First Drive Review
Tuesdays can be unpredictable at Car and Driver. For example, one Tuesday this past July there was suddenly not one but two Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sports shimmering in the sunlight by our doorstep. Targa roofs jettisoned, they were a glistening pair of $2,128,230 carbon-fiber blisters seething with recherché decadence.
Two Grand Sports parked side by side look like the roller skates of a golem that wears a 75-foot silk Armani. With just five hours allotted, we grabbed the key to one Bugatti and took off, figuring we’d leave the other in reserve just in case of trouble. You never know about Tuesdays.
The world’s way-fastest production car went on sale in 2005, though just 225 or so coupes have been ordered. Eventually, Bugatti plans to make 300 Veyron coupes and 150 Grand Sport roadsters, unless the Sultan of Brunei decides to hand them out as party favors, in which case there could be more. With time to reflect on what was wrought by 21st-century technology enslaved to an ancient impulse to express wealth and power, we’ve come to some conclusions.
First, the Veyron can never be to the millennial generation what the Lamborghini Countach was to Gen X. The Humpty Dumpty shape simply lacks the malevolence to make a good wall poster. And the Veyron doesn’t have scissors doors.
Also, Ferdinand Piëch is nuts.
Madmen don’t often get to run major car companies. The Volkswagen chairman with the long inseam and burnished forehead, last seen dining on the bones of Porsche after it launched a plucky and ultimately futile takeover of VW, is an engineer with a reliable taste for the bizarre and inscrutable. Piëch has run VW and its various children, including Bugatti, as his personal fetish factory since 1993. It’s been a glorious spectacle.
There were freakish W-12 and W-8 engines. There were VWs priced on top of Audis, an Audi that outperforms and undercuts a Lamborghini, and a VW that tried to be a Mercedes. Remember the Phaeton and its $200 million glass factory with Canadian maple floors? Hey you, in the pinstripe, put down the car company and back away slowly!
Details about the Veyron Grand Sport: There is a 36-pound transparent polycarbonate roof that is removed with help from a friend. There’s also a black canvas tarp with carbon-fiber bows that covers the cockpit like a Nicoderm patch. By twisting a glossy aluminum and carbon-fiber rod that is threaded at one end—the rod probably costs more than a new Toyota Yaris—you slowly unpucker the canvas like an umbrella and snap it into place, then stow the rod inside a tube in the cockpit.
With the roof affixed, you can match the Bugatti coupe’s full 253-mph top speed if you own a considerable section of interstate freeway. With the umbrella in place, Bugatti strongly advises not exceeding 100 mph, which is roughly the high end of second gear. With no roof, the Grand Sport’s corrupted aerodynamics permit only 224 mph, which we strongly advise against if you’ve ever had hair transplants.
Counting the 26.4-gallon fuel tank and the roughly 26 gallons of lubricant and water aboard, there are close to 400 pounds of liquids in a fully tanked Grand Sport. The 1001-hp, 7998cc quad-turbo W-16 engine; the seven-speed dual-clutch transmission; and the differentials, driveshafts, and Haldex electronic all-wheel-drive system represent another 1800 pounds or so.
Which means that if you smack a wall head-on in a Veyron, the hurtling engine seeks to crush you like a ripe watermelon. Removing the roof only weakens the cabin, so the Grand Sport’s doors are of sturdier carbon fiber instead of aluminum, as in the coupe, with carbon-fiber columns inside that reinforce the passenger capsule in an impact. The A-pillars are also thicker, and the transmission tunnel is fully boxed for more rigidity.
