Top Gear takes Veyron to its top speed (video)...amazing

[G.Irish]

Heres an exellent video I saw today, James May of Top Gear takes the Bugatti Veyron to its top speed of 407 km/h, or 252.89 mph around VW's test track in Germany. My fire suit is donned, say what you will but the car is an amazing engineering achievement anyway you look at it 8) ...

Its an exercise in excess but it doesn't really amaze me at all as far as engineering achievement goes. Producing 1000 horsepower out of a quad turbo 8.0L engine isn't terribly impressive to me nor is the 4000 lbs curb weight of the car. I mean shit, F1 cars were making 1500 hp from 1.5L engines in the 80's (granted that was qualifying trim using toluene...).

VW did a lot of engineering work to sort out the aerodynamics of the car and there is some nice trick stuff in there like the rear spoiler airbrake and titanium brake caliper pistons. And supposedly from articles I've read its not a total dog in the twisties.

Still it just doesn't strike me as impressive the way the McLaren F1 did. Both of them were $1 million cars but the McLaren did it in an efficient, elegant manner whereas the Bugatti starts with "lets put a big mfn' engine in there," and then tries to figure out how to keep the thing from crashing and killing its occupants.

250 mph is nothing to sneeze at in a street legal vehicle but for my meellion dollars I'll take the McLaren. Of course, I wouldn't mind seeing what kind of time the Veyron could do at Nurburgring.