We’ve driven both a standard Chiron and a later Super Sport, both on the road only, so there are only so many things we can tell you about the performance, but our first go was in a place where – how to say this? – we could take a certain number of liberties with its speed.
How fast is the standard Chiron? Very, obviously, but so are lots of cars. It’s the way the Chiron is fast that’s remarkable.
It’s not fast in a Porsche Taycan Turbo S way: the Porsche is immediate, getting up and going before the Veyron has decided which of its turbos to send air through. Nor is it Ariel Atom V8 fast, which is hairy and immediate like a superbike. It’s not even McLaren P1 kind of fast. The P1 has a torque dip-filling electric motor to get it going and, relatively speaking, a race-style engine, two-wheel drive and much less weight.
No, the Chiron has a far more literal interpretation of acceleration than any of these. There’s lag – quite a lot of it usually – while it inhales massively and, about a second after you ask it to, begins to push you along the road, in loping, increasingly urgent strides of noise and blur.
The noise that accompanies that is overwhelming – like standing next to an express train or hovercraft as it leaves a station or waterside. It’s not soulful, per se, but is clearly expensive, multi-cylindered, airy, fully lit, fully impressive. The Chiron spools and rushes and keeps rushing, with exceptional stability even as it passes 200mph, which it reaches incredibly quickly.
At 300mph, so Bugatti’s test driver Andy Wallace tells us, things get rather more hairy. Not because of aerodynamic stability but because the wheels become gyroscopes like spinning tops, and so Wallace was correcting steering corrections he had made only a few moments ago, because the wheels want to take on a path of their own choosing.
Bugatti’s test drivers tell me that even the standard car is still accelerating appreciably when it hits its 261mph limiter. I lifted off when I was disinclined to see the speedo needle raise further, at which point the Chiron whistled and exhaled a volume of air like the tube had blown off a bouncy castle. And at which point I exhaled too.
The accelerative numbers are astonishing regardless of model: 0-62mph in 2.5sec, 0-124mph in 6.5sec, 0-186mph in 13.6sec on the standard car; or 0-62mph in 2.4sec, 0-124mph in 5.8sec, 0-186mph in 12.1sec and 0-249mph in 28.6sec in the Super Sport.
Cooling is so good that the Super Sport could maintain its 273mph limited top speed, if you could find the right place to do it, until its fuel tank ran dry – which would take eight minutes.