The King of Road Cars: The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport (Part 1)
As you take a look inside the car, there is not really anything to make one think that this is a supercar. Sitting into the custom suede and leather seats, you grab the steering that sits in front of you with four chrome-plated gauges behind it. The center
console is made of carbon fiber and very clean looking. The only thing in the car that makes it seem more than it looks like is the backwards E and B on the steering wheel, Bugatti’s logo.
You see the big “START/STOP” button on the console next to the steering wheel and press it. The engine starts quietly and no differently than any other modern Honda, Toyota, or Porsche. With the car on automatic mode, you slowly press the gas to get the
car going. With an open stretch of road in front of you, you floor it and the car throws you back into the seat. Still no supercar quality, seeing as that can be done in anything with an engine. As you go faster and faster, you feel the front of the car lower,
and see a spoiler come up from the back of the car. That is the first thing you notice that makes it a supercar. When the car just won’t go any faster, you look at the speedometer, and your heart leaps into your throat. You are going 267 mph (431 km/h).
That’s what separates the contenders from the pretenders. The Bugatti Veyron EB 16.4 Super Sport (Veyron SS) is a technological treasure trove and the fastest road car in the world, with a top speed of 267 mph (431 km/h), which is restricted to 250 mph (407
km/h).
Designed by the German Volkswagen Group, the Veyron SS is named Pierre Veyron, who was a French racer. Veyron raced for the original Bugatti company and won the 1939 24 Hours of Le Mans. The Veyron SS was named the car of the decade, from 2000-2009, by Top
Gear of BBC. Aside from Bugatti, Volkswagen also owns Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, Seat, and Skoda.
The Bugatti Veyron started production in 2005 with the Super Sport version introduced not long after. The original Veyron was the fastest car in the world, until passed by the 2008 SSC Ultimate Aero. Bugatti then came back and introduced the Veyron SS, which
was faster than even the SSC Aero. The 2-door coupe is powered by a mid-engine W16 quad-turbocharged engine with a 7 speed DSG sequential transmission and permanent all wheel drive along with a bunch of technological advances to make it faster and controllable.
When Volkswagen Group purchased Bugatti in 2000, the boss at the time, Ferdinand Piech, had a designer construct a model of a car to his specifications. When showing it to the engineers, he said “This is what the next Bugatti will look like.” He then went
on to say “And it will have an engine that develops 1000 horsepower and it will be capable of 400 km/h.”
Volkswagen’s (VW) engineers didn’t see how it could be done, but went on to merge two V8 engines from Audi’s, which they owned as well, and created a W16 engine. On top of the 16 cylinders and 64 valves, the engineers added four turbochargers which, in total,
produced 1020-1040 horsepower.
But to cool a monster engine that churns out over 1000 horsepower, VW needed to harness the cooling capacity of 10 radiators. That’s right. 10. Four of the radiators are used to cool the engine, one as a heat exchanger for the turbocharger’s intercoolers,
two more for the air conditioning, another one to cool the transmission oil, one more to cool the differential oil, and one final one to cool the engine oil. That’s a lot of cooling.
The Veyron SS is a masterpiece of finely crafted material, technology, and power all in a neat package for an astounding $2.4 million US (roughly £1.53 million or €1.72 million). In the next article, we will take a look at the power behind the Veyron SS,
the 8.0 L W16 Quad-turbocharged engine.
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