Bugatti Chiron First Drive Impressions

You don’t have to be a car expert to be able to set apart from other the cars that are really the best.

Whether you realize that they are better because they look better or can be driven faster really isn’t important, the thing is that you can spot them from a mile away and know they are incredible even if you’re not sure what kind of car they are.

Bugatti has been a household name when it comes to expensive and extraordinary supercars for a very long time now and every single car they release is always better than the previous one.

The same goes for Bugatti Chiron, truly a gem of a car.

According to forbes.com, when the Bugatti Chiron co-driver, 1988 Le Mans winner Andy Wallace, turned loose the 1500 horsepower W16 engine to help acclimate my senses before taking the helm, I felt like I was strapped spread eagle on the face of a meteor hurtling through the heavens.

Chiron is the fastest and quickest in a straight line, and the most powerful, docile, civilized, luxurious, and artistic hypercar ever—gasoline, hybrid or electric.

It’s a bit much coming from a journalist interloper, but if $3 million for a car doesn’t cause a blink or stammer, I highly recommend Chiron as a lifetime achievement award.

Bugatti has accepted requisite hefty deposits on more than half the planned production run of 500. Bugatti will deliver perhaps 70 of these 261-mph bolides in 2017.

In the aggregate 20 or so seconds I invested completing three full-tilt acceleration runs from standstill to just shy of 130 mph—there wasn’t enough pavement or sightline to go significantly faster without being stupid—Chiron transformed my thoughts on Bugatti from quizzical to convinced.

Each time I stabbed the throttle I hit 128-129 mph in less than seven seconds, no sweaty death grip on the carbon-and-leather wheel, not a single chirp from any of the four monstrous Michelin tires, no great physical or mental effort required.

Head and spine properly positioned to land squarely in the butter-soft leather of the seatback, I experienced Chiron’s ability to suck points on the distant horizon into its horseshoe snout.

To outdo Chiron, one needs a serious American drag car that is only nominally road-legal, and such cars are single-purpose sleds always on the edge of implosion, not silky luxury sports cars for well-bred gentlemen.

Chiron engineers and designers gathered all the lessons-learned from its predecessor, the Veyron, to create a completely new car.

I spent an hour grilling a Bugatti engineer one-on-one (he started his career creating fast bikes with BMW Mottorad) and another half-hour in pleasant conversation with Achim Anscheidt, La Maison Bugatti’s cerebral chief designer.

Chiron is not a computer tube evolution of Veyron, though Chiron adheres to a similar engineering brief and fills the same market space.

Veyron and Chiron share almost no parts. The entire engine, gearbox, and aerodynamic package had to be rethought to add 500 horsepower while keeping the engine reliably cool, a challenge that would sweat bullets out of engineers at JPL, NASA and Lockheed-Martin.

Blendline between functional demands of a 1500-horsepower engine and 21st Century Art Deco design is elegant to the millimeter.

Chiron is cohesive in its human factors, aerodynamics, cooling, performance, everything. My six-three frame settled perfectly into the cockpit, plenty of head, shoulder and leg room, though my size 13s required careful placement.

Chiron proved docile as a lamb, just another sexy sports car for impressing a dinner date while toddling down to the local bistro, but tramp the throttle and you’re riding the meteor, singeing the very atmosphere. Wallace and the other Bugatti folks call it “unleashing the beast.”