Meet the world's fastest production car

FIRSTDRIVE BUGATTI VEYRON SUPER SPORT:Bugatti's beautiful new super car sounds terrifying, moves faster than any other production car and costs almost €2m – how could you not want to give it a spin, writes BEN OLIVER

SO YOUVE paid at least €450,000 – before tax – over the cost of the standard Bugatti Veyron for an extra 8km top speed. You are now part of a small group of 25 individuals who treat Top Trumps as a shopping list. Welome to the surreal world of the Bugatti 1200PS Super Sport owner’s club.

It’s probably your second or third Bugatti, after your normal, ordinary, 1001PS, €1.2 million 16.4 coupé, and your €1.4m open-top Grand Sport. If Bugatti is to be believed – and we’ve no reason to doubt them – its customers already have both. Of the 300 Veyron coupés built, just 25 are expected to be Super Sports, with the majority of owners residing in the US and the rest sprinkled around the globe, concentrating in Europe and the Gulf.

These owners will have already handed over another €20,000 to take your new car to one of Bugatti’s customer track days at the Ehra-Lessien test track in Germany, where the 9km track is one of the very few places on earth you can legally prove the Super Sport’s claim to be the world’s fastest production car.

So after your car has been meticulously checked and you’ve done your sighting laps with Bugatti’s pilote officiel Pierre-Henri Raphanel and you’ve inserted the secondary top-speed key into the slot in the sill and you’ve finally got your foot all the way in and held it there. . . what happens?

You run into an electronic speed limiter. Like on a Toyota Corolla. Okay, it’s a speed limiter that cuts in at 415km per hour, but it’s a speed limiter all the same; some geek taking remote control of your throttle and telling you that the Volkswagen-owned supercar brand isn’t prepared to shoulder the risk of you going any faster, regardless of how rich you are. The “standard” unrestricted coupé or Grand Sport will do 407km per hour flat-out. All that extra money, all that extra power, has bought you an extra 8km of speed. It’s just enough to recapture the title of world’s fastest production car from the SSC Ultimate Aero, which in turn justifies building this third distinct Veyron model, which in turn will help Bugatti shift the last of the 300 coupés it plans to build by 2012. And you bought one. How do you feel?

Actually, you probably don’t mind, because nothing much makes sense in the distorted world of Bugatti. Nobody needs a 400km per hour car in the first place.

The reason your car is limited is that the Veyron’s bespoke Michelin runflats – €20,000 a set – haven’t changed. If you started with a full tank of fuel and accelerated to the true, drag-limited v-max of 431km per hour the tyres would disintegrate before you needed to fill up; less than five minutes, Bugatti reckons.

That’s assuming you’d found a 36km track on which you could hold 431 km per hour for five minutes. VW understandably isn’t prepared to bet you can’t: some billionaire owner might just build one. Pierre-Henri was able to hit 431km per hour in a derestricted Super Sport because, as an employee, he is expendable, though we wonder if he was required to remove his €180,000 Parmigiani company watch first.

The standard Veyron already has more power than grip, the launch control system only letting through as much of the 1,250Nm of torque as the Haldex four- wheel-drive system can manage.

The Super Sport’s extra 250Nm only makes the problem worse, so it matches the standard car’s 2.5 seconds from standstill to 100km per hour time and only improves on its 0-200km per hour time by 0.6 seconds, now down to 6.7 seconds. It only starts to find grip beyond that, taking the standard car’s already-absurd 16.7 seconds 0-300km per hour time down from 16.7 seconds to just 14.6 seconds.

So what’s it like to drive? Well let’s start with the noise. It sounds terrifying; deliberately much louder than before, like two angry V8s in stereo, which is what it basically is. The car we are in is one of five “world record” specials finished in black and orange inside and out, and it looks a lot better than it sounds, though for €1.95 million (a “regular” Super Sport starts from “just” €1.65 million) you’d want it to.

Inside, all Super Sports get a suede steering wheel and a few other upgrades, although the cabin keeps its surprisingly simple layout and the same mix of flawless materials and build with the odd cheap touch; though how you’d make it feel like €1.95 million without a smattering of diamonds, I’m not sure.

You knock the stubby lever sideways into D and move off, the seven-speed Ricardo twin-clutch gearbox changing early and imperceptibly, the low-speed manners still polished, visibility improved by the new quarterlights and the ride still compliant despite the stiffer springs.

They have, however, made it much noisier inside too, and in an entirely good way. It’s worth breaking yourself in very gently with this car, spending an hour or so feeling it out if you haven’t driven a Veyron for a while, before you attempt anything more than half-throttle.

When you do, it is madly intoxicating; get deep into the throttle and there’s a big, loud bass induction suck, overlaid with an angry mechanical thrash and a whipcrack from the turbos as you lift off and they dump all that extra pressure. But you can only analyse this from the passenger seat, and then only just; from the driver’s, you’re too busy worrying that your blurred peripheral vision and machine-gun heart rate might be the onset of a panic attack. It is an entirely non-automotive sensation, and very nearly too much to cope with.

But is it actually any quicker? It’s impossible to say. The extra torque makes that magnificent gearbox even more redundant; in manual mode, it will change up at the redline but won’t kick down. Yet it will still provide devastating acceleration in any gear you choose.

What the Super Sport does is to stretch even further the Veyron’s weird contrast between its almost uncontrolled acceleration and the complete control of the chassis. The stiffer suspension gives less roll and even more precise, tactile steering. Privately, those Bugatti suits sniffily claim not to take any notice of uncouth, overtuned muscle cars like the SSC or the Hennessey Venom, which claims to be able to do 438km per hour but has yet to prove it. They say they built the Super Sport only because their customers demanded it. But secretly, they’ll be praying they’ve done enough, and that the Super Sport’s record will remain unbeaten until future road cars are rocket-propelled.

Its record is safe for now, alongside its position as the most inappropriate car built in the midst of a global recession and a battle to tackle global warming. It’s the new posterboy for the petrolheads, so make room on the wall.

Factfile

Engine: 16-cylinder 7,993cc putting out 1,200bhp and 1,500Nm of torque via a seven-speed DSG transmission that changes gears in 0.1 seconds

Top speed: 415km/h (limited)

0-100km/h: 2.5 seconds

0-200km/h: 6.7 seconds

0-300km/h: 14.6 seconds

L\100km (mpg): 23.1 (12.3)

Emissions: 539g/km

Price: €1.95 million before tax