Bugatti Veyron Super Sport is simply about owning the road

1.710264-1427870921 — Image Credit: Supplied

As the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport heads interminably towards the 300kph mark on the digital speedo and the traction control fights to rein in 1,184bhp of pure fury behind my head, I know it cannot get better than this.

This is a rare, exquisite taste of perfection, with a living, breathing 8.0-litre quad turbocharged work of art snorting in my inner ear. Intoxicating though the speed is, I have to constantly remind myself that the SS costs 1.6 million euros in standard spec and 1.95 million euros in special black-and-orange World Record trim that I'm driving.

But then they do say that absolute power corrupts, and I just have to feel a car that hits 100kph in 2.5 seconds, 200kph in 6.7 and 300kph in 14.6 seconds.

Then there's the rich tapestry of sound coming from the engine bay, not just the exhaust, with the pistons, bypass valves and turbos all combining in one orchestral movement. It's a thing of beauty.

Epic is an understatement

This is the fourth Veyron I have driven, which makes me something of a veteran, but there is no way to get used to this outrageous power and every time I lift off the throttle, the sounds of my own childlike giggles fill the cabin.

Because when you floor the throttle both time and space just disappear, the car roars, the windscreen simply arrives at the next bend and there's a sharp intake of breath from the engine and driver as the near stupidity of the last second's events hit home.

The Veyron does not squat, it does not wriggle, it just explodes down the road with pure, perfect, Teutonic efficiency. It is scary fast, but also perfectly controlled. It's a strange dichotomy that turns anybody, even a grandma, into the fastest driver on the road… Any road.

Traffic is cleared in moments — a downchange, a squirt of throttle — and they're a speck in the rear-view. And that reserve of power and 1,500Nm of torque means any visible road is a clear overtaking opportunity.

There's nowhere on earth you can use full bore acceleration for long, it's a sad reality. It's almost too much car for the public road and sits on the very limits of physics.

But then the Veyron is all about acceleration and braking, the mind-numbing power that can only be enjoyed in short, quick spurts. It is sheer omnipotence, if only for a few swift seconds at a time.

Admittedly I don't get near Bugatti test driver Pierre Henri Raphanel's best, because he stormed past 431kph on a closed course and retook the production car speed record that was stolen for the shortest time by SSC's Ultimate Aero.

The car is so much more than the headline numbers, though.

With legendary test and development driver Loris Bicocchi by my side, we're back to the old skills as we embark on our epic journey. The DSG gearbox sits in ‘Drive'; there is no semblance of a jerk from the twin clutch designed to handle the torque, nothing. It just glides down the gravel drive like a high-end saloon and on to the tortuous ripped up tarmac to start our blast.

Other cars would buck, grind and graunch, shaking vertebrae free as they go. Not the Super Sport.

It is built for the kind of client that doesn't want a go-kart or a road legal race car, it is on a higher plane altogether. I don't even need to tense on the steering wheel, the suspension squashes the topographical nightmare first.

We're doing stupid speeds for such confined and varied tarmac, but the car is utterly imperious. Somehow it tucks two tonnes of weight away in the bends, too. It just disappears as this compact hypercar dives to the apex.

There's no driving the Super Sport sideways on a public road — it's just too good for that — and the only time the four-wheel drive system feels even questioned is when all four turbos come on song at about 5,000rpm, and the engine does its best to immolate all four tyres simultaneously as 1,184 horses kick in.

No, the Veyron is simply about owning the road, knowing for sure that nothing can come close, on two wheels or four. And knowing that unless you're a certified psychopath and have gone in at a speed an F1 car would struggle with, the car will take the corner and come out smiling on the other side.

Monstrously wide Michelin tyres do an almighty job of holding the road and the horsepower, so the car can produce cornering and braking forces of 1.45g. Which is insane and well beyond what most owners will ask from their steed.

So, as I plough into a corner that would leave a lesser car on its roof in the roadside ditch, the Veyron just turns in. There's no kick through the wheel, no nervous moments at the rear, it just crushes the bend.

The Super Sport corners even better than the base car, thanks to the suspension tweaks that ensure the rubber remains in contact with the tarmac at all times. And while I couldn't detect a dead spot in the steering last time I drove, apparently it was there. It isn't any more.

Don't think this is just a tuned Veyron with 200bhp more and a few minor improvements, though. It's a ground-up rethink of the world's most complete hypercar and it's even kinder on fuel. Slightly...

There is a new aero set-up, including an extended rear cowl over the exposed engine bay, NACA ducts in the roof and a new front end treatment to get more air to the 10 main radiators. Under the skin the car gets four bigger turbos, revised cooling to cope with the W16, quad turbocharged furnace mounted in the middle, a new exhaust, and trick suspension with a bypass valve that improves the ride quality on high-frequency bumps.

Even the monocoque is revised with a lighter, more expensive variety of carbon fibre. So despite the extra power, the car weighs 50kg less than the old Veyron. It's not a huge saving and the Super Sport still weighs 1,840kg. But you'd never know it on the move.

And that shape is still unique, this is a total rethink of the supercar genre and the Veyron remains as fresh as the day VW first unleashed it upon the world in 2005. It is still the apex predator, the great white shark of the automotive world. It was VW's Formula 1 project for the public road and the SSC simply cannot steal its thunder.

That big boxer's nose and minimalist tapering sides seemed clumsy in the first pictures, but it's a shape that anyone who's driven it has grown to love. This is pure purpose, the symbol of engineering perfection, and although the aero changes have ever so slightly messed up the clean lines, we can forgive a company so keenly focused on the mesmerising drive.

Everyone has a favourite Bugatti fact, too, from the three days each car spends in the light tunnel to catch any imperfection in the paint, to the vast amount of Dh300 titanium bolts that are used and then thrown away before the final assembly. There are others too, like the fact that it will literally run the tyres down to the bones in 15 minutes of full speed driving, but it will run out of fuel in 12 anyway.

This car is a collection of mind boggling statistics, it is the benchmark in more or less every way. Of course in 50 years time the Veyron could take on a different hue: it will represent everything that was wrong with the age of consumption. So the next step for Bugatti must be a supercar that is more environmentally sensitive, if not entirely friendly.

For now the Veyron, and this Super Sport, achieved way more than Ferdinand Piëch could have ever envisaged when he laid down his conflicting and seemingly impossible demands for a world conquering supercar.

Free of technical regulations the firm could create the ultimate road car. It got Wolfsburg way more publicity than a Grand Prix entry and it's a real hotbed for technology: brakes and now dampers are just two of the innovations on their way down the pipeline to VW and Audi. The fact that each Veyron was made at a significant loss has been used as a stick to beat it with, but VW still signed off a fresh round of development work for just 30 Super Sports. The swashbuckling, boundary pushing marque is worth every cent to its staid German overlords.

The only criticism, if we can call it that, is that when the original Veyron went on sale the customers thought they had bought the landmark car. And now it isn't: Bugatti has beaten itself into second place by finding room to improve on perfection. It is unlikely to devalue the Veyrons already out there, but it would be a real ego popper to roll up in the old car, lord of all you survey, and see one of these parked at the Billionaire's Beach Club.

Many owners fixed the issue for themselves with an order for the new car and there are virtually no more build slots when this sells out. Bugatti will stick to the original plan to sell 300 cars and no more. 250 are sold, the 30 planned Super Sports do make room for an end of line open-top version, but then this is the record car, the big daddy.

Surely, then, this time, it cannot get better than this.

Tech sheet

In a highly unlikely event of finding two of them parked next to each other, you might notice that the Super Sport is 14mm lower than the standard Veyron — every little bit counts at 431kph. But it's not just a dropped suspension that improves the SS to beyond epic proportions. Bugatti worked on the engine, suspension, chassis and bodywork to get a record speed. Unbelievably, the standard car is so capable that the SS is fine with stock 265 and 365 wide Michelins, as well as 400mm front and 380mm rear brakes, with eight and six cylinder callipers respectively.

Rcord run

On July 3, at Volkswagen's Ehra-Lessien proving ground, Bugatti's test driver Pierre Henri Raphanel pushed the Super Sport down the 9km straight to a speed of 431.072kph. The facility also features around 100km of private roads; ultimate bug heaven...

Perfection made better

1 Engine capacity is exactly the same as always, at 8.0-litres in a W16 arrangement. But the SS produces 197bhp more than the base Veyron, thanks to larger turbochargers and intercoolers.

2 Engineers tweaked the chassis to cope with the boosted power, adding stronger stabilisers and new shocks.

3 For top speed runs — customer Super Sports are limited to 415kph, although they're all the same spec as the record-breaking car — the body needed slight aerodynamic fine tuning. NACA ducts are integrated into the roof to feed the ravenous engine which needs 45,000-litres of air every minute. At the front, Bugatti enlarged the air intakes and added a double diffuser at the rear with a centrally arranged exhaust.

RIVALS

Koenigsegg Agera
This outlandish Swede is probably the nearest thing to the Veyron in terms of engineering and build quality. The Agera does 0-100kph in 3.1 seconds, and tops out at just less than 400kph but it manages 1.6g lateral force.

SSC Ultimate Aero
Yes, so this is the old one, but it's also the one that took the Veyron's top speed crown, managing around 410kph. Not even close to the current Super Sport record though, so SSC is building the next Aero with over 1,200bhp and half-a-tonne less weight than the Bugatti. The battle rages on...

Specs & ratings