The Bugatti Veyron needed a special key before it would reach full speed
Driving a Veyron at its absolute limit meant stopping the car, turning a dedicated key beside the seat and waiting for a checklist to confirm the machine was ready. Only then would it drop closer to the road and seal its air intakes, allowing speeds above 400 km/h while gulping air faster than a person breathes in four days.
Volkswagen bought the right to the Bugatti name and logo in May 1998 and quickly showed a run of Giugiaro concept cars with a W18 engine. A fourth, styled under Hartmut Warkuß and revealed in Tokyo in October 1999, carried the Veyron name, and by 2000 the design had switched to the W16 layout used in every production car. Volkswagen approved production in 2001, but technical problems pushed series building back to September 2005. The name honours Pierre Veyron, a Bugatti engineer and driver who shared victory at Le Mans in 1939; the EB stands for Ettore Bugatti, and 16.4 for sixteen cylinders and four turbochargers.
That engine is essentially two narrow V8s joined together, displacing eight litres and certified at 1,001 metric horsepower. A seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox from Ricardo shifts in under 150 milliseconds, and a replacement costs just over 120,000 dollars. Michelin built run-flat tyres for the car at 25,000 dollars a set, and fitting them to the wheels could be done only in France.
Normally the top speed is capped at 343 km/h. In the special mode the ground clearance falls from 12.5 to 6.5 centimetres and the rear spoiler tucks away. German inspectors averaged 408.47 km/h on the Ehra-Lessien track in April 2005, and James May nearly matched it for Top Gear the next year, reporting that the car only wobbled when the air brake flicked up. That rear wing snaps to 55 degrees in 0.4 seconds and alone supplies roughly the stopping force of an ordinary hatchback.
The Super Sport raised output to 1,200 metric horsepower, and on 4 July 2010 test driver Pierre Henri Raphanel averaged 431.072 km/h over two runs to reclaim the production-car record. Regular Veyron production ended in late 2014, and Top Gear later named it the car of the decade.
Source: Bugatti Veyron
