The 16 Cylinder Bugatti Veyron
By James Grahame
The Sunday Times ran a piece on the Bugatti Veyron today. Bugatti has a tradition of high-performance vehicles dating back to 1901. Former VW boss Ferdinand Piëch is now at the helm, and his imagination is a little higher octane than most. The 1001 bhp Veyron can hit a maximum speed of 253 mph (407 kph), but don't count on living long enough to brag about it. Journalist Jeremy Clarkson of The Sunday Times sums up this £810,345 beast brilliantly:
"When you push a car past 180mph, the world starts to get awfully fizzy and a little bit frightening. When you go past 200mph it actually becomes blurred. Almost like you’re trapped in an early Queen pop video. At this sort of speed the tyres and the suspension are reacting to events that happened some time ago, and they have not finished reacting before they’re being asked to do something else. The result is a terrifying vibration that rattles your optical nerves, causing double vision. This is not good when you’re covering 300ft a second." [Vielen Danke to Professor VW for this link!]
Utterly, stunningly, jaw droppingly brilliant (The Sunday Times)