How the Bugatti Veyron changed Supercars FOREVER

it's pretty rare that a manufacturer builds a vehicle so groundbreaking it's capable of instantly reaching icon status most great cars have to work for their place in the market and that usually comes with some growing pains and a sort of evolution think cars like the Mustang or the Prius but other times a car like the dusenberg model j just enters the market and it's just so far ahead of its time it instantly has a kind of aura or celebrity around it these kinds of machines don't just come out of nowhere though we might not always see it but they are being developed for years often and many times by the most Brilliant Minds in the automotive world today we're looking at a kind of modern dusenberg story the story of the development of arguably the craziest sports car of all time the Bugatti Veyron now as you probably know these kinds of rare iconic sports cars are often purchased for investment purposes though classic cars in General can be good Investments even if they don't cost a million dollars for wealthier drivers and collectors these kinds of cars really draw huge interest as a potential store of wealth so much so that they're even talked about by global players like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs the logic is that over time assets like these will often appreciate in value and that value isn't necessarily affected by external factors like other more traditional assets can be but Goldman says that these valuable physical assets don't end at classic cars in the same sentence they say fine art and classic cars can help protect purchasing power they also call out fine art as a way to potentially protect your wealth from inflation so today I'm super excited to be bringing you this sponsor which is Masterworks the ultimate platform for art investing in times like these when inflation really is a problem Fine Art becomes even more desirable as an investment since it's not losing value as time goes on the way that your cash is but what if and I are not ultra wealthy or able to just outright buy either a Bugatti Veyron or a Picasso painting Masterworks art investing platform has turned this previously inaccessible asset class into a legitimate option for investors and no you don't have to be an Art Expert Masterworks securitizes the paintings to break them into shares and their advisors can help you choose which paintings to invest in that really match your financial goals this way you don't have to spend millions and you can easily control the amount you invest Masterworks distributed back a total of60 million plus dollars in investor proceeds to date with their 23rd exit happening just a few days ago over 900,000 members have signed on with shares of paintings like picassos and bankies previously selling out in minutes but by using my special QR code on screen now or the link in the description you can skip Masterworks weit list and invest right away past results are not indicative of future performance and do not include unsold Works investing does involve risk so keep that in mind check out the QR code or Link in the description and again big thanks to Masterworks for sponsoring the video all right let's jump back in now cars like the Bugatti Veyron are not created in a vacuum it's really helpful to understand what was going on in the automotive world around this time in the early 2000s while American manufacturers were busy trying to recreate the past even with their high-powered sports cars those in the Supercar business were really looking to the Future future and the future looked like basically more horsepower and higher top speeds the idea of the ultimate superar wasn't really something new though despite there being many potential contenders most would agree that the Lamborghini Mira was the first superar as we really would come to know the genre the mid-mounted engine an exotic unique styling and of course incredible performance it also had a juicy sticker price to match at a time when money wasn't exactly growing on trees since the mura there's been a race to make the best fastest supercar in the world Lamborghini has made quite a few contenders as well as Porsche and Ferrari but perhaps the most significant vehicle in this class would be the McLaren F1 which would really Propel this whole segment of the market forward for it was really a Step Beyond anything that had existed before it a true Masterpiece of style and performance so outlandish it brought about the term hyper car as super car just didn't seem fitting anymore some have said that the McLaren F1 was the first car to use the whole speedometer the F1 was the car in the 9s not the kind of car that you owned just the kind of car that you collected posters of it seemed impossible for any manufacturer to top the status and performance and really the aura that this car had but as the 9s was coming to a close something was brewing over at Bugatti now if you know anything about Supercar history you know that Bugatti wasn't a player not only in this segment but any segment Bugatti had been basically dormant since the 1950s but in 1998 Volkswagen group announced that it had acquired the great name for basically pennies and was intent on bringing it back to its former glory many were skeptical of this partnership it's not that Volkswagen didn't have the resources to bring a manufacturer like this back to life this just wasn't any manufacturer this was one of the great companies known for making striking beautiful kind of Automotive art could the German approach really work for such a brand but nobody was ready for what they would create the first good move was to make Dr Carl Hines Newman a man known as the engine Pope president of Bugatti and this makes a lot of sense as the engine that they would create would rival the Vatican in Beauty and complexity Bugatti began that year making initially three concept vehicles designed by Fame Italian designer gior jetto Gio jaro I think I got his name right this time guys but I'm not sure and also by his son Fabo these concept vehicles were impressive and striking evoking the style of some of Bugatti's greatest cars from history and of note there was the mid-engine concept 18/3 Chiron and it would have quite a few similarities in style to the later Veyron especially with the long sloping front but really none of these vehicles would match the current crop of supercars available at this time even with the 500 plus horsepower turbocharged w18 engine which would make some half of the horsepower of the Veyron there were expectations from purists at this time for Bugatti to make cars that really honored their history and that would be important but those in charge at Bugatti knew that if they really wanted the name Bugatti to mean anything again that they would have to look forward and so they began working on a car that would change the very definition of superar or hyper car much like the McLaren F1 did and it would all come to a head in the year 2000 starting shortly after the unveil of these three concept vehicles they began working on a fourth the e184 Veyron for this concept designer harmit warus and Joseph cabin created the exterior but fitting the previous w18 engine would prove challenging so Bugatti would move to an 8 L W6 Engine with four turbos now in case you're curious about this whole W thing Bugatti actually basically pioneered this well there have been similar engines even dating all the way back to 1916 but this one really is unique basically it's two 8 cylinder blocks set up in a V position and this is primarily for space saving so this isn't two V8s stuffed together that wouldn't have fit it's a 16 cylinder engine taking up the space of a typical v12 by connecting two inline eights pretty genius really and of course turbocharging has the same effect you know more power without taking up lots of more space and the result announced at the concept cars unveil at the Geneva Motor Show in 2000 was 1,1 horsepower not 1,000 horsepower 1,1 horsepower or technically 1,1 PS which is actually just under 1,000 horsepower but all the production Veyrons would make around 1,035 horsepower and the car would have a 0 to 60 of 2.5 seconds with a top speed of just over 2 50 mph for reference by all accounts by the end of the 90s you know at this time the McLaren F1 was still the fastest car in the world but its top speed was 240 mph and it had a 0 to 60 time of 3.2 seconds so these were pretty astronomical numbers and of course being essentially a race car for the street the McLaren weighed quite a bit less than the Veyron but it would only make 618 horsepower I know only 618 so this would really be staggering performance never seen before on a production vehicle but here's the thing it's easy to say this car will do this it's much more difficult to actually make a production version of said car that actually works so over at Bugatti the early years of the New Millennium would be spent in part parading the Veyron concept around the world at various shows while also in the background simultaneously working to find the best parts from around the world and creating sort of a supply chain to make this crazy car a reality the Veyron was quickly becoming a sort of celebrity in the automotive world with its first appearance here in America being in 2002 at the annual Supercar Exhibition at qua Lodge country and Golf Club in Carmel Valley California there Bugatti said that the car was one of the most remarkable celebrities at the presentation of exceptional sports cars behind the scenes though Bugatti was really relentlessly testing the engine in the drivetrain that 1,1 PS was more or less the retical at this point but finally the engine hit those numbers with a corresponding torque of 1250 newm once the engine was ready to go the car was taken out to a nearby test track where the engine was tuned for performance making this incredibly powerful power plant work with the seven-speed Dual clutch direct shift computer controlled automatic transmission was no easy feat in the summer of 2003 the veyon was taken out to Laguna sea to show off its capability and this would would prove to be more of an embarrassment than anything else as the car quickly spun into a gravel pit almost completely crashing many wondered if Bugatti and VW weren't just kind of full of crap at this point was this really as revolutionary of a car as they claimed and would the production version just be a watered down version of the car that they were promising with only a fraction of the performance that everyone hoped for the main problem everyone wondered about was cooling how in the world do you cool such a massive Eng these problems led to delays planned public events were postponed you know 2003 was originally the target to have this car ready for production and it wouldn't be ready until 2005 in all reality these delays were because Bugatti Engineers really were hard at work creating the car and making sure that it really did all the stuff that they promised reliably and if everyone had just practiced a bit of patience it would have all been okay Bugatti described the car like a diamond you know it must be carefully cut and Polished before the breadth of its Brilliance can be revealed that's what they said what people didn't take into account was the fact that this car was really made from scratch you know there was no history of models to look back to this meant that there were no shared Parts all the lessons were being learned as they went it was like a new company making its first car and that car would happen to be the craziest car ever built much like the dusenberg model j cutting Corners was really not an option on top of all that the Veyron wasn't like a McLaren F1 or a Kos or even the recent Ferrari Enzo it was really meant to double as a luxury car a kind of grand tourer one that could be used as a daily driver whereas those other cars were essentially just race cars they weren't necessarily supposed to be comfortable or feel all that stable at those high speeds for this car it was meant to really be a car that people could Ed but finally in 2005 the Veyron was ready for series production the production car had some striking features its two-tone paint and Horseshoe radiator evoked the Bugattis of old but the performance was really all forward-looking once you hit 137 mph the hydraulic suspension would lower the car to a ground clearance of 3 and 1/2 in and the spoiler would pop out creating a solid 770 lb of downforce to keep you safe and secure on your way to 253 m power you know you don't want to just fly away even though you are hitting basically airplane [Laughter] speeds if you wanted a veon at this point Not only would you have a little bit of a wait time it would cost you $120,000 oh wait that's how much it would cost to replace the transmission the car had an MSRP of €1 1 million or 1.2 million and many have reported that you know Veyrons and chirons were all pretty much sold at a loss I don't know if that's true or not but it's not a cheap car to develop and produce motor trends 2005 review of the Veyron starts not by praising the cars exotic design or incredible specs but rather by detailing a specific large gauge on the instrument panel and it's not the speedo showing 280 mph it isn't the TAC either no it's a power meter and it tells you how much horse power you're using at any given time Motor Trend notes that where normal cars max out you know say 155 mph on the Veyron you're only using a fraction of the available 1,000 horsepower which would be about 266 and the other 730 or so horsepower are really what takes the car to the next level 1,000 PS or you know about 1,000 horsepower this was like another dimension for cars I know we have cars like this and of course Bugatti has gone beyond this with the Chiron and with the later Veyron and other hypercar manufacturers have 1,000 plus horsepower vehicles but at this time in the early 2000s this really was out of this world Motor Trend reviewer Charles McGee notes the ease with which he powered past 200 mph on the Autobon and he makes a great point about how it Stacks up against similarly spec cars he says unlike the Ferrari Enzo the Veyron is not a racing car in dis guys instead the Bugatti is intended to be the grandest grand tourer you know I think of it like again the dusenberg model j or you could think of it as something similar to the Bruff Superior ss100 you know a motorcycle able to go 100 m hour at a time when production motorcycles barely went 60 but again it wasn't a race bike that motorcycle was a grand tourer in this way the Veyron very much stands in line with many cars from Bugatti's history their racing ped degree is well documented but they also became a sort of luxury brand the Veyron was very similar to something like the Bugatti type 41 Royale in its day beautiful yes luxurious yes gigantic oh yeah and then Innovative and Powerful totally now it doesn't make much sense to create the fastest most powerful car in the world without at least attempting some official world records and so in ' 05 the veyon would reach a verified 23.81% 7 26.4 one and then in 2010 the Veyron Super Sport hit 267.8 56 mph only to be usurped by keg in 2017 and today many cars supposedly have 300 plus mph top speeds you know the Chiron Super Sport being one of them but this all got really crazy with the Veyron in 2005 aside from these records the other best thing to happen with the Veyron was the time when Tom Cruz couldn't get get his wife's door open in his own personal Veyron now the Veyron would level up once again in the form of the Veyron Super Sport almost an entire like redesign of the car better structural rigidity and get this 20% more horsepower which is equal to about 12200 horsepower and now the Veyron could empty its 262 gallon fuel tank in just 8 minutes and of course there would be no shiron without the veyon the Chiron made a whopping 1479 horsepower power and once again pushed the limits of what a production vehicle could be capable of in 2019 a Chiron superport hit 304 mph and it was even more luxurious and just as much a kind of celebrity in the automotive world as the Veyron and there's rumors going around that Bugatti is kind of poised to once again just blow up the hypercar market with another new car the immediate impact of the Veyron is difficult to overstate you know keg and companies like anani these companies that make these insane hypercars they were around you know before Bugatti got going again but they wouldn't be who they are without the Veyron it really started this whole thing that we think of as modern hypercar development but what's going to be the long-term Legacy of the Bugatti Veyron the Veyron was what it was because of crazy people and I'm not meaning that in a bad way but even atore Bugatti was kind of crazy that's why his cars were kind of crazy the guy who would get W to purchase the Bugatti name and then dump Millions into it to make an absolutely silly ridiculous vehicle he was also kind of insane and his name was Ferdinand pek and when he got the whole Veyron project going he set out his expectations one of which was that 253 mph Mark or 407 kph and there's a reason he was obsessed with that number Ferdinand PX 917 race car with Porsche hit the all-time record speed at Lem man's of 200 127 mph but that would be broken by a specially built PUO that hit you guessed it 407 kph or 253 mph and so with the Veyron that was the Target and by golly they had to hit that number or he would probably smack them with a pastry and that's really the reason this car took so long to develop they could have made the craziest fastest superar in the world without hitting these specific targets but P wasn't interested in beating the Ferrari Enzo or the McLaren in F1 in a 0 to 60 by say .1 seconds he wanted this car to obliterate all of the competition a huge part of this car's development is really owed to P that Motor Trend article says this at Porsche P demolished his Rivals with the legendary 917 at Audi he came up with the Quattro at VW he paid peanuts for the Bugatti name before spending big money on the development of the Veyron its mission was to end the Eternal cus alus for fortius debate Forever by establishing a performance standard that no other Mark could match the Veyron was a silly car in a very similar way to the huge race cars from the very early days of Motoring and racing you know those ones with gigantic straight engines making up about 90% of the car the Veyron is no different it's just got the engine in the back like kind of a backwards Beast of tur there's all this space behind the driver and then you realize there's no space it's all just engine what if I told you though that not everyone loves or appreciates the engineering Marvel that is the Bugatti Veyron what's not to love right well first and foremost when a car is this expensive you know 1 million plus dollars this makes it incredibly exclusive only the richest kinds of car enthusiasts or just rich people in general can afford it and so the Veyron and its successors are seen as just another status symbol for the wealthy you know the kind of people who have significantly more money than driving skills and are quite likely to crash the thing if they had all tried to tap into that performance you know a Veyron is it's like getting a really expensive watch to me this isn't really Bugatti's fault when you think about their sort of goals when they set out to make the Veyron though with their vehicles they've certainly played to Their audience with loads of even more exclusive and expensive additions and just ridiculous interior I get it though they've got to pay the bills and I do think most Veyron owners really do understand and appreciate what the car is I I I could be wrong about that to me there's a more relevant criticism though of the whole Veyron project and it gets at the heart of what cars and sports cars are really all about what is a sports car in the early days of Motoring sports cars were just regular cars that were modified for performance made to be more lightweight and more powerful for the purpose of speed around a track interestingly enough though this idea of the sports car being not only more powerful but especially lightweight would come to a head in 1924 with the incredible Bugatti type 35 this was an Innovative race car primarily because of its stripped back form not only in terms of the body and the wheels but also the lightweight Powerful 2 L overhead cam engine this car and others helped usher in a different approach to racing and performance one that was less focused on just making huge engines and top speed like the early days this car was looked at more holistically with a sort of balance between power and weight and AER Dynamics with the ultimate goal of fantastic handling and Superior performance as time went on the Divide between the regular production sports car and the race car really grew and in the 60s and 70s we saw very different approaches to the sports car formula from the tiny lightweight British roadsters to the more powerful Italian grand Tours to the cars that were basically only fast in a straight line muscle cars and then of course the birth of the Super and Hyper car would come with more of a focus on overall top speed if we're going to be purists and say that whatever cars are more like those early stripped back race cars it's hard to debate that Porsche has pretty consistently offered the kind of Ultimate sports car not necessarily the fastest in terms of top speed though they have contended for that spot multiple decades but more just lightweight Nimble incredible handling fast cars around a track but I guess if that's the definition maybe a go-kart could be the ultimate sports car my point is that I do think it's fair to criticize Bugatti for making sports cars that don't really have the kind of sports car character that even Bugatti primarily used to pursue I mean on the right track or autocross a Miata could be a veon or even out in the twisties would you really want to have a Veyron or a Miata or an old 911 but at the same time who at this point even wants to compete with Porsche at engineering these kinds of traditional but high-end expensive sports cars and I think in some ways these hyper car manufacturers it's almost easier to just make cars that go really really fast in a straight line than to make cars that go really fast around the twisties for me the main pioneering element of the Veyron and the Chiron isn't so much that they can hit 250 or 300 mph technically speaking we've had engines capable of propelling cars this fast for decades no it's the stability with which they do so that is really such a Marvel I mean you watch airon hitting these numbers it looks like it's just cruising down the highway and that's because every single part of the car from the engine and Chassis to the body and wheels and brakes it's all perfectly engineered and working together harmoniously and it's still faster than a cyber Tru from 0 to 60 which let's be real the Cyber truck is the real Benchmark for performance now I just want to see one of these hypercar manufacturers hit 300 mph with the top down I think the Veyron and Bugatti's other supercars and supercars in general they have their place in the market they're not really my cup of tea but who knows that could just be my bank account talking all right I hope you guys enjoyed this one I want to give a shout out to this book on the Veyron by Martin roach it not only gives a nice account of the development of the Veyron but also his experiences driving Veyrons I'll link it in the description below if you want to check it out be sure to subscribe for more car stories like this one and we'll see you in the next one drive safe

Channel: Bart's Car Stories

Views: 6,152

Keywords: car, cars, car history, car video, car videos, history of cars, automotive history, vehicle, automotive, car channel, bart, bart's car stories, car stories, story, bugatti, bugatti veyron, bugatti chiron, chiron, german, sports car history, sportscar, fastest, craziest sports car, most powerful engines, engine, mclaren f1, ferrari, koenigsegg, pagani, fastest car, top speed, veyron, supercar, supercar history, muira, hypercar, craziest cars, craziest engines, w16, turbo, turbocharger

Id: sFZbKJbAe38

Length: 24min 53sec (1493 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2024