Bugatti Veyron

A Daily Telegraph story by Andrew English at http://www.telegraph.co.uk

You'd probably have to win the Spanish lottery to get to drive the amazing Bugatti Veyron - Andrew English received his invitation to do so in the post

The Spanish lottery is called el Gordo, ("the fat one"). This week it is paying out 13 million euros and if you are quick you can still get a ticket. Win it and you will probably be able to afford to buy one of these, the el Gordo of cars, the £839,285, 987bhp, 253mph Bugatti Veyron. The continental, VAT-less figures are catchier; 1 million euros, 1001PS and 400km/hr respectively.

Phew-l consumption: with almost 1,000 horsepower, the Veyron is the fastest production car ever built

You might even have change to fill the 22-gallon tank with super unleaded, although running such a car as this will involve much more than just meeting its prodigious thirst. Around town it does less than six mpg, flat-out it does less than two - use it regularly and the Veyron will quickly make you a Nectar points millionaire and put you on a "Wanted Dead or Alive" poster for every police force and environmental group.

But what an amazing technical achievement this car is. Built around a carbon-fibre body and using aluminium, magnesium and titanium in its construction, it has a frontal cross-sectional area of 2.07 square metres. Travelling at the top speed is like pushing two standard sheets of plywood through the air at 253mph.

Try it. At that speed the fuel being consumed has the potential energy of 3,000bhp, almost 1000bhp to push the car along, 1,000 thrown out of the back as exhaust heat and another 1,000 dissipated by the three separate cooling systems with six separate radiators. At 253mph this car will drain its 22-gallon tank in exactly 12 minutes. But where on earth are you going to do 253mph for 12 minutes?
     
Interior

Before you do that speed you have to stop and select (with a key) the special aerodynamic trim and engine management pack for top speed. At any other speeds this makes the car as wieldy as a trolley jack. VW is mindful of the product liability issues and has made it impossible to max out the Veyron on a whim. You've really got to want to do 253mph in this car.

At Telegraph Motoring we've been taking the mickey out of the Veyron for the past year. It's been an easy target. The ludicrous price, the over-the-top power output and those pictures of it crashing at every track in Europe. So why did they do it?

Opinions differ on this one. Its instigator Dr Ferdinand Piëch decided it should be a statement of intent to German rivals, an assertion that VW had the technical nous to make a supercar the like of which had never been seen before.

The current VW boss, Bernd Pischetsrieder, says it is a cheaper alternative to Formula One racing. Bugatti president Thomas Bscher says the project is a technical and training inspiration for VW engineers and that the entire project has cost less than a full season of F1 racing for McLaren Mercedes, or BMW.

I get the feeling we are being steered gently around an edifice of creative accounting here. Mercedes and BMW are rumoured to spend in excess of £55 million a year each on their F1 efforts. VW's costs for the Veyron must have been higher than that, especially with the development of a new driveline and the purchase of the Bugatti rights, former estates and chateaux at Molsheim in Alsace.

So does it make money? Bscher laughs. "We have our own engine and gearbox, so that cannot be profitable producing just 300 cars in total. If that could be profitable, then the motor industry would be much more profitable than it is."

But why has it crashed so often? Technical director Wolfgang Schreiber bravely holds his hand up. "I was in that car," he says, referring to the well-publicised photographs of a Veyron clanging its way down the Nürburgring barriers. "We were measuring suspension movement and one of the sensors cut its way through a brake line. I spun and then went back to the pits. Within 20 minutes, that car was back out on the track."
Rear 3/4

Dr Ferdinand Piëch, former Audi and VW boss, is an extraordinary genius: short, almost bald, with eyes the colour of lapis lazuli that appear to light up like those of the Thunderbirds' Hood. He's still non-executive chairman of VW and since his family company, Porsche, recently purchased 18.5 per cent of VW's voting shares, he's a big and controversial beast, trumpeting in the woods around VW's Wolfsburg home.

There are echoes in his forceful personality and quirky perfectionism of Bugatti's originator Ettore Bugatti, who built the legendary cars between 1911 and 1939, appearing for work at Bugatti's Molsheim home dressed in jodhpurs and a bowler hat.

VW bought the striken Bugatti name in 1998 out of Romano Artioli's hands and moved the firm out of its idiosyncratic Italian factory and back to Molsheim. Piëch wanted the ultimate supercar, a sort of best Audi in the world, but the plan got off to a shaky start. VW's W12 engine was first seen at the Tokyo Motor Show in 1997 and it has since provided the basis for the Bentley W12 engine and the Bugatti W16.

The first VW Bugatti concept, the 1999 EB218, bore a close resemblance to the Ital Design EB118 that Romano Artioli had been trying to flog as a GT-follow-up to his EB110 super car. Both were pretty ugly. The Veyron appeared as a concept in 2000 and has been through a very public development since.

First, in the hands of the laid-back VW director Karl-Heinz Neumann and then (after the prototype was criticised as being a racing car for the road by Pischetsrieder in 2003), in the hands of Bscher.

As a banker and a Le Mans driver, Bscher is perhaps the only man in the world simultaneously rich enough to buy a Veyron (he has ordered one) and skilled enough to drive it at anything like its capabilities.
Dust buster
    
Veyron is named after Bugatti ace Pierre Veyron. A previous Bugatti supercar concept was named after Bugatti driver Louis Chiron. Bscher denies he is planning on calling his next Bugatti "the Williams", after the English Bugatti-driving winner of the first Monte Carlo GP William Grover Williams - rather than the F1 team.

The launch was held in Sicily (don't ask) and the first appearance of the Veyron was as it growled into the hotel courtyard under the cover of darkness. There is something of an animal about this car, with its pouncing stance, the prominent alloy air ducts in the spine and the black holes of air intakes.

It even moves on its own, opening ducts and running the pumps of its cooling systems to cool itself even when it is locked up. The exhaust beats unevenly out of the single central exhaust duct and fills the night air with a menacing warbling.

The story of the Veyron is mainly one of dealing with the formidable power and managing the top speed. As Schreiber says: "Once the gearing is chosen, if you don't get the speed, you don't get the power and vice versa."

After months of edging up to the target 400km/h, the team went to race team Sauber and adopted the age-old race-car trick of dropping the vehicle as low as they could, closing as many air intakes as they dared and flattening all the aerodynamic devices like that huge rear wing, which above 220km/h will also act as an air brake under hard braking.

Does it overheat at that speed? "There isn't the time, the space or the fuel," says Schreiber, who is without doubt the technical genius behind the Veyron.

It is the seven-speed, twin-clutch gearbox rather than the eight-litre engine that lies at the heart of the Veyron. Although Porsche developed the twin-clutch PDK gearbox initially for its racing cars, the Bugatti system was designed by Schreiber and diverts power via a series of Haldex clutches to the front and rear wheels.

"I think this is the best thing about the car," says Bscher, and he's right. Rivals like the McLaren F1 and Ferrari Enzo are also defined by their transmissions and the heavy manual in the F1 and the automated manual box in the Enzo make it difficult for ordinary drivers to access the performance or manoeuvre without damaging the clutch.

Manoeuvring the big, 1.9-ton Veyron out of the car park shows the transmission to be perfectly docile and manageable, although the fearsome noises from the four turbos and the Siren's whine from the gearbox prove pretty intimidating. There isn't much steering lock and it is difficult to see out of the back, or work out where the front is. Parking sensors are not included in the price, so you proceed fairly gingerly at first.

Not that the cabin is that practical, either. Every nook and cranny in this car is filled with piping, machinery or sensors. Luggage plays no part in the Veyron's remit. The front space under the bonnet is minute, heated up by the radiators and only just big enough for my brief case. The glove box is big enough for a pair of gloves.

"You could ask your daughter to take you shopping in this car," said Bscher, who's clearly used to the sort of shopping that only involves small bags of highly expensive shiny things.

You sit low in an L-shape formed by the gearbox and the engine behind your head. The seats are comfortable and adjust, along with the steering, in every direction. The cabin is upholstered with soft, perfectly stitched leathers and festooned with handles, switches and controls machined from solid aluminium.

It exudes quality and finely wrought craftsmanship and seems quite restrained until you come to the centre console. Engine-turned dashboards are a Bugatti hallmark, but the horseshoe-shaped console looks garish and the switchgear for the ventilation, air conditioning and stereo are complicated beyond belief.

It's actually quite difficult to work out what is and isn't a switch. This confusion is continued up to the instrument binnacle with its aluminium-turned bezels and virtually identical dials. The speedometer is smaller than the pointless power indicator and hard to see.

I drove with Bscher, who's directional skills are easily surpassed by my daughter's guinea pigs, Mustang and Strudel. Fortunately the first part of the route was simple, a run down an almost deserted Sicilian autostrada. "Go on change down to third and feel the gear change," encouraged Bugatti's boss as I hit 100mph. Needing no further encouragement I flipped the left-hand steering-wheel paddle and felt the turbos waken.

The red line is at just under 6,500rpm, but hold the throttle at 5,000rpm, and the W16 sounds like a gathering storm behind you, with the turbos whooshing, the wastegates chattering and the high-pitched transmission whistle beside you like wind in the rigging. Floor the throttle and…

Gadzooks, this car moves and how. At these sorts of speeds that speck in the distance becomes a wavering Fiat Panda before you've had time to think. I glanced down at 300km/h (186mph) and then up just as quickly.

The Veyron tracks remarkably cleanly, especially considering its special Michelin tyres are the largest ever fitted to a production car, but you need your wits to be as turbo-boosted as the engine. Schreiber confided that at 253mph, the Veyron is carrying the same sort of kinetic energy as a 32-ton truck travelling at 60mph.

At 320, 330, 340km/h, I haven't got time to do the conversions as the Veyron is still punching as hard as it did at 70mph.

I kept my foot in as long as I dared and eventually had to slow. Eight pistons on each 15.7-inch ceramic front disc haul the speed down as hard as it was gained. Phew.

Out on the back roads of Sicily, on the old route of the Targa Florio, the Veyron proves its case with outlandish cornering speed, massive point-to-point acceleration and that gearbox making access to the performance as easy as in your Gran's Nissan Micra. There are times when the Veyron feels like a tea tray towed by the land-speed record car Thrust SSC.

The steering is perfectly weighted and as accurate as a needle, but when you need a bit more lock for a tightening corner, when the front wheels turn and the rear bodywork lurches round almost imperceptibly, it's enough to tell you this is a big car that will go a long way down the mountain side. Visibility is also a problem, with the thick windscreen pillars restricting your view into corners.

Of the three suspension and aerodynamic modes on offer, touring is the most comfortable and the most wieldy, but the suspension is still firm as befits a car with this amount of grunt.

Later, we are driven on a circuit by a Bugatti test driver, stamping on the brakes at speed to illustrate the air-brake's anvil-out-the-window efficiency, hurling the car inexpertly through turns to illustrate its benign nature and using the awesome launch control where the Veyron will howl all four tyres as it hits 62mph in 2.5sec and less than 40 metres, and on to 124mph in just 7.3sec. It will reach 186mph in 16.7sec, almost twice as fast as the McLaren F1.

So they've done it.

VW has built the supercar's supercar. Each one takes three weeks to make and there'll be no more than 300. Bscher has sold three already to his neighbours and says production is secured until August next year. After that may be a lightweight version, possibly a tourer if the market can bear it and eventually perhaps a super lightweight Bugatti just as Ettore was predicting before his death in 1947.

A success then? I'm beguiled by speed here, yet the Bugatti is also a frustrating car, always wanting to go faster. Corners are never quite fast enough for it, yet when you do get near the limits, it's an intimidating car that uses control systems, aerodynamics and power limits to mitigate its speed and weight.

Bscher has driven all the competition at higher speeds than we could imagine and says they are all inferior, because they are race cars for the road. He's right that the Veyron is first and foremost a road car but where are the roads that could contain a car like this?

Ferrari's Enzo might be out-gunned here, but I remember driving it nearer the limits, getting more satisfaction than in the Veyron and having no more space for my luggage, so who is really racing on the road here?

As an accomplishment, the Veyron has few peers. That most will be bought by collectors, traded at auction houses and sit in air conditioned luxury should perhaps be a relief to us all.

If I had one, I'd always be haunted by the small boy's question, "What'll she do, mister?" Safe and secure as it undoubtedly is, I'm not sure I'd want to be on the same piece of road when a Bugatti owner turns that key in the special slot and really goes for it.

Now where's that lottery ticket?

Bugatti Veyron

Price/availability: £839,285 inc VAT. On sale now. First delivery to France (for an American customer) in November, waiting list is 35 cars long which will take until next August to produce.

Engine/Transmission: all-aluminium W16-configuration (two 15-degree V8s 30-degrees apart on a common-block) 7,993cc, petrol, with SOHC per bank and four valves per cylinder plus four inlet-charge-cooled turbos; 987bhp at 6,000rpm, and 922lb ft of torque at 2,200rpm. Seven-speed twin-clutch direct shift gearbox - DSG. Four-wheel drive with via front differential with Haldex clutch and rear differential with transverse locking device.

Performance: top speed 253mph, 0-62mph 2.5sec, EU Urban fuel consumption 6.99mpg (Combined 11.7mpg), CO2 emissions 574g/km.

We like: The addictive performance, the DSG gearbox, the outlandish shape, the quality of construction.

We don't like: The width, the weight, the thick windscreen pillars.

Alternatives: Audi V10 Le Mans, arrives next year. McLaren F1 (used) about £1 million. Mercedes-Benz SLR £313,540. Ferrari Enzo (used) about £1 million

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