Bugatti Chiron
Fifteen hundred horsepower, and a cabin calm enough to hold a conversation in. That gap is what I like about it.
All the carsAn 8.0L W16 making 1500 HP, 1996 KG on the scale, a top speed of 420 KMH, and only 500 ever made.
Why this one
If the Huayra is a show, the Chiron is the opposite. It came out in 2016 as the car that followed the Veyron, built by hand in Molsheim, in the east of France, and named after Louis Chiron, a racing driver from Monaco who raced Bugattis in the twenties and thirties. The Veyron had already been the first road car past 400 kilometres an hour. The Chiron's job was to beat it at everything and still be as easy to live with.
The engine is an eight litre W16, which is really two narrow V8s joined into one block, with four turbochargers. At low revs only two of them work. Past a certain point the other two join in, and the car stops accelerating the way cars normally do. The cooling alone is a small engineering project: ten radiators, and a water pump moving hundreds of litres a minute through the engine, just to stop fifteen hundred horsepower cooking itself.
What gets me is how calm all of that is from inside. At normal speeds it's a comfortable, quiet grand tourer. You could drive it to dinner. The violence is completely hidden until you ask for it, and then the road ahead seems to fold toward you faster than your brain can process.
Nearly two tonnes is heavy for a car like this, and Bugatti never pretended otherwise. The weight goes into cooling and comfort, the things that let it cross a country at speed without wearing out the person driving. When you stop hard from high speed, the big rear wing tips up into the air and works as a brake.
Even the top speed is kept behind a door. The car tops out at 420, but only once you use a separate key that puts it into its top speed mode, lowering it and changing the aerodynamics. Without the key, it limits itself. I love that detail. The most powerful thing it can do is something you have to deliberately unlock. In 2019 a longer version, the Chiron Super Sport 300+, went past 300 miles an hour on Volkswagen's test track in Germany, the first time a car based on a road car had done it. Right after that, Bugatti said it was done chasing top speed records.
Bugatti for the menace means that gap between how calm it looks and what it can do. I find it more impressive than any car that shouts about itself.
