Bugatti Veyron Super Sport: FHM Road Test

We take Rs 160 million of supercar for an afternoon spin.

It’s not every day that FHM is handed the key to the fastest car in the world and told to “have fun”. Yet here we are, in southern Spain, key to said car in our sweaty mitt. There’s a full tank of super unleaded and miles of empty, perfect highway at our disposal and, with a gulp and a quick prayer, FHM mentally prepares itself for the ultimate version of the ultimate performance car.

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The Bugatti Veyron Super Sport is the final hurrah for what many thought would be an impossible car to design and build. The original brief was very simple: it must be able to do more than 403kmph, crack 96kmph in under three seconds, look as sleek as the designer’s sketch and be as easy to drive as your gran’s VW Polo. The original Veyron, against all the numerous odds, emerged with mission accomplished.

With 1,001 hp at its disposal from its colossal 16-cylinder, quad-turbo engine, it became the world’s fastest production car, as well as the most expensive. Unbelievably, some owners started grumbling about how they wanted even more power and a less civilised experience behind the wheel. The Super Sport is for them and, with a price tag of around Rs 160 million, it had better be astonishing.

Three orders had been placed by the end of 2010 in India after it entered the market in June last year and many more are expected; proof that not everyone is feeling the recession’s pinch. For the money they get a motoring legend – full stop. Everything in a Veyron is built to be as close as possible to engineering perfection and the Super Sport takes that a step further. It’s a comprehensively re-engineered car and, to put things into perspective price-wise, Bugatti would need to charge double what these cost just to break even. We’ll never see the likes of it again.

In July 2010, a Super Sport set the world speed record for a production car at 432kmph, but customer cars are limited to 415kmph because the tyres just can’t cope with that speed for any length of time without exploding. Not that you could do it for long – at full pelt a Veyron will go through 114 litres of petrol in ten minutes. That’s 4.5kmpl, tree-huggers…

Power in the Super Sport is up by another 200bhp, which is basically like bolting on the engine from a Golf GTI. That you only get another 6mph out of it shows just how extreme the limits are in which this car operates – at these speeds even the air acts like a brick wall. And, with this in mind, FHM drops into third gear and puts its foot down.

The road, that looked so long and straight is destroyed in seconds. The acceleration is so brutal that our innards are trying to escape out of our back. There’s a furious roar from the 16-cylinder engine and it sounds like Darth Vader is back there too, sucking cooling air and spitting it out when we lift off the throttle. By the time fifth gear is selected, FHM is doing 325kmph. The Super Sport is just getting into its stride but we’ve realised a little bit of wee has escaped so have to back off from warp speed to preserve what little dignity we have left.

It is without a doubt the world’s most exciting car. If your numbers come up you’d better be quick before production ceases and the motoring world becomes a duller place.

Engine: 8-litre, mid-mounted, W16 cylinder, quad-turbo. Top speed: 415kmph. 0-62mph: 2.5 secs. Weight: 1,838kg. Price: Rs 160 million. On sale: Now

Supercars we love…

01 Lamborghini Countach

Designed in the late ’60s, the Countach still looks like it crash landed from another planet. Scary and difficult to drive, notoriously unreliable and expensive to run, it was the original bad boy supercar.

02 Ferrari 288GTO

One of the most beautiful cars of all time, the GTO was also the fastest car in the world when launched in 1984, with a top speed 71mph short of the Veyron’s. If you can find one for sale it’ll be worth telephone numbers because they’re possibly the greatest driver’s cars ever produced.

03 Porsche Carrera GT

Proof that Porsche can build a good looking car if it puts its mind to it: the Carrera GT is a four-wheeled mentalist. It sounds exactly like an F1 car when you put your foot down and will try to kill you at every opportunity. Brilliant.

04 Pagani Zonda

Pagani might be a relatively new name to supercardom, but company founder Horacio does have previous form, having designed Lamborghini’s crazy Diablo. It looks like nothing else out there and just ten are built every year. Properly fast, but completely reliable, it’s one of the all time greats.

From the March 2011 issue of FHM India.