If you really are a fast car enthusiast then you got to be a huge fan of Bugatti Veyron, the only Fastest Car Ever to be welcomed with a loud and wet raspberry by the auto enthusiasts. Despite of the fact that it’s too heavy, may not be pretty enough for some, and way too expensive, but still, it is one piece of metal not everyone can afford, so their hate is justifiable, to some extent.
In his early days, Gordon Murray, the designer of McLaren F1, used to hate Veyron, but in January 2006, when he drove the car for the first time, he understood what this machine is capable of. He wrote: “I have always felt a little responsible for starting this lunatic chase for top speed with the McLaren F1, and the Bugatti Veyron should put an end to this nonsense.”
Today, when we look at the stats, they clearly prove him right. The door on the numbers race has been closed by Bugatti, even a decade old Bugatti can outrun a Lamborghini, one of the best supercars. Now this term doesn’t fit to the Bugatti, there was a need to invent some new term which would, justifiably, describe this million-dollar car: so came in, hypercars.
The Bugatti uses 8.0-litre quad-turbo W-16 engine – producing 9,000 lb-ft of torque – in combination with a seven-speed dual clutch automatic gearbox. These hypercars use hybrid petrol-electric engines, pseudo eco-cred, and huge batteries, but even then, none of them comes close to the Veyron when it comes to top speed. For instance, take the $1.3 million worth of Ferrari LaFerrari, regardless of being the flagship, it is beaten by flatly some 50 mph by the Veyron Super Sport. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?
The top speed of Veyron Super Sport is 267.8 mph, and when it is travelling on full, it is 100 mph faster than a Boeing 757 at its take-off. Now, how cool is that?
Well, to introduce the original 1001bhp Veyron, the engineering team at Bugatti took five and a half year, while the 1184bhp models added another two and half years to that. In usual cars, an updated version may boast almost 100 per cent increase in power but it was not the case at Bugatti, these new models got measly 20 percent increase in power.
Bugatti made only 450 examples and the good news is that all of them are sold, but there is one bad news too, Ferdinand Piech, the patron saint of Veyron, was forced out of the chairman seat at VW Group two months after the last Veyron was sold. So maybe will never see another Veyron ever again.
