It’s been 15 years since the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 broke the 400kph barrier

Can you believe that it has been exactly 15 years since the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 became the first series production car to break the 400kph barrier? It only feels like it happened yesterday. The world’s first 1,000+ PS hypercar featuring an 8.0-litre quad-turbo W16 motor could accelerate from 0 to 100kph in 2.5 seconds. No other series production vehicle could accelerate that fast in 2005. It also had 1,250Nm of torque, a seven-speed automatic and permanent all-wheel drive. And it set a top speed record on Volkswagen Group's private Ehra-Lessien test track of 407kph.

Test driver Uwe Novacki - lead driving safety instructor of VW at the time, and a member of the technical development team - regularly drove at speeds beyond the 300kph mark but when he climbed into the Veyron 16.4 in April 2005, he knew that day would be different. "It was a great honour for me to be the first driver to attempt to surpass 400kph with the Veyron. I wasn't nervous before the drive, and I wasn't afraid, but I did feel respect. Even though I was used to driving regularly at high speeds, this speed range was a whole new dimension. No-one had experience of this", says the 71-year old today.

He added, “The car was very quiet, perfectly tuned, and I could immediately tell that the engine was really giving off a lot of power. I cautiously approached the speed range. On the first lap, I drove around the steep bend at 230kph which was too fast and the car became unstable. I took the next bend at 220kph and the car felt more stable. Before I came out of the bend, I accelerated as hard as I could to get the full 1,001 PS out of the Veyron’s engine. I was so impressed with how stable, effortless and safe the car felt at 400kph.”

At the end of the straight, it touched 411kph, but the record needed to be measured in both directions. Finally, 407kph was the value entered in the type approval documents which made the Veyron the world’s fastest series production car at that time. More speed records would follow. In June 2010, the enhanced Veyron 16.4 Super Sport’s engine now produced 1,200 PS and propelled the hypercar to speeds of up to 431kph. Behind the wheel was the French racing driver Pierre-Henri Raphanel.

In April 2013, the open-top Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse set another record: reaching 408.84kph, it became the world’s fastest street-legal roadster. Then in 2019, Bugatti was the first manufacturer to exceed the 300mph mark with the latest Chiron Super Sport 300+. At the same time, Bugatti set a new speed record at 304.773mph (490.484kph).

“It’s still an incredible achievement for Bugatti. The name of Bugatti will once again go down in the history books as the first brand to pass the 300-mile-per-hour mark,” says Bugatti president Stephan Winkelmann. And 15 years since that spectacular 400kph+ feat, the Veyron is still regarded as one of the best hypercars ever built.