I think the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport may be the most impressive car I�ve ever driven. It�s the fastest car [put on Clarkson voice] in the world, yet it�s perfectly usable by anyone who�s just stepped out of a Fiat Panda. And I know that for sure, because I did.
Words: James May
Photography: Ripley & Ripley
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This feature was originally published in the Awards issue of Car Evolution magazine
It shades the best efforts of the stars of the supercar establishment, yet is made by Volkswagen. It costs �1.5 million. So much for the people's car.
Wouldn't buy one though, even if I were fabulously rich. I don't actually want a Veyron Super Sport, but I do want to know that such a thing exists in the world. In this respect, it's a bit like the Women's Institute. I'm not planning on joining, but I'm glad it's out there.
At any rational level, the best Bug is pretty pointless, isn't it? It's too big to feel like a sports car, and too heavy as well. It's too wide for the sort of road where it might be interesting, and the price of a service is terrifying. The tyres cost as much as a decent roadster, and you could wear them out very quickly.
Two hundred and sixty miles per hour? Even if you were the last person alive on Earth and had the whole of the planet's road network to yourself, there would be few opportunities to use it. This car is so far ahead of the roads it runs on that the infrastructure will probably never catch up.
What is outright speed anyway? It's not in itself much of a sensation. On an airliner, you might be covering the ground below at 600mph, but you don't cling onto the seat screaming deliriously with the thrill of it.
Now 60mph in 2.5 seconds - there's a figure to give us the fizz. Acceleration is what makes cars exciting, either in a straight line or barrelling through corners. But now we have the Ariel Atom V8, which might be slower at the top end by the best part of 100mph, but is just as quick where it matters in the real world. That �car' - it may not actually qualify as one - is seen as expensive by some at �150,000, but at a tenth of the Bugatti's price, it might actually be a bargain
Look: the Veyron SS is thrilling. The acceleration is deliciously disturbing, like a fairground waltzer, and the mechanisms of gearbox, four-wheel drive, brakes, steering and everything else through which we communicate with a car are wonderful. Next to this, the standard Veyron GL seems a bit chintzy and, as my mother would say, �unnecessary'. This is the Veyron as the exasperated engineering department would have it, rather than the one the management wanted. It's tastefully austere and to the point, and superbly made.
Standing next to one, especially one in that hyper-limited orange and black World Record scheme, gives me a twinge in the guts that I associate with being a teenager. When I'm old and dribbling in an armchair, I'll remember driving the Veyron Super Sport, and it'll probably keep me alive a bit longer.
But its appeal remains cerebral rather than visceral. I know that sounds a bit pretentious, because this is a supercar and the sentiment ought to be more sort of ?�wahey' than anything even remotely chin-stroking, but the contemplation of the Bugatti is even more awe-inspiring than driving it.
The Super Sport does poke around at the fuzzy edge of what is acceptable and even possible with a car, and draws a new boundary a bit further away than the one we're used to. It demonstrates, albeit in a slightly hypothetical way, that aerodynamics are still important at a time when ludicrous power alone is the talk of the Car Bore's Arms.
Without meticulous management of the airflow, the Bugatti would not achieve that remarkable top speed. The issue is not really how fast it is, but how much slower it would have been without this work. It looks like a quest for performance, but in fact it was a quest for efficiency, which is relevant everywhere.
The extra 200bhp it enjoys over the standard car is also the result of using the air and - a related science, this - attending to gasflow. The engine's internals are no different; it's been achieved by fiddling with turbos, intercoolers and the exhaust. So in effect it was there all along, which bodes well for the current output of 1.2-litre four-pot petrol engines.
Obviously, a top-fuel dragster can accelerate faster than a Veyron, which makes all this posturing seem misplaced. But a dragster usually has to be serviced after half-a-minute's use, whereas the Bugatti can be serviced like a normal car. Achieving that combination of performance and durability must surely have some sort of beneficial impact on my brother's new Golf.
But here's the big one. I may have hammed up the drama a bit for the telly, but there really is only one word to describe driving the Super Sport, even at over 250mph. The word is easy.
This is, when all's said and done, a conventional car built with normal car-building materials and techniques, and arranged like a normal car. If you can drive, you can drive the Bugatti. I believe that, technically, you could drive it on an automatic-only licence.
So: it appears to be a glorious irrelevance, but in fact it couldn't be more pertinent. I don't doubt that some miserablists will decry it as a waste of time and human endeavour, but the same people said as much of the Moon landings. Would you have them erased from history and get a refund?
Me neither.
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