GENEVA MOTOR SHOW: Bugatti Chiron

There’s only one way to top the animal that rewrote the rulebook for hypercars. Bugatti had to rewrite them again.

Enter the stupendous Bugatti Chiron, boasting 1103kW of power, an astonishing 1600Nm of torque, a 420km/h top speed and all of it backed by a Volkswagen Group warranty. And, for the insanely brave, it even has a drift mode.

If you can mount an argument that the Bugatti Veyron marked a flag-on-Everest moment for the supercar industry, it’s hard to know where to take the debate for the Chiron, which will begin production in October.

To put its numbers into perspective, the Chiron has about 500 horsepower more than the Veyron did at its launch in 2005.

The Veyron already approached the longitudinal limits of its tortured, mega-expensive tyres, but Bugatti claims the Chiron will hit 100km/h in less than 2.5 seconds, will streak beyond 200km/h in less than 6.5 seconds and will hammer beyond 300km/h in around 13.5 seconds.

By comparison, the Veyron knocked out those increments in 2.5, 7.3 and 16.7 seconds respectively.

And the Chiron does all this even though it weighs 1995kg, and a sterling silver and enamel Bugatti badge atop the traditionally shaped horseshoe grille fronts it all.

It still uses the aerodynamic tricks of having separate top-speed and handling modes, reaching out to 420km/h at the peak of its powers and 380km/h with the hydraulically raised rear wing set for maximum driving security.

You could be forgiven for thinking the Chiron is a rebodied development of the mid-engined Veyron, but you’d be wrong, even if its wheelbase is just 1mm longer (at 2711mm).

It’s an all-new carbon-fibre chassis, this time with a honeycomb sandwich floor and it has discarded the alloy engine cradle and now a stiffer, lighter carbon-fibre one hosts the 8.0-litre quad-turbo W16 powerhouse.

Previewed by Bugatti boss Wolfgang Durheimer at a private Volkswagen Group event in Geneva, it’s a visual development of the Vision Gran Turismo concept car that was shown at the Frankfurt motor show in September.

Like the Veyron, the Chiron won’t stay as one stock model for long, with Bugatti planning a successor for each of the Veyron’s main variants, including the Grand Sport, SuperSport and Grand Vitesse.

Not for the Chiron are the modern niceties of electric turbochargers or hybridised powertrains, like the McLaren P1, LaFerrari or Porsche 918 (none of which remain in production). Instead, the French-built hypercar will rely on using 32 individual direct-fuel injection nozzles to help drain the 100-litre petrol tank as fast as mechanically, hydraulically and chemically possible.

Ultra-low volume operations still claim they Veyron’s titles and attention, too, including Apollo, Koeniggsegg and whatever challenger is being tossed up out of Asia and Eastern Europe this week.

But the Chiron is the most powerful car that’s ever been street legal and Bugatti has once again limited it to just 500 cars and, before you ask, it’ll take €2.4 million ($A3.68m) in spare change to secure one. And it says it already has an order bank of 150 cars, equating to more than half a billion Australian dollars in fresh cashflow.

While you expect the price tag to be colossal, everything else about the Chiron falls under the same heading, too.

A huge car, the Chiron is, at 4544mm long — 82mm longer than the Veyron. It’s also 53mm higher, at 1212mm and, critically, its 2038mm width is 40mm wider.

That extra width has been used to give the two-seat Chiron’s interior some extra space, especially down in the footwells, and it has also delivered another 12mm of headroom. Its interior continues the Veyron’s theme of authentic materials, including leather, carbon-fibre and brushed aluminium, while it has the world’s first airbag that can deploy through the carbon-fibre dash to protect the passenger.

The new monocoque, constructed by CarboTech in Austria, delivers 50,000Nm/degree of torsional rigidity, which is up there with the Porsche and Audi LMP1 Le Mans racers. It’s a lot heavier, though. A lot.

The Chiron has added 155kg over the original versions of the Veyron, and it sits at 1995kg, which can lead you to develop some frightening numbers about what a crash might look like at v-max.

A big reason for the weight is the engine. It’s an enormous thing, heavily revised from the Veyron and capable of delivering 1103kW of power at 6750rpm.

It’s enormous 1600Nm torque loading, which is available even in first gear, hits at 2000rpm and stays on until 6000rpm. That makes it the first petrol-powered car in living memory with a power peak lower than the torque peak.

The breathing parts of the engine have been completely overhauled, with a carbon-fibre inlet manifold added to it, along with six catalytic converters and an all-new titanium exhaust system.

The four turbochargers are also new, along with being larger and capable of cramming in more air at higher pressures. Bugatti insists it was after a more linear power delivery from the Chiron, so it only uses two turbochargers during the car’s step-off acceleration phase before the next two join in above 3800rpm. Don’t worry; it will still spin up all four wheels from a standing start.

It retains its all-wheel drive layout, though this time it uses an electronically controlled multi-plate centre differential with torque vectoring to deliver the drive to whichever end of the car can make the best use of it. It also has torque vectoring on the rear axle, giving it an “easy to drift” function that might have to be seen and used to be believed.

The seven-speed dual-clutch is a development of the Ricardo-built unit, with alloy paddle-shifters on the steering wheel for manual use, and there’s now an electro-mechanical steering system.

The suspension adopts air suspension to improve high-speed body control without hurting the surprising ride quality coming up from the custom 285/30 ZR20 front and 355/25 ZR21 tyres.

While it’s fully adaptive for bump and rebound, it also lets Bugatti give the Chiron variable ride height, depending on the task at hand.

Those tasks range from five preset modes, which include Lift (for keeping the nose out of trouble over gutters and speed bumps), Auto, Autobahn, Handling and Top Speed.

While Lift is a low-speed solution, the next three modes are limited to just a paltry 380km/h, while you will still need to stop the car then insert and twist a Speed Key to engage the Top Speed mode for the full time-warp experience.

Calming all of this are bigger 420mm front and 400mm rear carbon-ceramic rotors, clamped by eight-piston front and six-piston rear calipers. Bugatti insists the stopping power is astonishing, pulling the Chiron back to zero from 100km/h in 31.3 metres, from 200km/h in 125 metres and from 275 metres from 300km/h. Don’t ask about 420km/h, though.

It doesn’t use the mechanical braking system alone, though, because the Chiron carries over the concept of the air brake (also adopted by McLaren). While the big car has a coefficient of drag of 0.38Cd in its Auto mode, 0.40 in its Handling mode and just 0.35 in its Top Speed mode, that leaps up to 0.59 when it uses hydraulics to stick the plane-like Air Brake up into the air flow to help slow the car down.

The Chiron is named after Bugatti’s most famous racing driver, Louis Chiron, who raced for the marque in the 1920s and 1930s and was the official starter of the Monaco Grand Prix into the late 1970s. Chiron won the French Grand Prix in a Bugatti Type 51 and even though he also raced for Alfa Romeo, Mercedes-Benz and Maserati, he was always closely linked to Bugatti.

The dramatic Chiron styling was lead by design boss Achim Anscheidt. While attention to detail is easy to come by when you’re asked to design an all-new car once a decade, the Chiron has its own issues, most notably the torture of air across the surfaces.

Anscheidt insisted the design team worked unusually closely with the engineering and aerodynamics teams to retain the visual punch without losing any aero efficiency.

Besides the horseshoe grille, there’s a front splitter strong enough to go racing with, while the thin LED lights also cunningly redirect air to cool the front brakes.

There’s a semicircular set of front wings and a large central fin, which runs from the bonnet into the roof and onto the tail, to provide lateral stability at high speed, much like on modern LMP1 racers.

The Veyron’s large air scoops to feed the mid-mounted engine have been replaced by NACA ducts, which keep the bodywork cleaner and deliver less turbulent air.

There’s an integrated rear spoiler, a large, central exhaust system and another hard-core diffuser at the back to finish off the Chiron’s look.