The King is back: Veyron SS runs near 270Mph

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Yet again, horde displays his lack of anything resembling "a clue", apparently.

There are probably a hundred videos or more knocking about the internet of Chris Harris displaying skill behind the wheel that you, nor I, nor probably many others here will ever get anywhere close to. As Niky says too, he's not just a top journalist but he puts his money where his mouth is and races competitively too (as do many writers from Autocar/Evo).

Like I said, if he says the Veyron is better than all of those cars, I'm inclined to trust his judgement.

Certainly more than that of an over-opinionated and ill-informed keyboard warrior.
 
Yeah, that high speed run is impressive, it's just a pity that at night you don't get the same impression of scenery rushing past as you do in the day. Still, it's fun watching the speedometer climb almost as quickly as the rev counter...
 
So the guy is a midium race driver ok...

Top Gear?! From what i remember were the ones that said that a Peugeut 106 it corners better than a NSX?! Sure... You guys made your point :indiff:!


About the 8th place on TG track... why not compare to the lap times of a REAL race track, the longest and hardest in the globe, The Nurburgring:tup:!

1.5 million to go 400km but not that fast around a track... I love the car but not that much! ;)
 
I know the car is heavy, but still gets beaten by many on the track... I know it does a good job, but still it lacks performance for the stupidly price to pay.

You must not realize that you don't pay $1.4 million for the Veyron's performance. You pay for the engineering behind it. That's why VAG still loses money on them.
About the 8th place on TG track... why not compare to the lap times of a REAL race track, the longest and hardest in the globe, The Nurburgring:tup:!
Because there's no other lap time for a Veyron besides Top Gear, which arguably, is the best lap time to use in comparison because the cars on TG are at least all driven by the same driver (presumably).
1.5 million to go 400km but not that fast around a track... I love the car but not that much! ;)
Again, you don't pay for performance with a Veyron. It's like a Rolls Royce. You pay for the luxury & engineering behind it.

The Veyron is essentially, what a supercar Rolls Royce would be.
 
Well, diferent perspectives what a car should be! Either way a great car no doubt!
 
Or not. What the Veyron should be is what VAG intended it to be, which is exactly what it is. They always said from the outset that it wasn't built as a track machine, rather the ultimate road car. Which according to all the press, it is. What the ca should be is just that, what you would prefer the car to have been is an altogether different thing and subjective. The Veyron is more like a super GT than a traditional super car.
 
Read again... pfff
If you think the Veyron should be much faster on a track than what it is now, that's you not understanding why it's here to begin with.

This car was never built to be a hot lapper. If that's what you think $1.4 million should buy, then there's other cars out there for not even a quarter of the price.
 
Poor Ms. Shelby of SSC and Mr. Hennessey of HPE. Years of hard work and agony to beat the Veyron, only to have a few months of hurrahs and have their a$$ kicked. What a drama!
HAIL TO THE KING! :bowdown:
 
So the guy is a midium race driver ok...

He's been first in class in one series. And I don't think Walter Rorhl would settle for someone "midium" as a team-mate...

Top Gear?! From what i remember were the ones that said that a Peugeut 106 it corners better than a NSX?! Sure... You guys made your point :indiff:!

About the 8th place on TG track... why not compare to the lap times of a REAL race track, the longest and hardest in the globe, The Nurburgring:tup:!

And who's to say they were wrong? Top Gear, the show, may be pure entertainment... and the lap times are not an absolute indicator of ability, due to the infamously fickle weather in the UK and the fact that there have been a number of different "Stigs", but it's close enough. Because the Top Gear lap is short and repeatable, and the gentle run-off means that drivers can push the cars to their absolute limits.

A lap of the Nurburgring is one of the worst possible measures of performance. The straights are long enough that prevailing winds can change a laptime (for better or worse), the surface keeps changing (repaved recently), the traffic is terrible, and the fear of death means that many people aren't even driving more than 80% of what a car is capable of... even on a 'record' lap.

And there's a huge difference between some guy going out and doing one 'flying lap' (AutoMotor Und Sport's "Supertest") and doing a dozen laps or so (most 'record holders') or doing hundreds of laps (Nissan's GT-R 'record' ). Unlike Nissan, most people don't have a few months to spend idly sitting by the track trying to 'break' a record.

1.5 million to go 400km but not that fast around a track... I love the car but not that much! ;)

Anything that's faster than an Enzo, a Carrera GT, all the Porsches and a GT-R around a track is pretty fast. I still don't see where you're getting at. Price has nothing to do with lap-times. Otherwise, all those supercars would be faster than a Caterham around the circuit. And most of them aren't.

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I still don't like the Veyron. No matter how fast you are, you can't outrun ugly.
 
But the road limited ones will be limited to 257mph? So, you're going to be paying loads more than a regular, for a nice orange stripe, and 4 mph more?



Also, have Bugatti tested how the Veyron would stand up in a head on collision at top speed, like into a brick wall? Rich people will be buying this thing, rich people wasted on expensive wines and liquors, they should.
 
Also, have Bugatti tested how the Veyron would stand up in a head on collision at top speed, like into a brick wall? Rich people will be buying this thing, rich people wasted on expensive wines and liquors, they should.
Oh, there's a nice generalization. Because they're rich, they obviously buy alcohol and drink while driving. :rolleyes:
 
Hey... ooh... ooh... since a Corolla can hit 100 mph, let's see if it'll stand up to wall impacts at full speed. Because, y'know... moms are going to buy it... and we all know what Mom does in the kitchen at the liquor cabinet while Daddy is away... :rolleyes:
 
Corolla? Pfft...the mom car is a Prius. :p

Since they drink they'd might as well have no taste, right?

...Right?
 
Corolla? Pfft...the mom car is a Prius. :p

Since they drink they'd might as well have no taste, right?

...Right?

I don't think even a fifth of whiskey would make the Prius look sexy. :lol: The plumber maybe, but that's another story...
 
Also, have Bugatti tested how the Veyron would stand up in a head on collision at top speed, like into a brick wall?

Why don't they just test all cars at top speed? That way we would know how safe cars really are.

I don't think even a fifth of whiskey would make the Prius look sexy. :lol: The plumber maybe, but that's another story...

Speaking from experience?
 
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But the road limited ones will be limited to 257mph? So, you're going to be paying loads more than a regular, for a nice orange stripe, and 4 mph more?

That's simplifying it a little. Weight reductions, aero kits and even more exclusivity than a "regular" Veyron are also in the deal.

The top speed difference is largely academic, since few owners will ever get close to it. It does look good in the brochure, though.
 
Is it possible to de-limit a Veyron, like is it as easy as a standard luxury car and would it affect your warranty?

... talking like i'm buying one! :lol:
 
I still can't get over how the $20,000 tires have to be shipped to France (Michelin themselves, I'd assume) to be replaced. and mounted...Makes the 5000 mile, $3000 clutch replacements of your average supercar seem like cheap maintenance.
 
I suppose your average service for a McLaren F1 was about $37k and there are no doubt plenty of people who own a Veyron as well as an F1. When you've got that sort of money you probably spend that amount on quilted toilet paper. Hell, with that sort of cash you could buy the actual Andrex puppy to wipe your butt on. Tyres? Pfft, mere pocket change.
 
Sounds like it was quite taxing on him! Even if the tyres could be guaranteed up to 270mph those last 20mph probably wouldn't be a good idea :scared:

0-60 talks to Bugatti test driver, speed-record pilot Pierre-Henri Raphanel

Last week, Bugatti test driver, er, pilote official, Pierre Henri Raphanel set the production-car speed record in Bugatti’s new Veyron Supersports 16.4. The 1,200 horsepower, 1,106 pound-feet monster propelled Raphanel to timed runs of 265.9 and 269.8 mph on Volkswagen’s Ehra-Lessien test track near Wolfsburg, which according to the Guinness people, averages to a V-max of 267.81 mph. That’s more than enough to bring the title of world’s fastest production car back to the VW fold. We phoned the former F1 and Japanese touring-car driver to get his take on what it’s like to approach the 270 mph mark in a production car, why the forest is his friend and whether or not he’s up to try for 300.

What does going 268mph in a Veyron feel like?

It’s basically a mental exercise. Physically, you have to do nothing more than to keep your right foot flat out. But at that speed, if anything happens, you can be sure that you won’t be coming back to the pits to tell what was the problem. And that is what is making the pressure, the excitement. The night before I could not sleep because I was so stressed. When I woke up, I looked at the alarm [clock] and it said 4:27. And the next day on my first run I did 427 kilometers per hour. And two days after setting the record I continued to sleep badly because of the stress and the adrenaline and I was waking up at 4:26 and was like I was also cooling down and the speed on the clock was also slowing down.

As a driver, is there a difference between going 268 and going, say, “just” 250?

When you’re driving 250 in a Veyron, the car is completely solid, it doesn’t move and you can nearly do that with two fingers. When you’re trying to do the speed record, there is an interaction between the tarmac and the car that you cannot notice when you’re going 250. When you start to go 260, 265, 270 the car is a little bit following where the tarmac is telling to the car to go. And it’s a strange feeling because you are not really in control as a driver. You don’t know where it’s going to end up. You don’t have any interaction with the steering because it’s too fast and you don’t want to move anything. So it’s like an unknown situation because nobody has been there before, even at the factory in practice. It’s quite stressful.

That does sound stressful.

Also, where we did the run. [Ehra-Lessien] is in the middle of a forest. And there’s no space for anything to be even slightly wrong. It’s not like a salt lake.

Did you encounter anything unexpected during the record run?

For the world record you have to do two straight lines in both directions. At Ehra-Lessien, nobody has been driving on it the reverse way, so it was like a complete discovery for me and for the team. I only had three runs to discover that. You will tell me that you have nothing to discover because it’s only a straight line. Yes, of course, but the tarmac is reacting differently. It was actually much more difficult to make the first run, which was slower, in the wrong direction than it was to make the second run, which was faster, but in the normal direction of road use.

Also, when we were going the reverse way, we were facing a little bit of wind, which is why we couldn’t achieve the same speed as the other side. And at the end of the straight [I found that] if I was braking later, I would be protected [from the wind] by the forest. So I decided that I would put my braking point later, like 300 meters, just to arrive in this area of forest cover protected from the wind and I would get an extra one mile per hour. So I did that the day before and it was working, so I repeated that the next day. But also when I did that, because I knew that I was late in braking, I’d brake a little bit harder, which is very light when you go such kind of speed, and suddenly the car went from the center lane to the right lane. And I was like, not in control. And the forest was very close. So I think that one extra mile was because of me, and I’m quite proud of that.

Do you notice the extra 199 horsepower?

Compared to any other supercar in which you feel engine power going down and you shift gears, in the Veyron the power never goes down. It’s always there. With the Supersport, not only is the engine power not going down, it’s increasing. So the feeling of power is going up, the feeling of speed is going up. It’s just pushing away. It’s an amazing feeling.

How does the Veyron Supersports compare to other speed-record production cars?

People try to compare cars, to say, well this car is faster, more powerful, more something. The thing which is very different in Bugatti is that we’re trying to make things working together which are not supposed to work together. Which is to say, the fastest car in the world that can stay seven hours in traffic in first gear. Normally it doesn’t work together. And the same from the design of the car. Is this design made to go 268 mph? Yes, it’s going, but basically if you start from a blank piece of paper and you say I want to make a car going the fastest speed in the world, basically you will not choose this design. The design came first, and they had to give it to the engineer, who had to work around the design without touching it. That’s the story of the Veyron. And it is this combination that’s making a lot of engineering work, because you’re trying to achieve long life, quality, speed, luxury, easy to drive; you want to get everything and normally nobody can get everything. If you try to get all these things in the same car, it’s incredible. The Supersport will be a three-years’ warranty car. So it’s not like you buy a car then, ok, you use it and after one day everything is destroyed. And that’s where the engineering process is difficult and expensive.

With the Supersport the engineer said we need the design to follow our request in engineering – more power, more speed more torque – and the designer followed the engineering request in terms of downforce, cooling [e.g., those beautiful NACA ducts on top – ed] and those kinds of things, and they made the car. So it was a little bit of a reverse process than the Veyron.

The target for the engineers was to make a Veyron with more power, more speed, more torque. It’s a completely different exercise than if you say, ok I want to achieve just the world record, and you build a car with all the aerodynamics and the thinking in this kind of direction. The Veyron is an everyday car which you can drive as easily in traffic in first gear as on the other side, which you can go 268 miles per hour. With that car, with that engine, with that gearbox we did like 30 preparation runs around 260 miles per hour just to be sure. And this car will continue to be used as a test car. And I was saying to the [engineer] ‘But I will not get a new gearbox? A new engine?’ I would have preferred starting with something completely fresh, completely out of the box. But it is not a problem.

It’s the same thing with the tires. These are the series tires. [Michelin PAX run-flats, 245/690 R 520 (front), 365/710 R 540 (rear) – ed] When you’re doing this type of extreme speed, the life of the tire is very short, not just in terms of wear but in terms of structure. And the day before I did maybe five runs, and the next day, I had to use the same tires. And I was saying, ‘don’t you feel that we have to change tires?’ And the engineer said, no, we know we have some spare in the life of the tires, so we don’t need to change tires. For me, that was incredible, but also very, very stressful.

So what about 300 miles per hour. Are you down with that?

With the feeling I got last week, I will say, not for me. I think I gave everything that was possible.

If you could have any Veyron you wanted in any color scheme, which would it be?

You cannot compare the Supersport, I mean to drive it, that’s something that would not make a Veyron stand out, which is incredible. I always say the Veyron is like another planet. But now I’m out of words to explain what the Supersport is. In the Veyron we have a series which is black carbon, only 15 cars, black with the orange inside [Sang Noir -- ed] and the look of the black carbon, big wheels was the most sporty I have seen. That’s the one.
 
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Thanks for posting - amazing to hear the driver's experiences at those speeds, and how everything changes once you move above 250mph...
 
I wouldn't have thought it would make much difference going above 250mph but if this guy found it difficult with his experience in a Veyron maybe it's not going to be possible to top it.
 
I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to top it, but it would require a whole new car now. I think the Veryon is getting to the very edge of what it can do with the technology it has. A 300mph car would require a complete rethink once again.
 
I think the real achievement is to be able to do 250 with "two fingers". They make a car that can do 268 so that you can do 200 without thinking. What other car is described as easy to drive at 250 mph?
 
I guess so, there's always a way of engineering a solution to fix instability at high speeds...land speed records have been above this for many many decades.
 

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