Trees. Sun. Bridge. House. Guardrail. The Sicilian piedmont blurs in one long incomprehensible gout of liquid reality...treesunbridgehouseguardrail... The Bugatti Veyron bellows at 205 mph down the island's main autostrada. A deep aortic throb registers between my shoulder blades. I haven't blinked for, like, 10 minutes — I'm Keir Dullea in 2001. The truth is, I've driven this fast before, but never in a street car, never on a public road, and absolutely never on a cracked, sun-buckled hunk of weaving motorway like this. If I crash, the Sicilian highway department can expect a very strongly worded letter from me.
In the passenger seat, the Veyron's chief engineer, Dr. Wolfgang Schreiber, natters on about the supernumerary challenges involved in building this $1.7 million supercar, officially the fastest production automobile in the world: the 12 radiators, the 16 cylinders, the four turbos, the 1,000-plus horsepower, the seven-speed double-clutch transmission, the endless calculations and aerodynamic refinements that keep this beautiful, wind-glossed capsule from flitting off the road in a fit of turbulence. I mention that it is quite amazing that two people can even converse in a car that's blitzing the atmosphere at 200-plus mph, kind of like having cocktails in the middle of a cyclone. "We worked very hard on cabin noise," says Herr Schreiber, plainly glad I've noticed. Then, looking at the pockmarked road ahead, he says, "Here, now is the time for maximum speed."
I glance at the alloy-bezel blackface gauge indicating reserve horsepower. I have another 500 hp available, approximately one whole Dodge Viper. This hardly seems possible. Tightening my grip on the hand-stitched leather wheel, I roll on the throttle. Then the car does an unexpected and celestial thing. It downshifts. At over 200 mph, it downshifts from seventh to sixth gear, and as it does an eerie force is summoned from mysterious precincts within the enormous eight-liter engine. My breastbone gets heavy against my lungs. The landscape carousels a twitch quicker. Two-ten, 215 mph. Oh, yes, this car is fast.
As a peddler of automotive bombast at the Los Angeles Times, I always welcome the chance to enthuse and hyperbolize about a powerful sports car — It is to normal cars what a horny Viking raiding party is to Oprah's Book Club! — that sort of thing. But in the case of the Bugatti Veyron, words fail me. So let's look at some of the car's signature numbers: zero to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds; zero to 253 mph in a mind-bending 53 seconds; and in a panic braking maneuver, 253 mph to zero in 10 seconds. Imagine a Japanese bullet train pulling into the station at top speed. "My philosophy is that you should be able to brake better than you can accelerate," Schreiber says.
Beats the hell out of existentialism.
Flash. It's two years later, November 2007. There's unease in Molsheim, a dully fastidious village about 20 minutes from Strasbourg, in the Alsace region of France, and the ancestral home of the Bugatti company. Even in a world awash with petrodollars and hedge fund billionaires, the Veyron has found only about 180 buyers for the projected 300 to be built. The Veyron project — named for Bugatti's Le Mans–winning driver, Pierre Veyron — is estimated to have emptied more than half a billion euros from the coffers of VW Group, which resurrected the storied French marque a decade ago. And for what? As Ettore Bugatti himself found out in the 1930s with his Royale project — a stupendous ultra-luxury locomotive — these kinds of cost-is-no-object performance pieces almost never make any money. (See Porsche Carrera GT, Mercedes-Benz's SLR McLaren or Maybach, et al.)
