LUXURYMOTORS Supercar Survival III.Bugatti's ultimate supercar is the ultimate marketing exercise, writes NICK HALL,but begs the question: where to next?
THERE IT was, in all its glory, as we rounded the slab sided grey monolith that houses its construction in Molsheim, France. A testament to the temples of consumption, power, speed and even greed: the Bugatti Veyron Bleu Centenaire.
This €1.3 million special edition Veyron, effectively a standard car with a clever matte and gloss paint job, was commissioned to celebrate the Centenary of Bugatti and was unveiled at Geneva before a Middle Eastern client snapped it up. But with the changing economic and environmental times, Bugatti will have to reinvent itself once again if there is to be another centenary to celebrate, or even another decade.
VW brought back the Bugatti name in a blaze of glory in 2000, when VW Chairman Ferdinand Piech promised the fastest, most powerful and expensive car we’d ever seen. One of the greatest names in motoring history, founded on Ettore Bugatti’s racing cars that swept the field in Grands Prix, would return as a futuristic vision of the ultimate supercar.
Years of pain followed and the frightening expense of taming 1,000bhp and producing a car that doesn’t simply explode sent VW’s crack engineers to the point of madness.
Yet finally a landmark car emerged that most agree will never be bettered. An eight-litre engine that, it’s largely agreed, dishes out far more than the 1001PS quoted, four turbochargers, 10 radiators, the biggest tyres, the biggest ceramic brakes all joined forces to create a car that could blast through the 100km/h mark in 2.5 seconds and on to more than 407km/h – even in Top Gear slow coach James May’s hands.
In the year 2000, the height of consumer madness, the Veyron was the perfect vehicle for VW’s engineering skills. Now the world is a changed place, the global economy is in the toilet and the environment is at the forefront. The Veyron suddenly seems as culturally relevant as a travelling minstrel show and Krepa admits that, had the board met today to discuss this extravagant project, it simply would not have happened. But we should all rejoice in the fact that the Veyron got the green light in time, because this is a landmark car and in many ways created a new precedent for the VW group.
Critics laugh at the amount VW spent on this car – they point to the rumoured €5 million spent on each and every €1 million car.
Yet Toyota, BMW, Renault and more spend hundreds of millions of euro to finish second, third and occasionally not at all in Formula One. And they are so far removed from the cars we drive that it could be considered a near pointless marketing exercise.
With the Veyron, VW created a roadgoing F1 project, a hothouse of their best minds, given a series of technical challenges that the world dubbed impossible. The Veyron is perhaps the ultimate marketing exercise, rather than a vanity project, and showed just what could be done with the petrol-powered supercar. They have won their own F1 World Championship with no competition at a rumoured cost of €1.5 billion, garnered headlines around the world and cemented the VW group as the ultimate engineers in the supercar world. That is good value.
But creating a machine that renders all comparisons pointless creates the problem, what to do next? Having conquered the world, VW could simply close Bugatti, and that is one rumour doing the rounds.
But not only are they investing heavily in restoring the site, which suggests that isn’t happening, that would also leave VW with a long lasting problem. In about 50 years’ time, the Veyron could well represent a towering technical achievement, but it will also be an icon of everything that was wrong with the oil-burning age. The long-lasting memory of the Bugatti revival will be a filthy demonstration of pure consumption and pollution with all the numbers to prove it. That will reflect on the VW group, and just isn’t on.
And there’s no point trying to go further with an internal combustion engine – there is nothing left to prove. With such emphasis on diesel within the VW/Audi group, even at Le Mans, that’s a distant possibility. But again it could only smash the petrol Veyron into submission – there is no other rival – and so could prove a counter-productive stopgap.
I’ll confidently predict there will be another Bugatti, but it will be as new and unique as the Veyron was when it finally broke cover just three years ago. And it will be a leaner, cleaner car powered by alternative fuel.
“We’ve gone as far as we can with the internal combustion engine,” admitted Krepa, who would not be drawn on the other possibilities. But he hinted at an announcement later this year, that will start a whole new dawn for Bugatti, and the first step on a path that will see the greatest car company on Earth celebrate their bi-centenary with another ludicrously expensive special edition of the most advanced car on Earth.
It will be as far ahead of the Veyron as the 16:4 is ahead of the rickety creations that Bugatti himself sold to gentleman racers 100 years ago, if not in terms of pure speed then certainly in environmental awareness.
I never did get that power bar right round to 1001, either, but it was close enough to know that this is as good as engineering gets – the best petrol-engined car we will ever see. And now I, like many, cannot wait to try the same fruitless mission with whatever they come up with next.