Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse

Californians live by their own rules, and there are some pretty strange ones governing life in the Golden State. In Carmel, the manicured little seaside town which has been home for the Monterey Speed Week, apparently it’s illegal for a man to step outside wearing ill-matching jacket and trousers. The town’s former mayor Clint Eastwood repealed a law stating that ice-cream couldn’t be eaten on the street, but the one covering women wearing high heels within city limits is, apparently, still in force.

It’s been a week not to forget. Bugatti has laid on a fantastic programme of unbridled access to some of the best classic, vintage and exclusive cars in the world. We’ve spent the week poring over the details of the six Les Legendes Veyrons, we've rubbed shoulders with the most influential stalwarts of the elite car scene, we’ve seen tens of millions traded at auction, and we’ve met The Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger himself. And Pink Floyd’s skin basher Nick Mason. And racing legend Derek Bell. And custom car maker to the stars Rick Dore. And a whole string of people who have seared the week into the memory banks.

To soften the rabbit-punch of looming reality, Bugatti has arranged a Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse to get us from our hotel in Carmel to Oxnard in the outer reaches of Los Angeles where they’ve organised a tour of the Mullin Museum the largest collection of Bugattis outside Europe. It’s a six hour drive and there are two route options. The straight shot down State Highway 101 is the fastest and cleanest but it’s also the least engaging. State Route 1 or Cabrillo Highway winds down from the Monterey Peninsula, hugging the coastline the entire way. It’s one of most dramatic coastal roads on the planet, and we’re too close with too perfect a machine to ignore it. Sparsely populated, raw and majestic, the Big Sur coastline route tacks a bit of time to the journey but is well worth the effort.

As so often is the case, the best laid plans are interrupted by weather. The notorious Californian morning fog is clinging to the coast and is threatening to hang about or, even worse, coalesce into drizzle. With a twisty coastal road and a multi-million dollar 1200 horsepower hyper car the fastest open top car on the planet - at our disposal, the day is going to get interesting.

The bleak start has not taken the spark out of the day, and despite having spent the past week poring over the details of the six Les Legendes special editions, the Grand Sport Vitesse we’re about to thread down the coast in looks absolutely stunning. If the dark blue carbon fibre and light blue exterior livery seems familiar, it’s because it was used in the latest Transformers movie where it was one of the forms the character Drift, voiced by Japanese actor Ken Watanabe, was able to take. There’s no hint of the car’s movie alter ego left, but the little umbrella soft top which multiple Le Mans winner and Bugatti factory driver Andy Wallace is wrangling with could do with a little Autobot intervention to make installing it a bit easier.

Wallace is along for the ride too, not only to keep an eye on things, but to explain precisely what the car is doing when you prod the pedals or poke at its buttons. We’re not likely to spear off in to the distance, but it’s comforting to know that he’s alongside to answer the phone and coordinate with the chase car. He’s also first behind the wheel, just to get us out of Carmel’s city limits and beyond the reach of any of the town’s fashion police. The drizzle has disappeared too, so he takes a moment to
pull over and stash the soft top before handing the wheel over for the first stint.

Wallace now divides his time between factory duties and customer training. He’ll sit alongside owners and teach them to drive extremely fast (on track) and very well (on road), and he’s the perfect right seat companion for the trip.

For the uninitiated, the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse holds the world record as the fastest open top production car in the world. The record was set in April 2013 by Chinese racing driver Anthony Liu at Volkswagen’s Ehra-Lessien proving grounds where Bugatti also clinched the production car world speed record with the hard-top coupe version in 2005 and again the Veyron Super Sport in 2010. That record stands at 431 km/h for the coupe and 408.8 km/h in the open top car.

McLaren had held the record for 12 years when Bugatti claimed in it 2005, and there are no prizes for guessing who was driving the McLaren F1 road car during its record attempt. Wallace remembers the day clearly, and says that hitting those sorts of speeds certainly focusses your attention.

“It’s a lot nicer in a Bugatti than it is a McLaren because there’s a good bit of downforce on this car and it’s actually quite stable at speed,” he explained. “The McLaren had, of course, a lot less horsepower and therefore it had to have less drag and less downforce. That car did 0-200 miles per hour in 28 seconds, and this Vitesse can go from 0-200-0 in a shade over 27, so that brings it into perspective. It is a lot, lot faster.

“And the brakes on this car are amazing. Full carbon ceramic brake all-around of course which is pretty much standard these days but the front callipers are eight piston with four pads in each, with six piston callipers with two pads each in the rear. You then have the addition of the air brake when you’re going above 240 km/h it will deploy, so that, in addition to the brakes, will help the car stop at 2.2 g. Most normal cars are 0.8 - 1 g in extreme circumstances, so that’s a huge number.”

The car has two modes; one which will get you to 375 km/h and which requires nothing bit a decent stretch of road and girded loins. Ride height automatically lowers from 115 mm all around to 80 mm at the front and 95 mm at the rear when you near 180 km/h. That not only lowers the centre of gravity, but increases rake on the car which pushes the car’s centre of pressure forwards. The counter than, the rear wing extends to 26 degrees if the roof is off or 21 degrees if it’s on, to give the car a perfect aerodynamic split. In that configuration, the car will hit 375 km/h all day.

To go faster, you need two keys and a relatively straight and flat bit of tarmac. Top Speed mode is enabled at standstill by using the second key to turn a lock set beside the driver’s seat which then initiates a series of checks on the car. It checks the age of the tyres (they have to be under 18 months old), pressures, temperatures and a long list of other parameters to make sure things are absolutely safe. The car automatically dials in its low aerodynamic drag mode by taking the rear wing down from its 26 degree point all the way down to three degrees. That cuts downforce over the rear, so it compensates at the front by extending two hydraulic flaps under the front diffuser to take away some of the shape. It also adjusts the brake ducts to a lower drag setting. You’re then free to launch the car up to its warp speed.

If the car senses anything wrong during your run fluctuations in tyre pressures or temperatures, or sudden, wild movements of the steering wheel, it’ll drop out of Top Speed mode. To initiate it again, you need to repeat the exercise.

It’s not like we’ll be needing it today though. The coastal route is tempering our top speed, and so too in the threat of California’s lawmen who, we’ve been reliably informed, have a low tolerance threshold for the kind of speed infractions a slight sneeze on the Veyron’s throttle can deliver.

Besides, we’ve been in enough cars to realise that almost anyone can make one go really fast. The real skill in hypercar development is making one that can also be driven about town with all the civility that low speed refinement requires.

Make no mistake: the Veyron has a firm feel, but the chassis and engineering team have managed to pull off the remarkable by also making it a reasonably pleasant one. It tips the scales at over two tonnes thanks mainly to the enormous 8.0 litre quad turbo W16 engine mounted behind the cabin, and will generate stupendous levels of downforce at top speed, so suspension needs to be a little on the stiffside. The dampers with faster working valves and marginally softer springs in the Grand Sport Vitesse give it a phenomenal duality.

“It’s a really comfortable ride,” Wallace says. “There’s no body roll at all. It’s easy to lose body roll by going stiff , but if you do that, you get a horrible ride.”

Steering is also fantastic; nicely weighted and communicative. It loads up under hard cornering to give you a better understanding of the aggregate used for road construction, but it doesn't wobble, shake or behave erratically under heavy acceleration. In a car that starts at $2.2 million, you’d really hope not, but there are things we’d change if Bugatti’s engineers are reading this.

First off, the manual gear selector is the wrong way around. Sure, you’re more likely to use the steering wheel paddles for changing, but it would still be nice to see the central tunnel lever oriented to the pull-to-goup-a-gear way around. The brake pedal is too small, sits too high and too far to the right for comfortable left foot braking, and the window wiper switch also needs to be reoriented. Minor niggles in a car that remains easily the most impressive we’ve ever spent a few hours in.

In that time, the Big Sur has slipped by in a big blur. The windy coastal route has opened up into flowing roads which propel us over rolling dunes and onto State Highway 1. We’ve reached Santa Barbara, California’s approximation of the French/Italian Riviera. Ventura lays ahead with its alligator lizards in the air, before a short little stretch to Oxnard and the Mullin Automotive Museum.

The Veyron’s soundtrack is simply incredible and is made all the more impressive when enjoyed alfresco. Bury the throttle into the firewall and the two intake nostrils behind your ears suck the car towards the horizon in a rush of whooshes, whistles and the distant roar of the twin V-8s. Acceleration is relentless, and power delivery is smooth, linear and dramatic. With 1200 hp and 1600 Nm to play with, it’s tempting to think that the car will launch you off the road in a dramatic and expensive spin but Wallace says full throttle acceleration lets the car know what you want it to do. Hesitation on the throttle is met with a judder; mashing it lets the car get on with the job of sorting out traction at each of the wheels.

“If you rush into a corner very quickly and lose the front end, it very quickly puts the outside rear brake on and pulls the car straight again. If you ever get the back out of shape, it’s surprising how quickly it reacts: it just puts the outside front brake on.”“What we try to do on the test track is go about 250 km/h and try to spin the car around. Even if you manage to get it a little bit out of shape, at that point the air brake pops up and pulls it back into shape. So even at high speed, you can’t drop it.”

That may be so, but we’re not interested in being the first publication to find out. A set of the Super Sport’s special Michelin tyres costs $42,000 and may last 10,000 miles if you’re careful, though they last only 15 minutes at the car’s top speed (at that pace, however, the 26.4-gallon tank is sucked dry in just 10 minutes, and there’s no place on Earth to safely go that fast that long anyway, so no worries). At the third tyre replacement, Michelin requires that you also swap out the $69,000 wheels coincidentally, the only wheels that fit those tyres to ensure a proper bead seal.

It’s been the perfect end to a tremendous week, and as we pull up at the doors to the museum, it’s with a healthy dose of relief that we hand the keys back to Wallace and his team. Hypercars are great fun, and you’d be a fool to turn down the opportunity to drive one, but $2.2 million worth of car, in traffic, is utter stress. Even one so accomplished as the Grand Sport Vitesse.