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New Veyron quickest car ever

Bugatti’s new Veyron Super Sports drives all four-wheels with 1 500Nm of rotational force. Speed records are a given.
Bugatti’s new Veyron Super Sports drives all four-wheels with 1 500Nm of rotational force. Speed records are a given.
If the standard Bugatti Veyron is quick, just how quick is the Super Sports version?

Well, thanks to the skill and bravery of Bugatti test driver Pierre Henri Raphanel we now know.

Some background information first, though.

The Veyron has sprouted an unusually frequency of special edition variants.

Pur Sang. Fbg Par Hermès. Sang Noir. Bleu Centenaire. Grand Sport. Grand Sport Sang Bleu. Grand Sport Gray Carbon. All the aforementioned are part of the dizzying number of limited edition Veyrons produced since 2007.

As Bugatti’s segment defining hypercar edges closer to the end of its production life cycle (in 2013), the company has done the expected and released its most ambitious Veyron special edition yet – the Super Sports.

Most hyperactive hypercar yet

The new Veyron Super Sports extracts 159 units of additional power form the 8l quad-turbo W16 engine, peaking at 895kW as opposed to the standard Veyron’s 736kW.

Rotational force swells alarmingly courtesy of the Super Sports trim too, from 1250Nm to 1 500Nm.

In order to showcase the impeccable engineering of its Veyron range, Bugatti took the Super Sports to parent company VW’s Ehra-Lessian high speed oval on Saturday to see how fast it would go.

With Raphanel at the helm the first production Bugatti Veyron Super Sports lapped the oval several times – in both clock- and anti-clockwise. Conditions were perfect with an ambient temperature of around 25-degrees and no wind.

Guinness Book of Records officials and representatives of the German Technical Inspection Agency (TUV) verified runs of 427.9- and 434.2km/h, collating to a new world record for production cars of 430.9km/h. The car's outright pace took even Bugatti's ambitious engineers by surprise.

"We took it that we would reach an average value of 425 km/h," explained Bugatti's chief engineer Dr. Wolfgang Schreiber, "but the conditions were perfect and allowed even more."

The Super Sports Raphanel piloted to Bugatti’s new world record will serve as the default specification for the first five production cars, although customers will have their vehicles limited to a top speed of 415km/h in order to prevent potentially lethal tyre warping.

Bugatti’s Super Sports will make its public debut at the Pebble Beach concourse show in August - and yes, the black and orange colour combination is not optional, it comes standard with the car.

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