be done from a standing start. Using the “speed” key automatically closes the Veyron’s front brake-cooling ducts and flattens the rear wing for better aerodynamic efficiency and engages a raft of computer-controlled safety measures. For example, if the brakes are applied or the steering wheel moves more than a quarter of a turn, the car’s on-board computer system assumes you are not driving on a closed high-speed test circuit and it will not allow the car to accelerate beyond 375 km/h.
- That big plank on the back is not a wing, it’s an “air brake”, says Bugatti. Like the wing flaps on a jumbo as it lands, the rear wing tilts up to help slow the car down.
- All the parts that make up a Veyron are made in Germany and transported to Bugatti’s headquarters in Molsheim, France for assembly. The quad-turbo, 8.0-litre, W16 engine is so bulky that the body mouldings barely conceal it.
- Engineers test each car for 200km on a “rolling road” dynamometer and then follow it up with a 300km pre-delivery road test. Each car is also soaked with high pressure water to check for water leaks.
- Five engineers assemble each car by hand. A car takes six weeks to build. The Bugatti factory finishes one car a week. The company plans to build a maximum of 300 Veyrons over six years but will stop production if there is no demand once 250 are made. Pundits believe this is an optimistic figure. The McLaren F1 was discontinued after a production run of fewer than 100 cars.
- Each car is built to order and Bugatti says it is holding 35 deposits so far. One customer bought four Veyrons and another bought two after he couldn’t decide which colour and trim combination he preferred. The first female customer is the wife of former Volkswagen chairman Ferdinand Piech, who was the driving force behind the Veyron project. She requested build number 007.
- Car collector and fashion guru Ralph Lauren has been linked to buying a Veyron but he and Bugatti refuse to confirm if this is true. The only clues given were that the first customer was a man of French descent living in the US.
- British soccer star David Beckham, Dire Straits lead singer Mark Knopfler and even Michael Schumacher are rumoured to be on the list. None of these have been confirmed and, it must be said, with Schumacher’s links to Ferrari, his purchase is the least likely.
- In case you want one, the lefthand-drive only Veyron cannot be bought for road use in Australia. But Volkswagen Australia says they will help anyone interested to get in touch with Bugatti should they want to buy one for private use locally or keep it stored in Europe.
- Bugatti Veyron versus Formula One: Today’s Formula One cars reach a top speed of about 300km/h during most races in the championship. But on some circuits, where there are long straights, they can reach between 340km/h and 360km/h by “flattening” the wings to create less aerodynamic drag. According to enthusiast F1 websites, the highest straight line speed recorded during an F1 race was 356.5km/h set by David Coulthard in the 1998 German GP. F1 cars are said to accelerate from rest to 100km/h in a little more than three seconds. The Veyron accelerates to 100km/h in 2.5 seconds in the wet or dry as it is all-wheel-drive.
- The biggest challenge was not creating the world’s most powerful engine but rather how to make the Veyron slice through the air. The biggest mistake, insiders admit, was previewing the car at the 2001 Geneva motor show. Engineers could have reached their top speed target (400km/h) earlier had they been able to redesign the body. But management insisted it remain the same as the show car. Every surface of an F1 car has its aerodynamic effects considered. By comparison the Veyron “looked like a cake of soap”, as one insider put it.
- The Veyron likes a drink. Its fuel tank can hold 100 litres. At full speed it will run out of fuel in 12 minutes. If the Veyron wore an Australian fuel rating label it would likely show a figure of 40L/100km for the city cycle. On the open road it “sips” 24L/100km. Still, that’s economical compared with F1 cars. Their 2.4-litre V8s rev to 19,000rpm and consume about 75L/100km.
So, you think you’re a nervous passenger?
We are not sure whether Pierre-Henri Raphanel, a veteran of 14 Le Mans races, has the best job in the world or the most dangerous.
When he’s not baby-sitting journalists on Veyron test drives, he is in the passenger’s seat guiding potential customers through the Bugatti’s awesome potential.
“I try to be relaxed but race drivers are nervous passengers,” he says. “I’m not a good passenger.”
He says he braces his left leg against the door and the right leg against the centre section of the cabin to help “feel” what the car is doing and to brace himself for an emergency.
To date, no-one has bent a Veyron on one of his test drives but he’s had a few scary moments.
“I have had to ask some people to slow down. This car is faster than anyone except a Formula One driver has experienced, so you have to be alert and use extra caution.”
Raphanel was also one of the test drivers for the Veyron during its development. So, how does he thinks it compares to a Le Mans racer?
“Obviously in a race car the feeling is much more harsh and the car’s responses are sharper. But I am genuinely amazed by the performance. I never would have thought that somebody could have made a road car as fast as this.”
Bugatti Veyron 16.4
– At a glance| Engine displacement | 8.0 litres |
| Engine configuration | W16, 64-valve, four turbos |
| Engine output | 736kW (1001hp) / 1250Nm |
| Acceleration | Acceleration: 0-100km/h in 2.5 seconds |
| Top Speed | 407km/h |
| Transmission | Seven-speed paddle shift, all-wheel-drive |
| Brakes | ABS + ESP |
| Brake construction | Carbon discs; eight titanium-piston calipers, ceramic pads |
| Brake performance | 1.3g deceleration; 400km/h to standstill: sub-10 seconds |
| Brake temperature | Disc surface limit 1000-degrees Celsius |
So, what happened next?
We’re not ones for blowing our own trumpet, but Drive’s Joshua Dowling was the first Australian motoring journalist to drive the Bugatti Veyron, his March, 2006 test of the 407km/h hypercar predating some other outlets’ claims by two years.
The post 25 Years of Drive: Bugatti Veyron, first Australian drive appeared first on Drive.
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