Background
If you call yourself a car buff, then you already know Bugatti's fire breathing, 1001 horsepower (736kW), 1250Nm, 407km/h Veyron 16.4 is the second fastest car in the world — its title usurped by the 411km/h SSC Ultimate Aero TT in 2007.
With the mighty Veyron scheduled to end production, Bugatti couldn't put the beast to pasture as second best, so it built a better one: the 1200 horsepower (882kW), record-shattering Veyron Super Sport.
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(Credit: Bugatti)
In brief
Bugatti's engineers attacked the Veyron's 8-litre W16 engine with larger turbos (the Veyron has four of them), intercoolers and revised its engine tuning to give it an extra 146 kilowatts and a total of 1500Nm of torque. The company also gave the vehicle's chassis and suspension upgrades to handle the increased power and g-forces, as well as an improved aerodynamics kit.
For reasons only the good folk at Bugatti know, it also slathered the bottom half and wheels of the vehicle with a few tins of retina-searing orange paint. When the dust settled, the 882kW monster was put in the hands of French racing driver Pierre-Henri Raphanel, who averaged a Guinness Record grabbing 431km/h over two runs at Volkswagen's Ehra-Lessen proving grounds in Germany.
Bugatti will electronically limit production versions of the Super Sport to 415km/h to keep customers from disintegrating the tyres at ludicrous speed. However, that's still 3km/h faster than the Ultimate Aero TT, so the record of world's fastest production car will still belong to Bugatti — for now, at least.
Outlook
According to Bugatti, it will build 30 examples of the Veyron Super Sport, all of which will probably be spoken for by the time the vehicle makes its public debut at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in August. The company hasn't released pricing information, but if you have to ask you're not really in the market for one, are you? Oh, and it's not road legal in Australia as it's only left-hand drive. Again, not an issue if you can afford one.
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