Loved these quotes from the article...
"...The Veyron accelerates to 60 mph in 2.1
seconds, faster than a Formula 1 car..."
and
"...At that speed, the tires would begin to
soften in about half an hour. Fortunately, at top
speed, it runs out of gas in 12 minutes. "It's a
safety feature," Wolfgang Schreiber, the Veyron's
chief engineer, says with a smile..."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-et-bugatti10dec10,1,1258111.story?coll=la-home-nation&ctrack=1&cset=true
253 MPH and Still a Little Late
The Bugatti Veyron is a superlative on wheels.
But for VW, which spent six years and about half
a billion dollars, it may be obsession run wild.
By Dan Neil, Times Staff Writer
PALERMO, Sicily - At 200 mph, the Bugatti Veyron
pounds a beautiful, howling hole in the
sweltering haze hanging over the motorway.
This, the fastest production car in the world, is
broad and low, an enameled ellipse in a spiffy
two-tone paint scheme. By comparison, its
now-vanquished supercar rivals, such as the
Ferrari Enzo and McLaren F1, are all edges and
blades and angles, like F-16 fighter planes or Japanese stunt kites.
The Veyron is not, strictly speaking, the fastest
car I've ever driven, but the one that's faster
had a jet engine and a parachute. The guardrail
to my right is blurred into a dirty stream of
quicksilver. Houses fly by before my brain has
time to register the word "house."
About nine seconds ago, I was dawdling at 100
mph. Then I squeezed the throttle. The
seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox clicked twice,
the engine took a huge lung-busting toke of
atmosphere through its twin roof snorkels - and
then things got interesting. Something slammed me
from behind and I realize it was the seat.
Captain, it appears we have fallen nose-first into a wormhole.
Two-hundred mph. And I'm not even in top gear.
house.
A superlative on four wheels, the Bugatti Veyron
16.4 is not only the world's fastest production
car but also the most expensive: $1.25 million
before taxes and richly deserved gas-guzzler
penalties. Also, the most powerful: Its 8.0-liter
16-cylinder quad-turbo engine produces about
1,000 horsepower and churns it through a
high-tech all-wheel-drive system and gob-smacking
foot-wide tires. Also, the quickest: The Veyron
accelerates to 60 mph in 2.1 seconds, faster than
a Formula 1 car, but then it's just getting
started. In 20 seconds - about the time it takes
a fast reader to get through this paragraph - it
reaches 200 mph. In 53 mind-blowing seconds, the
Veyron reaches its marquee speed: 253 mph.
At that speed, the tires would begin to soften in
about half an hour. Fortunately, at top speed, it
runs out of gas in 12 minutes. "It's a safety
feature," Wolfgang Schreiber, the Veyron's chief engineer, says with a smile.
The Veyron, which is making its way to the first
customers this month, is many things: It's a
mirror held to the automobile industry's near
past of irrational exuberance. It's a monument to
the ego of Ferdinand Piech, former chairman of
Volkswagen AG, which purchased the Bugatti name
in 1998. And it represents a defining moment in
the history of the automobile, the likely
pinnacle of production-car cost and performance.
Six years and an estimated half a billion dollars
in the making, the car trades on one of the most
famous names in motoring. Revered among
aficionados, Bugatti dominated Grand Prix racing
for a time between the world wars and built
sinfully beautiful works of transportation art,
including the Type 57SC Atlantic and Bugatti
Royale, which holds the Guinness record for the
highest price paid for a car - $15 million.
Volkswagen was in tall cotton in 1998. Led by
Piech, a prodigious engineer-designer and
grandson of Porsche founder Ferdinand Porsche,
the company went on a buying spree, acquiring the
Italian carmaker Lamborghini, the British luxury marque Bentley and Bugatti.
This in itself wasn't unusual. The decade saw
many storied firms absorbed by larger car
companies: Ford, for instance, purchased Aston
Martin and Land Rover, and BMW acquired
Rolls-Royce. Volkswagen, riding a crest of record
sales, had the money; its after-tax profit in 1998 was $1.2 billion.
Bugatti, however, seemed peculiarly cursed. It's
doubtful that even Ettore Bugatti, the
artist-engineer who founded the company in 1908,
made money on the venture. In 1988, an Italian
entrepreneur, Romano Artioli, purchased the
rights to the name and built a state-of-the-art
factory in Campogalliano, Italy, to produce a
supercar called the EB110. Less than a decade
later, in 1996, Bugatti was again bankrupt. What
VW purchased amounted to no more than a glorious scrapbook.
Piech - unyielding and autocratic but possessed
with a vision as pure, in its way, as that of
Ettore Bugatti - promised that the new Bugatti
would be VW's crown jewel, the ultimate in
automotive technology. It was he who set the
well-rounded parameters for the Veyron: 1,000 hp
and faster than 400 kilometers per hour (248
mph). Such a car would eclipse the McLaren F1's
seemingly unassailable record of 240.1 mph.
"Piech was maniacal," says Peter DeLorenzo, an
industry analyst and founder of
Autoextremist.com. "He was one of the great
engineering geniuses of the late 20th century,
but he proved that brilliance on the engineering
side doesn't necessarily transfer to managerial vision."
Indeed, Volkswagen AG is a company in crisis,
beset by plummeting market share around the
world, high labor costs and - particularly in the
crucial United States market - a dearth of new
products in its bedrock brands such as VW. In
addition to other problems, the company is
embroiled in a sex scandal involving allegations
the company paid for "sex junkets" for its labor
representatives. Last week on the Frankfurt stock
exchange, a VW share hovered around the 45 Euro
mark, less than half its peak value in 1998.
Piech was replaced as chairman in 2002 by Bernd
Pischetsrieder, former chief executive of BMW.
By most accounts, Piech's failing was of the
classical Greek hubris variety. "He was obsessed
with putting VW onto a par with Ferrari," says DeLorenzo.
Piech's effort to drive the VW brand upscale
produced the VW Phaeton, an eight- or 12-cylinder
luxury sedan that costs as much as six figures in
the United States (the company announced last
month the Phaeton model was being discontinued).
The Phaeton directly competes with another of VW
Group's offerings, the Audi A8 sedan.
"I think [Piech's] crazy," says Mike Kamins, a
professor at USC's Marshall School of Business.
"The Phaeton just didn't make any sense. VW
doesn't have that image and you can't change an
image that fast. People ask what you paid for
your car and you say, '$100,000,' and they say,
'Well, what kind of Porsche is it?' You say, 'No,
it's a VW.' They say, 'What, are you stupid?' "
VW's bigger problem, analysts say, is that during
Piech's reign it took its eye off developing its
core product - cars like Golf, Jetta and Passat -
while diverting engineering resources to exotica
like the Phaeton, the new Bentleys, Lamborghinis and, of course, the Veyron.
"I think the Bugatti venture gets lost in the
rounding error for the overall VW Group," says
Jay N. Woodworth of Woodworth Holdings Ltd. "What
really matters is that the successor to the main
VW car lines has been delayed."
The result is that the Veyron - named after one
of Bugatti's most successful race drivers, Pierre
Veyron - has been born into a world very
different from the one in which it was conceived.
Other super-exotics, including Mercedes-Benz
Maybach limousines, the SLR McLaren and Porsche's
Carrera GT, haven't sold as briskly as was hoped
when they were drawn up in the bubbly days of the late 1990s.
And, it should be noted, the executives who lead
German car companies - people like Piech and
Pischetsrieder, former DaimlerChrysler chief
Jurgen Schremp and others - are intensely
competitive, and the Veyron project had an almost
irresistible logic for Europe's biggest automaker.
"I don't think it's dramatically different than
the relationship among auto executives at country
clubs at Detroit," Woodworth says.
Whatever the cause, the result is this artifact
called the Veyron, a heroic and historic automobile.
Meanwhile, back at 200 mph, technical director
Schrieber is urging me on. "This makes fun, doesn't it?" he asks.
The main autostrada of Sicily is not exactly
glass-smooth, nor particularly straight, and as I
bend the car into a sweeping right-hander at
about 205 mph, a flock of butterflies the size of
vampire bats alights in my solar plexus. The
suspension is working hard and I can feel the
static of the tires coming through the
stitched-leather steering wheel. I am very
curious to see if the car will hold the line in
the corner or slide off into the heavenly yonder.
As fast as it is, the Veyron is actually late for
its own party. The first Veyron 16.4 concept car
appeared at the Tokyo Auto Show in fall 1999, and
the final draft, so to speak, appeared in
September 2001 at the Frankfurt auto show. The
plan was to have cars to customers by the end of
2003, but the Veyron posed an unprecedented
engineering challenge: a car capable of 250 mph
that is civilized, safe and reliable - passing
all the durability and crash-test standards that a VW Golf has to pass.
"Its performance was achieved through
state-of-the-art engineering rather than simply
shoehorning a giant engine into thinly disguised
race car," says Csaba Csere, editor of Car and
Driver magazine, who performed a max-speed test
on the car this fall. "The Veyron is completely
usable on the road and can be piloted by anyone
with a regular driver's license."
When Schreiber took over the project in spring
2003, he says, there were about 500 technical
issues with the car. It was too heavy. The
dual-clutch gearbox was too noisy. The fuel pumps
weren't sufficient to supply the gallons per
minute the engine requires at full honk. And
everything was too hot. The car now has 10
radiators, cooling components such as the
hydraulics system and the gear-box oil.
But the biggest problem was air. At 200-plus mph,
air is not the insubstantial nothingness of
everyday experience but a thick, turbulent fluid
that wants to pull the car off its wheels. To
thwart what is known as aerodynamic lift, the
Bugatti - like most race cars - has a wing, as
well as a smaller spoiler, deployed on
aircraft-grade hydraulics on the back. These keep
the car from fluttering off the road like a
thrown playing card. However, the same wing that
provides down force also creates drag. As
recently as March, the car was falling well short
of the target speed of 248 mph.
Only when Schreiber and his engineers created
what is now called the "top speed" configuration
was the car able to achieve its maximum speed. It
works like this: When the car reaches 137 mph,
hydraulics lower the car until it has a ground
clearance of about 3 1/2 inches. At the same
time, the wing and spoiler deploy. This is the
"handling" mode, in which the wing helps provide
770 pounds of down force, holding the car to the
road. This drag-limits the car to about 230 mph.
To go faster, drivers have to stop the car and
activate the top speed mode with a special key in
a lock to the left of the driver's seat. This
lowers the car to a ground-skimming clearance of
about 2 1/2 -inches and retracts the rear wing so
that it just peeks out over the bodywork. At 250
mph, a little wing angle is all you need. At the
same time, openings for aerodynamic tunnels built
into the car close, creating a fully flat-bottom car.
In April, Schreiber and his team had hit upon the
ideal setup for the car and were putting down consistent 250 mph runs.
The Veyron has a lot of other tricks up its
carbon-fiber sleeve. When the brakes are
activated at high speed, the rear wing tilts to
70 degrees, creating what is effectively an air
brake - should the 15-inch carbon-ceramic disc
brakes not prove to be enough. Here is a fun
fact: In a panic stop from 253 mph, the Veyron
comes to a halt in less than 10 seconds - hard
enough to pull the sunglasses off your face.
"My philosophy is that you should be able to
brake better than you can accelerate," Schreiber says.
So it can go like the hammers of hell and stop on
a pfennig. But will it sell? That is the $1.25-million question.
"It remains to be seen," says Peter Mullin, a Los
Angeles car collector who owns several vintage
Bugattis. "They certainly have put the resources
into it. I just wonder what is the appetite for a
car that can go 250 mph on the street? It's kind of a limited market."
And yet the "fastest car" superlative is
indispensable to the car's mystique. The Veyron
is the latest in a long list of what you might
call dorm-room poster cars - cars with names like
Lamborghini, Ferrari, Koenigsegg and Saleen.
"Once this car comes out, it will be the car that
people think of when they think ultimate sports
car," says Leslie Kendall, curator of the
Petersen Automotive Museum. "It will be the new standard."
Bugatti has said it will build no more than 300
of the cars, optimally 50 to 80 per year. There
will be 20 dealerships worldwide, including
O'Gara Coach Company in Beverly Hills. Ehren
Bragg, president of O'Gara, says the dealership
has four orders in hand. The down payment is
$413,000, enough to buy six Chevrolet Corvette Z06s.
O'Gara is expecting to make its first deliveries
in August or September 2006, but it will have a
demonstrator model. Bragg wouldn't be surprised
if that car is bought off the showroom floor.
"Here in Beverly Hills," he says, "when people
can't have something, they want it more than they thought they did."
Even if Bugatti sells every car, it won't make a
dime. "Volkswagen will only net about $350
million from the Veyron," says Car and Driver's
Csere. "That's hardly enough to pay for the
engineering, development and manufacturing costs
of this car. But making a profit was never the
point. The goal was to relaunch the Bugatti brand
as a builder of noteworthy cars. That the Veyron has done."
Bugatti's president, Thomas Bscher, has said as
much in the media. The idea is that the glow of
the Veyron's halo will light up other products to
come, possibly a four-seat coupe. But under VW
Group's current financial constraints - and the
fact that the gas-hungry world has shifted under
the company's feet - it's possible the Veyron
will turn out to be a magnificent anomaly.
"I would have some healthy skepticism of the
survivability of these proposed products,"
Woodworth says. "They may never get off the launch pad."
When asked what he thinks of the Veyron's legacy,
automotive marketing analyst Daniel Gorrell, in a
literary turn, recalls some lines from Percy Bysshe Shelley:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
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