Because watching Captain Slow drive 253 mph never gets old.
If you’re at home, this episode is on BBC America right now.
Here’s another early reveal from next month’s Geneva Motor Show and this one is a beaut — The Bugatti Veyron Vitesse. The most powerful factory built roadster IN THE WORLD:
So, what sort of numbers does a convertible need to be the fastest in the world? 1184bhp and 1105lb ft. That’s 197bhp and 183lb ft up from the cooking variety Veyron’s 987bhp and 922lb ft. Or roughly one Golf GTI more…
Extra power’s been teased out of the 16-cylinder engine by enlarging the four - FOUR - turbochargers and intercoolers. The chassis’s also been beefed up to support the extra muscle.No performance stats have been released yet, but if it’s anything like the Veyron Super Sport, it’ll hover around 2.5 seconds to 62mph. That’s 0.2 seconds faster than the current Grand Sport. Pricing’s equally mysterious, but we reckon it’ll be in the region of $3.3M.
Top Gear has an update on the dream that is the Alfa 4C. Its engineers are confident of getting the first prototype on the road for the middle of 2012, with the final car on sale a year after that. It will be distinctly exotic, but sell for under $70k:
I talked about the car with Mauro Pierallini, who’s head of engineering for Fiat in Europe. The 4C project is being run by a special quick-acting little team outside the main product-development bureaucracy, he says, and he grins and adds he’s personally in charge.
The show car used a carbon tub designed by Dallara, the racecar manufacturer which also consulted on the KTM X-bow, Alfa 8C and Bugatti Veyron. The production car’s structure is an in-house design by the Alfa team. It has a carbon centre tub as before, but the front and rear frames are aluminium. It’s cheaper and only a little heavier.
The car will be about the size of a Porsche Cayman. And it’s destinate per l’America.
If you’re into the tech deets, read more at BBC Top Gear
Ok. We’ve got a few responses to our “What’s the most expensive supercar crash?” question. Here’s the first: man drives his Bugatti Veyron into a lake.
We can’t decide whether it’s hugely coincidental that some good ol’ boys just so happened to be filming the Bug moments before it crashed into the lake… or completely understandable. It’s a super-rare exotic supercar, right? You’d have done the same, wouldn’t you?
We also can’t decide whether it’s hugely coincidental that the driver has been identified by local media as the owner of a company that restores wrecked supercars for resale.
If SSC’s to be believed, it’ll beat the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport (which, of course, once made James the fastest man ever) and become the fastest production car in the world.
To heave itself up to the benchmark, it’ll be using a 1,350bhp engine, which gets from 0-200 in under 16 seconds. You can see the Ultimate Aero (using the same engine) hooning here. And remember, before the Veyron SS came along, the Aero was the fastest road car in the world.
