You're gonna need a longer road.
The sad truth is that the Bugatti Veyron
16.4 is simply too fast for this world. You just can’t go cruising
around at something like 20 mph faster than a pole-winning qualifying
lap for the Indy 500. But if you must find a place to blast around in
one of these land-bound rockets, you could do worse than Eastern Cape,
South Africa, or at least the most remote portions of it. Here, termite
hills provide some of the only landmarks by which to navigate, and the
savannas and badlands are covered in a thick blanket of silence.
And
that’s exactly why we and a couple of Bugatti engineers have come here
for a final preproduction evaluation of the newest and likely final
variation on the Veyron 16.4 theme, the Grand Sport Vitesse. Where a
rear license plate typically would be found, the Vitesse carries a
yellow placard that reads: HIGH SPEED TEST VEHICLE APPROVED BY
GOVERNMENT. And as much as we might want this Veyron, we think we might
want that placard even more.
But we digress. The Vitesse (French for “speed”) is a combination of the two major existing Veyron variations: the Super Sport, which makes 1200 horsepower from its quad-turbo 8.0-liter W-16, and the targa-topped Grand Sport. Somehow, Bugatti resisted the urge to call it the Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Super Sport.
Our first encounter with the Vitesse is on
its approach. We hear it, a deep and distant rumble, before we see it.
It could be a brewing thunderstorm or a herd of stampeding elephants.
As soon as we make out two lights peeping from between the horizon and
the tarmac, the sound shifts to a powerful staccato of 16
pressure-charged cylinders. Just a few seconds later, we can feel the
air that’s being punched out of the way, and the engine’s sound changes
again, this time into an extremely loud, jetlike streaming as the
4400-pound missile rushes by.
Behind the
wheel of the white prototype is Jens Schulenburg. A Bugatti engineer for
10 years (yes, it’s been that long since the rebirth of the brand),
Schulenburg does the final quality check. At the end, he will give his
approval to what passes for “production” in this most rarefied corner of
automobiledom.
The Grand Sport Vitesse
has to prove, over the course of thousands of miles across Africa’s
quietest regions, that the giant W-16 fires up properly even when
drinking lesser-quality African fuel; that all the complicated
mechanical, thermodynamic, and aerodynamic processes still work
perfectly even in harsh conditions. Conditions including those to which
no Vitesse driver will likely subject his treasure, such as whipping up
dust while driving on gravel roads, along with the more likely
Bugatti-driver endeavors such as flying along at high speeds, repeatedly
stabbing hard at the brakes, and incessantly accelerating at full
throttle.
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