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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.

Watch a Bugatti Chiron speedometer hit 218 mph

Driving reviews of the $2.5 million Bugatti Chiron supercar are starting to pop up - in fact, here's ours - and Richard Meaden, a former race driver, recently drove the Chiron for Evo in the UK, praising its combination of "civility and savagery." But what fascinated us was the video, large portions of which are simply a view of the speedometer as the Chiron rockets to 351 kph (or 218 mph) in less than 30 seconds. We can only hope that run wasn't on the idyllic English country road glimpsed in the opening and closing shots. The video is mesmerizing to watch. Enjoy. Related video:

Discover the two coupes Bugatti wanted to sell alongside the Chiron

Bugatti has released two cars since it joined the Volkswagen Group in 1998: the Veyron and the Chiron. Both are high-horsepower, multi-million-dollar machines built in strictly limited numbers. That wasn't the original plan; executives envisioned a three-car range during the 2010s. Autoblog went right to the source to discover a pair of coupes — one below the Chiron and one well above — that were cancelled and have never been seen before. The French company first attempted to revive the practice of coachbuilding in the 2000s, but it shifted nearly every part of the process in-house because a majority of the companies it worked with during the 1920s and the 1930s were long gone. While this added significant costs and complexity, the success of Lamborghini's few-off models (like the Reventon) proved collectors were ravenous for exclusivity and more than willing to pay a lot for it. "We were not sleeping on the horse. Starting in 2004, I was constantly giving management ideas about what we could do next to the Veyron, on its base, or after it. Most never saw the light of day," Achim Anscheidt, the soft-spoken head of Bugatti's design department, told me as we walked through the company's styling center. Bugatti Veyron Barchetta View 5 Photos With coachbuilders like Henri Binder, Park Ward, Kellner, and Figoni & Falaschi out of the picture, the task of creating a new body fell into Anscheidt's lap. While he experimented with many projects, one he shed light on is a barchetta-like open-top two-seater (shown above) based on the Veyron Grand Sport. It featured the short, boat-like wraparound windshield that has historically characterized the body style, though "it could have been done as a roadster with a conventional windshield." Its proportions are recognizably Veyron-like, but the similarities end there. Its front end wears a vertical lights and bigger grille flanked by wide air intakes, styling cues later seen on the Divo. If built, the Veyron Barchetta would have arrived as a limited-edition model with a correspondingly high price tag, in part to offset the sky-high development costs. But as Lamborghini chalked up hit after hit, including the Sesto Elemento introduced at the 2010 Paris show, Bugatti's top executives were reluctant to adopt this business model. "They couldn't give themselves the push to make it happen," Anscheidt said with a tinge of regret.