Simply Abu Dhabi XXVII

Its 420mm carbon ceramic discs worked in conjunction with a huge airbrake to arrest its speed and as it did so, blood rushed to my head so much that I saw spots in my eyes accompanied by a faint dizziness from the negative Gs. The brakes worked so well that I washed off more than enough speed so quickly I then had to embarrassingly accelerate just a touch again in order to reach the corner. Mindbending Bugatti Chiron 1 – Lame Motoring Hack 0 “You can’t play chicken with the Chiron as it wins every time,” a smug Wallace said after. “No matter how brave you think you are, you’ll always pull up short before the corner.” Unless you’ve driven a 1500bhp pro-modified-style dragster, which I have, or are a retired astronaut, which sadly I’m not, then you have no idea of the sensory explosion my brain went through in less than half a minute on a quiet day in the back blocks of Portugal. With apologies to Ferrari, McLaren, Porsche and Pagani, your LaFerrari, P1, 918 Spyder and Huayra BC do not even come close to getting an invite to this realm of supercardom. Heck, you guys are almost a Dodge Hellcat short in horsepower from even sitting at the Chiron’s table. Chiron of course is the successor to the hallowed Bugatti Veyron which, to be fair, had similar write-ups when it was released in 2005 boasting 1001bhp. It re-wrote history and until now has remained the top-speed benchmark supercar. So when Bugatti’s boss Wolfgang Durheimer said he wanted a successor that was “better in every respect,” you knew this was going to be something quite special. Nestled in the sill panel beside the driver is another start key, locked into place. This is the key which unleashes the full 420kmh potential ¬– but for us, and as a default, we had to make do with the one that restricts it to 380kmh. Eagle-eyed Bugatti enthusiasts may note that the Veyron set a world record speed of 431km/h, 11km/h more than the official top speed of the Chiron. Bugatti assures us that the speed limiter will be removed so that its test drivers can set a new benchmark, which some pundits indicate will be close to 470km/h in an unfettered Chiron in the coming months. Overall there’s a claimed 25% improvement in every respect to the Chiron’s performance over the Veyron including its drag coefficient, fuel efficiency and power. While the engine still reads the same in the spec box in terms of configuration, number of cylinders and capacity, its four turbochargers are key to its 300bhp boost over the final Supersport iteration of the Veyron. Being 69% larger than the Veyron, you can imagine the kind of lag these hamburger-sized turbos could deliver, so Bugatti offset them by having two blowing all the time that are fed by eight exhausts each. At 3800rpm a valve opens the other two to bring all four on song. These are fed by four exhausts each to deliver a linear wall of torque from 2000rpm to 6000rpm. Chiron has shunned any electrical assistance to the powertrain, so while it lacks the immediacy of take-off compared to hybrid supercars like the 918, LaFerrari and P1 McLaren, it more than makes up for it a split second later as the stopwatch – and your neck muscles – will prove. At its governed top speed, 1000 litres of air are fed into its ten radiators and intercoolers every second, while its water pump can fill an average sized bathtub every 11 seconds at 800 litres per minute and the oil pumps circulate oil at two litres per second. Thankfully it has a large 100-litre fuel tank, but that becomes academic when it’s drained empty in less than eight minutes thanks to its turbos sitting on 1.85 bar of boost which is the equivalent of 1300kg placed on top of each of its 16 pistons. After a while the stats become mind numbing, so luckily my co-pilot was the kind of person who can put that kind of engineering and performance into perspective in a way that only a man who has raced a 400km/h Le Mans Jaguar can.