The 250 mph Aircraft Carrier That Lives in Your Garage
Bugatti Veyron Super Sport
Bugatti Veyron Super Sport
The Bugatti Super Sport is a 'supercar' made for adjectives and contradictions, demanding them, impossible to adequately describe without them; elegant but brutal, agile but welded to the road, docile in traffic but with a top speed of 256 mph. And a price tag high enough to make even a hedge fund manager think twice - between $2.4 and $2.8 million – but apparently worth every dime to the few dozen people who will ever own one.
It was typical over the marque's hundred-year history for Bugatti
customers to request 'special' versions of the cars with more horsepower or
exclusive styling. And it was such
requests from affluent enthusiasts around the world, many of whom already own a
Veyron, that led to the development of the extremely limited-production Super
Sport, an evolution of the 'standard' 1,001-hp Bugatti Veyron 16.4, launched in
2005.
The Super Sport is immediately distinguished visually by the richly-colored
carbon-fiber bodywork and a flat, aerodynamic silhouette that features enlarged
front air intakes and two NACA ducts set into the roof to provide extra cooling
for the 16-cylinder engine. The four
turbochargers have been enlarged to boost horsepower up to 1,200, with a
7-speed gearbox delivering power to all four wheels through an intelligent
all-wheel drive system that allows the Super Sport to achieve lateral
acceleration of 1.4G… well into race-car territory.
The interior is less of a fantasy space-ship than you'd
expect, the gauges are gauges and the layout conventional, but a high-style
aesthetic is apparent everywhere you look and everything you touch, from the
steering wheel to the starter button, feels like fine jewelry. It's an elegant cocoon of a space, one you'd
be content to just sit in… until a touch of the starter button conjures up the
immensely powerful Genie living in the carbon-fiber bottle right behind the
driver's seat. Then it’s a case of
making a wish, moving your right foot a few inches, and next thing you know
you're halfway to the horizon and hoping the local cops are off on a donut
break.
The acceleration is – back to those adjectives and
contradictions – prodigious, but in a very civilized way. There is no feeling of the car gathering
itself up for some mighty effort, you just turn the steering wheel, hit the gas
and its "Scotty, beam me up"… or forward, as the case may be. Cars on the highway become motionless obstacles
to slalom around, and you have to be going really fast into a really sharp turn
– or zooming up the tailpipe of an unmarked highway patrol cruiser - before
using the brakes even occurs to you.
And it's this not merely uncommon but unparalleled mix of concept,
capability, NASA-grade engineering and art-gallery style that allows Bugatti to
build and charge what can only be described as 'stupid money' for a car that so
thoroughly insulates you from both reality and physics that every time you open
the garage door your cell phone plays the theme from 'The Twilight Zone."
Bugatti has
a long and storied history of stylish, exotically-engineered, high-performance
cars, but the Super Sport takes the automotive concept to such extremes that it's
hard to imagine where they go from here.
It's not possible to justify the price of these cars vs. the time its
owner will actually spend driving one, no matter how great the genuine joy of
driving.
Putting it
in proper perspective requires that you consider it as an aircraft carrier that
fits in your garage… a complex and awe-inspiring device designed to project
personal, political and financial power into carefully-targeted areas. The ultimate tool to make sure you come out
on top in whatever deal is being made.
Then it makes perfect sense. And
if the nature of your deal is such that you need to influence more than one
person at a time, Bugatti has a 4-door version in the pipeline.
No comments:
Post a Comment