Ben Barry interviews new Bugatti boss Wolfgang Durheimer in the new May 2011 issue of CAR Magazine. He reveals lots of detail on the new Galibier super-saloon, talks of the company’s plans and lets Barry and snapper Mark Bramley loose in a new Bugatti Super Sport. Watch the video above of photographer Bramley onboard experiencing launch control at the hands of Oliver Cramm (Bugatti’s head of quality control and stand-in test driver for Pierre-Henri Raphanel), and read Barry’s blog below.
A little while back I was being interviewed over the phone for a feature on Radio Liverpool, the purpose of which has since entirely slipped my mind. But I do remember the presenter’s opening gambit: ‘So Ben, you work for a car magazine,’ he said. ‘You must get to drive all kinds of interesting stuff.’ ‘Well,’ I confidently replied, ‘I’ve driven most of the cars that are on sale today.’ ‘Then tell me, what’s it like to drive that Bugatti Veyron?’ There followed a long uncomfortable pause and much stammering.
Tell the layman you’re a motoring journalist and, shortly after, they will typically ask The Veyron Question. But until recently the invites to drive the defining car of the last ten years had always avoided my desk, going to Georg Kacher, Chris Chilton, Mark Walton or Jethro Bovingdon instead. And that meant I always came up short in the eyes of all those average Joes who found out what I did. When, finally, I did get the invite to drive the Bugatti Veyron Supersport – a veritable Willy Wonka golden ticket of a car launch – it clashed with my trip to Australia to cover last year’s Bathurst 1000 race. Bathurst was good but, sorry Australia, it wasn’t Bugatti good.
I’m sure you’ll all be awfully relieved to learn that the stars aligned and I finally got my Molsheim moment with the May issue of CAR– it was new boss Wolfgang Durheimer’s first day at Bugatti – as well as at Bentley and VW motorsport – and I was invited along to interview him, plus drive the Veyron Supersport. In case you haven’t heard of it, the Supersport is a regular Veyron plus an even more sporting chassis and a couple of hundred bhp extra thrown in for good measure.
The Durheimer bit was fascinating – when you talk to people at that level, they have no-one else to answer to, so his answers were frank and revealing, where minions would have been cautious and evasive. Durheimer talked at length about the Bugatti Galibier limousine plus future Veyron replacements (note the plural), on his plans for Bentley, and of the future for all the key VW Group brands. That’s the bit you can read about in the May 2011 issue of CAR
The bit you can’t read about happened at the end of the day, when I got the keys to a black and orange Supersport. I opened the door, sank into its low-slung driver’s seat and started up the engine – all 16 cylinders and four turbos of it with its deep, lion-like pulses. Wow. Already I had the excitement and fear of driving something epically fast and expensive that isn’t yours and would be very bad indeed to crash.
Now, when you’re about to drive the Veyron, you’ve already been so beaten over the head about how fast it’s going to be that, actually, its awesome thrust is perhaps the least surprising bit. Instead, the things that struck me first were how easy the dual-clutch gearbox made it to manoeuvre at low speeds and how the paddles felt just like the ones you get on a Golf GTI. I noticed how firm the ride was, and how excellent the steering was – all lightness and swiftness and hydraulically assisted rightness. Then it was the body control; how together and flat and composed this 1.8-tonne supercar felt. It was unexpectedly nimble.
At first I just left it in auto, and I remember feeling unsure as to how much throttle I should use and what effect this would have – even the fastest things I’ve driven here at CAR, like the Porsche GT2 RS, the Ferrari GTO and the Lamborghini Murcielago SV, are a good 500-600bhp behind the Supersport. Couple that with auto mode’s kickdown and it’s difficult to mentally assess how much accelerative force you’re about to be subjected to. The best, I decided, was manual mode, with paddleshift gear changes ruling out unexpected cog swaps.
With a clear carriageway ahead, I selected third gear and put my foot to the floor – and there was something of a pause. Now, the Supersport’s turbos are a little bigger than the standard car’s, meaning they take a little longer to spool. It’s not a long wait – and the car is still piling on speed – but you’re expecting instant, gobsmackingly ferocious thrust, and it doesn’t happen, not immediately. But you know it’s coming, so you grip the steering wheel tight and hold on and sure enough – BOOM! The roar of turbos dominates, and you fire down the road so swiftly and gather speed so effortlessly that it genuinely requires mental recalibration and acclimatisation to work out where you need to focus on the road ahead simply because the distance is coming towards you so much faster than it ever has before. Then you click the paddle and it happens again as if drag resistance didn’t exist – it even feels okay to keep it pinned through tightening fast sweepers because this car is so aerodynamically stable. Then you see traffic and you just have to stand on the brakes – there’s no way any other motorists can be ready for your closing speed, and it’s just not fair to expect them to be. Thankfully, when you hit the brakes in the Supersport, it’s a drama-free experience – there’s little pitch, the pedal feel remains consistently firm, and the back end feels rock-solid stable.
So far, so predictable: it’s an otherworldly fast, unbelievably well-engineered supercar.
Then we turned off the autoroute and into the twisting hillsides that mark the Lorraine Alsace border. I was expecting the Veyron to feel too big and clumsy to work here, but it doesn’t. That body control, the sweet steering, the incredibly positive brakes and the stiffness of this car mean it actually flows neatly down tricky roads. And the awesome power makes it a real challenge to mete all the oomph out accurately, to work out how long you can hold the right pedal down for before you need to be hard on the brakes.
The one limiting factor was judging the width of the Veyron – in a left-hand drive car it was hard to assess how close i was to the right-hand side of the road – I ended up straddling the white line a little too often.
That said, I just wanted to drive and drive, relishing my brief time with the Veyron Supersport. Sadly, I had to give back the keys and jump in our – now leaden-feeling – Ford Kuga rental for the schlep back to the airport. Happily, I’ll never be lost for words on Radio Liverpool again.
