| Remember mum and her constant refrain never to judge a book by its cover? Hard to put into practice, isn’t it? The Bugatti Veyron for instance. I don’t know about you but ogling at her in magazines and on motor show stands I’d gotten it into myself that she looks, well, a bit soft. Fit to grace an art exhibition, to be the diamond in an automotive museum, but for the fastest car in the world you don’t want soft. You want angry. You want lines sharp enough to shear your finger by just staring at it, a nose so impossibly long and low that the rest of the car follows in a couple of days, vents and scoops so plenty that the very sight makes you break into a sweat. As a kid I had a Lamborghini Diablo poster covering half my wall and that was so raw, hard and edgy that no one would ever question its claim to be the fastest car in the world. It was almost as if they made it terrifying so that only the very brave would muster the courage to challenge its credentials. The Veyron is far from terrifying; standing here in the cold mist at Bugatti’s Molsheim works in France, the Bug actually looks inviting. It’s like the performance is so otherworldly that there’s little need to make her look like she’s just landed from Mars. Maybe it’s just me caught up in the heat of the moment but I can’t wait to hop in and max her out. But nobody hands over a supercar, much less a hypercar costing 1.2 million euros without a briefing and so I drum my fingers impatiently as Julius Kruta, Bugatti’s historian-in-chief, a slightly portly, slightly balding and very professorial German gives me the rundown. Never judge a book by its cover? When you’re being given the lowdown on the world’s fastest car by somebody wearing steel rimmed Gandhi spectacles and a shirt buttoned to the collar, you tend not to pay attention. Until, without preamble, Julius floors the accelerator. Mother of god! I’ve been at a loss for words before but not this time; this isn’t the time or place for it. It’s horrifying, the realisation that I won’t be able to convincingly convey just how other worldly 1001PS really is. Bloody quick? That’s how I previously described 100PS. Plenty quick? That was 150PS. 200PS was mighty quick, 450PS was thunderingly quick. While 500PS was ballistic. So 1001PS? Ballistic times ballistic? Ballistic squared? There really aren’t any superlatives left to describe what 1001PS can do to a road car. How rapidly it manages to spear a car down an empty road. Not that I profess any knowledge of it but I suppose being fired out of a cannon would come close to rivalling the sheer violence. A road that seemed straight suddenly develops a corner, the car that was but a speck moments ago is now right under your nose. It’s terrifying. Really, really terrifying. |
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| Bugatti Veyron Supercar Volkswagen Molshiem Piech 1000 bhp PS |
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