Chir Leader

The successor to the Bugatti Veyron has a simple brief: to be better than the Bugatti Veyron. Will 1,500hp and 1,600Nm be enough? Matt Prior finds out.

- Matt Prior

It’s just a car. That’s the thing to remember. Just a car, like any other: four wheels, some seats and a tank of petrol. It’s just that the Bugatti Chiron happens to be a car that’s able to do… what, exactly?

Well, some numbers, if I may. The official figure says the Chiron is able to do 420kph, but that’s misleading because it is both electronically limited and slower than the old Bugatti Veyron Super Sport was when that became the world’s fastest production car at 429kph. That had a mere 1,200hp. The new Chiron has 1,500hp to be getting on with. So it ought to go rather faster than the Veyron.

Especially given that the Chiron’s brief was very simple. The simplest that Bugatti boss Wolfgang Dürheimer – once head of Porsche R&D, but by dint of him being brilliant and several of his Volkswagen Group colleagues being suspect, now in charge of both Bugatti and Bentley – had encountered in his career.

“Be better than the Veyron in every respect,” it said.

Which means that, when Bugatti goes back to the Volkswagen Group’s Ehra-Lessien test track with the Chiron next year, to tell us exactly how fast it’ll go, it’ll be a bigger number than that official figure. Bigger than the Veyron Super Sport’s number, Dürheimer says, by a notable amount, although nobody at Bugatti yet cares to speculate how fast that might be. If it were 10 percent faster, and with 50 percent more power that’s not unreasonable, that’d be 480kph.