2012 Bugatti Veyron on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Vile Gossip: Ladies who launch

Jean Jennings has been writing about cars for more than 30 years, after stints as a taxicab driver and as a mechanic in the Chrysler Proving Grounds Impact Lab. She was a staff writer at Car and Driver magazine, the first executive editor and former president and editor-in-chief of Automobile Magazine, the founder of the blog Jean Knows Cars and former automotive correspondent for Good Morning America. She has lifetime awards from both the Motor Press Guild and the New England Motor Press Association. Look for more Vile Gossip columns in the future. The year was 2006. We were driving a Bugatti Veyron 16.4 across the Florida Panhandle from Jacksonville to Panama City, only because I couldn't convince Bugatti to let me be the first to drive its exotic powerhouse, the world's fastest car at that time, all the way across America. One gleaming example had arrived in time for the Amelia Island Concours d'Elegance, where the journos massed for their quick test drives out the front drive of the Ritz Carlton, down a short stretch of the A1A, and back to the Ritz. Not far enough for me. I wanted to take the Veyron in all of its 16-cylinder, 1,001-horsepower, $1.3-million-dollar glory on a coast-to-coast extravaganza of a road trip. Never hurts to ask. I asked. Once the Bugatti guys stopped hyperventilating, I explained that the coastal adventure would be contained wholly within the state of Florida, from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf of Mexico. My secret destination, however, was to be Vernon, Florida, home of the great Errol Morris' classic documentary about a town in the Panhandle with the highest per-capita population of citizens who'd blown off or whacked off a limb for insurance money. (Google "Nub City.") The Swiss head of Bugatti public relations thought it hilarious. He showed up in a van with a couple of German mechanics to follow us and a failed French Formula 1 driver to serve as my chaperone. I came with a photographer from Germany and one of the most infamous of bad-boy auto magazine tech editors, the irrepressible Don Sherman. Sherman had his own reason for going, and it had nothing to do with a Veyron to Vernon. Once we gave up looking for nubbies, he ordered me to veer south to the handgrip of the Panhandle, familiarly known as the Redneck Riviera. The Don was aiming to secretly execute the Veyron's first Launch Control blastoff in captivity.

One and only Bugatti Chiron Profilee is headed to auction

Bugatti has shed light on a never-before-seen variant of the Chiron named Profilee. Designed with production in mind but ultimately canned, the coupe was envisioned as "a less radical interpretation" of the Pur Sport, and the only existing example is headed to auction in 2023. Customer requests shaped this otherwise fruitless evolution of the Chiron: Bugatti explains its clients asked for a toned-down version of the Pur Sport that focuses more on touring than on handling. Designers gave the coupe a new aerodynamic profile that's characterized by wider air dams and a bigger grille up front, a redesigned front splitter, and a relatively small rear wing with a hollow middle section. The wing's distinctive shape was chosen because it adds stability by providing the rear end with downforce while giving hot air a path out of the engine bay. Bugatti also made changes to the steering and suspension systems, and it gave the seven-speed, dual-clutch automatic transmission 15% shorter gear ratios. In turn, the Profilee stands proud as the fastest-accelerating member of the Chiron range: it takes 2.3 seconds to reach 62 mph from a stop. Keep your foot down and the speedometer will indicate 124 mph in 5.5 seconds, 186 mph in 12.4 seconds, and it will keep going until 236 mph. These numbers are provided by a mid-mounted 8.0-liter W16 engine quad-turbocharged to 1,500 horsepower. Bugatti Chiron Profil?e View 16 Photos Executives planned to cap Profilee production at 30 units but ended up canceling the project. "We started with the design and development of the Chiron Profilee in autumn 2020. By the time we saw the pre-series vehicle coming out of production, all Chiron slots limited to just 500 were assigned," explains Bugatti president Christophe Piochon.  Profilee production was never launched, but the only example built is fully street-legal in European markets. It's finished in a shade of silver called Argent Atlantique that was created specifically for it, and the bottom part of the car features bare carbon fiber that's tinted in Bleu Royal Carbon. Inside, the Profilee is the first Chiron fitted with woven leather on the dashboard, the center console and the door panels. Bugatti notes that completing the interior required using over 2,600 meters of leather strips. The cabin is fitted with a pair of comfort seats. RM Sotheby's will auction off the Chiron Profilee in Paris, France, on February 1, 2023.

How design follows function in the Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport and Super Sports 300+

As the successor to the world-beating Veyron, the Bugatti Chiron had big shoes to fill, and by every measure it has succeeded. With its 304-mph top-speed run last fall, the latest Bugatti hypercar has handily beaten all expectations, and Bugatti President Stephan Winkelmann has even publicly stated that the company will no longer chase speed records. One could argue that the Chiron's work here is done, and yet it's merely half way through its projected lifecycle. What more could it possibly accomplish? Bugatti's answer: Go faster on a road course. To accomplish this, the Chiron Super Sports 300+ formula would have to be cast aside for something entirely new. After all, the things that make a car fast in a straight line are only part of the equation when it comes to conquering a race track, and with that mission, the Chiron Pur Sport was born. These two models' diverging missions necessitated distinct design. To learn more about just how differently they were formed, Autoblog attended a virtual round-table with Frank Heyl, Bugatti deputy design director, and Jachin Schwalbe, Bugatti head of chassis development. The distinctions are most evident in their profiles, where the longtail design of the Super Sports 300+ radically alters the Chiron's entire rear "box," making the Pur Sport's sharp rear cut-off seem almost inelegant by comparison. The slow, clean taper of the longtail design accomplishes the same thing aerodynamically that it does aesthetically. When the car is in top-speed mode, the rear spoiler even remains stowed. This design significantly shrinks the low-pressure zone behind the car, reducing the resulting drag, but that absent spoiler also detracts from the Chiron's stability. To compensate for the lack of spoiler deployment, Bugatti's engineers altered the flow beneath the car and through the rear diffuser. Heyl describes this as "free" downforce, because there's no corresponding penalty in drag from gains found with these underbody features.   With the Pur Sport, Bugatti went the other direction. This track-focused car gives up a ton of top speed to its sibling in exchange for nimbleness and acceleration, so being able to cut the minimum hole in the air is far less important. Think of design as a zero-sum game, Bugatti's team says.