I say this, at the risk of sounding like a crusty old curmudgeon:
The Bugatti Veyron
The Bugatti Veyron is, once again, the fastest production car on the planet.
Bugatti says an orange-and-black Veyron 16.4 Super Sport achieved an average top speed of 267.8 mph at the hands of test driver Pierre Henri Raphanel. Stop and think about that for a moment. That’s more than 393 feet per second and almost 4.5 miles per minute. Even Bugatti’s engineers were surprised.
“We took it that we would reach an average value of 425 km/h (264 mph),” chief engineer Wolfgang Schreiber said in a statement. “But the conditions today were perfect and allowed even more.”
Raphanel made his record-setting run at Volkswagen’s test track in Ehra-Lessien, Germany, in the latest version of the greatest automobile ever made. He had one hour to make back-to-back runs in each direction. The speedo hit 427.933 km/h against the wind and 434.211 with it. That came to an average of 431.072, which by our math is 267.8 mph.
And that was more than enough to take the title back from Shelby Super Cars and the Ultimate Aero, which had held the record since peeling off an average of 256 mph in 2007. Raphanel set the record on June 24; Bugatti announced it on July 4. Bugatti says Guinness was on-hand to verify the record, and we imagine the guys at SSC will not take this sitting down.
As the name suggests, the Super Sport is a hot-rodded version of a car that already has too much of everything. The 16-cylinder engine has been tweaked and tuned with bigger turbochargers (four, count ‘em, four) and intercoolers. Bugatti says the engine is good for 1,200 horsepower and a staggering 1,106 pound feet of torque.
I’m sorry, but 267 miles per hour is just way, way, waaaaaay too fast. I mean, I am all for the idea of going fast; in fact, I love going to Milan Dragway here in Milan, Michigan. But for a street car, 267 miles per hour? Hell no. Too fast. Reason I say that is because if you happen to be in one these contraptions, and you happen to hit an inanimate object going that fast — forget calling the ambulance; call the farking morgue. Be sure to tell them to bring a big spatula, to scrape your greasy spot off of whatever you hit.
Do not misunderstand me; it is a nice car — To look at and say, “Yeah, I bet that thing goes really fast!” 😉