Volkswagen's Ehra-Lessien test track is around 13 miles long and has been described, not least by VW, as ‘an oval'. But it isn't, really.
At each end is a 180-degree banked turn. One side of the ‘oval' is a 5.5 mile dead straight, but the other is shaped more like a comic-strip dog's bone. Viewed from the sky, I suggested, it would look a bit like a very elongated BMW grille. They didn't like this.
Maxing the new Veyron SuperSport is an exercise that begins on the dog-bone side of the track. The idea is to accelerate to 200kph - let's call it 125mph - enter the banking at this constant speed and then, at each of three bollards placed on the inside of the curve, drop the 'box down by one cog. Finally, near the exit of the banking, you meet a pair of bollards. This is the signal to give it the beans for the long straight.
Four and a bit miles later you pass under a metal gantry, which is in itself the signal to lift off, touch the brakes to put the car back into ‘handling' mode, and wind the clock back to 200kmh for the banking at the other end. Then it's a simple matter of cruising back to the pits for a cup of tea and a medal.
So there I was at the start of all this, in the pits, engine running and sounding like a cross between a diesel electric locomotive and an early jet fighter. I felt on my left for the magic key sticking out of its slot in the sill, tweaked it, and watched as the satisfying ‘Top Speed' legend appeared at the bottom of the rev counter. This meant the spoiler/air brake was retracted and the SuperSport was configured for maximum slipperiness rather than downforce. Now I mustn't touch the brakes, or it would revert to the handling mode, which is much better for high-speed cornering, but I wasn't interested in that.
I pulled away and accelerated briskly - not difficult - up to 200kph and seventh gear. Then I set the cruise control. This seems a bit odd, I know, but it was the best way of keeping a constant speed without having to concentrate too much. I settled down to enjoy the scenic tree-lined cruise to the north banking and have a bit of a think.
Here, then, was the latest thing from Bugatti; a 1,200bhp version of the regular 1,000-horse Veyron, the car we said signalled the peak of supercar development, that would never know its equal and the likes of which would never be seen again. We said that about the McLaren F1 as well, and someone probably said it about Stephenson's Rocket.
The point? None. Twelve hundred horsepower and an alleged top speed of 415kph is of no real use in the world. But then, as American ambassador Benjamin Franklin once said, what's the use of a new-born baby? Maybe it's because it wasn't there, yet.
The real reason is America's Shelby SSC Ultimate Aero, with 1,183bhp and an officially recorded top speed of 412.28kph, or 256.18mph. That's a staggering 5kph up on the old Veyron GL's 407kph, so something had to be done.
Welcome, then, to humanity's perverse substitute for the arms race, the space race, Star Wars and everything else the passing of which has left us bereft of the delicious contemplation of Mutually Assured Destruction. This is how ideologies will taunt each other from now on, waving their 1,200, 1,300, 1,500 and maybe 2,000bhp knobs across the oceans. It's daft, I'm not sure it's what motoring is really about, but it's a right laugh from where I'm sitting.
I moved to the left of the three lanes for the entry to the banking. It's an unusual sensation if you're not used to it; bowling into a bend apparently far too quickly without braking, without lifting off and without, in fact, steering. At 200kph Ehra's banking is a hands-free affair, and the sensation was merely that the world had tilted temporarily. I saw a bollard, and I flipped a paddle for sixth gear.
Unofficially, the SuperSport is the way VW's engineers would have done the Veyron if they'd been left to their own devices. The regular car, so the story goes, was foisted upon them by the management as a concept, along with the demand that it should have 1,000bhp and a top speed of at least 400kph. They did it, eventually, but how much easier it would have been had they been allowed to tweak the shape a bit.
This they have done. The nose is subtly different, the engine cover and air intakes are radically changed, there is a new rear diffuser, other occult aerodynamic stuff. The extra 200bhp, I suspect, was always there for the taking. Bigger turbos, bigger intercoolers and a new exhaust do the bulk of the work, and I don't believe they didn't know that all along. The engine internals are the same, after all.
The second bollard appeared. I lopped off another gear. I was still doing a steady 200kph, but a hint of urgency had crept into the SuperSport's tromboney exhaust.
I like this new, plainer Veyron. Much as I admired the old shopping version, it was always a bit too Liberace for my tastes; a bit too pleated and tinselled. Now there is a workmanlike black interior almost Porsche-like in its po-faced functionality, beautiful instruments, austere switches, fabulous understated quality throughout. For once, naked carbon fibre looks right on the body, brooding darkly above the orange skirts and wheels like the chocolate on a half-eaten Jaffa cake. The old Veyron looked like an accessory, but this one looks like an essential.
The third bollard swung into view. The SuperSport bristled as I summoned fourth, and I placed my right foot gently on the loud pedal, ready to slingshot out of the banking like Apollo 13 drawing strength from the Moon for its journey home.
To have 1,200 horsepower in the bank is a heart-warming sensation. At motorway sort of speeds the SuperSport's acceleration is so severe it actually becomes funny. But where really high speeds are required, power alone is the mere ranting of a lunatic. Aerodynamics are the key.
Engineers will tell you that aerodynamic drag increases exponentially as speed increases. The faster you go, the bigger the finger that bloody minded physics wags at you. Increasing speed is a bit like compressing a coil spring; the effort is always doubling, and the contraction always halving. That's why an extra 200hp is needed for a piffling top speed increase of 8kph from 407 to 415. All that meticulous massaging of airflow, all that desperate stoking of the monster's W16 furnace, and that's what you get. An extra 5mph. Assuming it was actually there, of course.
Two bollards. How ironic. Bollards normally come in their hundreds and are a harbinger of lower speed and enormous frustration, but here were two lonely bollards telling me it was time to go for it. I squeezed the pedal home, and the SuperSport was impaled on the buffers of a runaway train as the long straight swung into view.
The Bugatti stiffened like an offended dignitary. Meaningless numbers rattled through the digital speed readout faster than I could repeat them to the camera - 230, 260, 290. Three hundred passed and still the SuperSport accelerated like a shell down its barrel. Next time I dared to look I dimly saw 350. The trees dissolved into a livid green slash and the three-lane straight closed in on my peripheral vision like the Hammersmith Bridge width restriction.
Now the numbers became harder to win, like the big scores in pinball. I clocked 390, then my previous Veyron best of 407. Was it slightly twitchier than it had been last time? It's firmer in the springs, softer in the dampers. The anti-roll bars are different. I could see the gantry rising from the heat-haze like a skeletal submarine surfacing, and I admit my pelvis was flooded with something like the gelatin-based inverse of iron nerve as a slight weave seemed to develop. Twelve-hundred horses under my right foot, at least twice that many trying to pull it off the pedal. Keep it buried, Captain Slow!
saw it, briefly, about a quarter of a mile from that point under the gantry where I had to either lift-off, or take-off when I got to the banking; for a few seconds before unbending electronic intervention trimmed the Bugatti SuperSport to its published top speed of 415kph. Four-one-seven. Four hundred and seventeen kilometres per hour; 259.11mph. This, then, and by a very hard-won 2.99mph, is the fastest production car in the world.
And it's Mister Captain Slow to you.
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