Chiron What Is It Good For?

More power, more performance, more money — but what does Chiron do that Veyron didn’t? Does it move the game on? And is the exclusive place its two keys unlock worth the entry fee?

- Chris Chilton

FOR A CAR THAT MAKES A BIG noise about going fast, the Bugatti Chiron does a great job of going slowly. Slow, of course, is a relative concept. At 200 km/h, the kind of speed when your average affordable fast car is starting to breathe a little heavily, the Chiron’s cabin is an oasis of calm, your right foot treading as lightly on the right pedal as a pond skater dancing on the water’s surface. A pond skater that’s about to slip on some concrete wellies.

‘Okay, you can start picking up some speed now just to get ready,’ my codriver Loris tells me gently from the other side of the weird carbon septum that divides the passenger compartment. There’s a brow in the motorway ahead and traffic in the slow lane to the right. But I lean into the pedal because I trust Loris. Bugatti trusts Loris. So does Lamborghini. And Pagani, and Koenigsegg. Loris Bicocchi is the go-to man for supercar dynamic tuning.

But does Loris trust me? How must it feel to sit beside a stranger knowing you’re about to give them the okay to unleash 1,500 PS and do their absolute damnedest to go as fast as physically possible on a public road in a car that’s electronically limited to 420 km/h?

As we crest the hill and the motorway unfolds ahead, Loris nods his head slightly and makes a chopping motion with his hand. Before his wrist has even reached the end of its arc, I’ve pinned the throttle. The four turbos take a breath and the W16 pins us both to our seats. I can feel my cheeks flush and my hands instinctively grip the wheel tighter as the car hurls itself forward. One-thirty. One-forty. One hundred and fifty miles per hour. The increments on the speedometer are ticked off as quickly as you can say them, and with the same nonchalance. One-sixty. One-seventy. That long straight we could see from the crest? Half of it is in the rear-view mirror. Not that I’m looking anywhere but forward.