By now you’ll have heard the big news: Bugatti is back with a brand-new hypercar.
The follow-up to the legendary Veyron, the new Bugatti Chiron is the most unnecessarily brilliant exercise in over-engineering that the world has ever seen, and looks set to inherit the Veyron’s title as the world’s most powerful production car.
For Bugatti, ‘less is more’ is a phrase that holds no meaning. The Veyron tested the limits of physics and now the Chiron looks set to continue its legacy of the sorts of performance that would make an engineering nerd’s head explode in a frazzled, gory mess.
You’ve heard the rumours, now here are the numbers…
1,500: How much horsepower the engine produces
Like the Veyron before it, the Chiron is powered by a mammoth 8.0-litre W16 engine, which is essentially two V8s arranged side-by-side to create a W-shaped unit.
Bugatti says that the re-engineered engine can produce as much as 25 per cent more power than its predecessor, with total output clocking in at an absolutely insane 1,500 horsepower in total. In comparison, that’s the same amount of power as 25 entry-level Ford Fiestas.
261: The limited top speed of the Chiron in miles per hour
This far, Bugatti says that the Chiron’s top speed clocks in at 261mph, but that this is only the speed it’s been limited to for road use. So far nobody knows exactly how fast it’ll be able to go when flat-out, but given that the speedo dial exceeds 300mph, it’s expected to be very damn fast indeed.
Even with the restrictor on, the Chiron still beats its nearest hypercar competitors by a large margin, all the more impressive when you realise that the air around the car at its top speed would be almost as dense as concrete.
60,000: How many litres of air the engine sucks in per minute
Like the Veyron, the Chiron needs to gulp in an absolute tonne of air in order to feed its hungry W16 engine when it’s running at full whack.
Each and every minute, the 16-cylinder engine sucks in and spits out a total of 60,000 litres of air, meaning that it ingests roughly half the interior volume of an empty lorry trailer every 60 seconds, or a 41th of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
4: The number of turbochargers the Chiron has
If you thought your car was cool with one or even two turbos, think again. In order to wring the maximum performance from the engine, the Chiron is fitted with a total of four twin-stage turbochargers.
Replacing the parallel turbo system in the Veyron, a bank of eight cylinders on each side of the engine feed two turbos arranged in series to minimise turbo lag at low engine speeds and allow more air to enter the cylinders at high RPM.
800: How many litres of water that circulates through the engine in a minute
Everything about the Chiron has been engineered to be the pinnacle of high-performance, and that even extends to seemingly innocuous components like the coolant pump.
In the space of a minute, the pump circulates 800 litres of water throughout the entire engine, with two circuits that feed the turbochargers and the engine itself separately. In all, the system holds 9.8 gallons of coolant, which passes fully throughout the engine once every three seconds.
30: The number of soccer pitches equivalent to the catalytic converters’ surface area
To rein in all the inevitable emissions produced from such a high-performance power plant, the Chiron features six huge catalytic converters to treat the exhaust gases.
In all, the active surface area of the converters clocks in at about 230,266 m², which is the equivalent of 2,478,563 square feet, 43 American football fields or 30 soccer pitches
140: The amount of silver in grams used for the Bugatti badge
According to Bugatti, its famous oval badge is the only component in the entire car which hasn’t been subjected to a painstaking weight saving programme to improve the car’s performance.
Manufactured from silver and enamel, the badge has a circumference of 26cm and weighs in at 155g in all, which includes 140g of high-quality silver.
44: The amount of luggage space in the Chiron in litres
For the first time, Bugatti customers can now take their suitcases with them when they travel to the airport in their hypercar thanks to the addition of a small luggage space in the car.
Measuring in at 44 litres in all, the luggage compartment is nearly seven times smaller than that of the average Ford Fiesta, but it’s still big enough for one airline-approved suitcase. Or a few bundles of cash.
86: The number of times the car’s carbon fibres would wrap around the earth
As part of the manufacturer’s efforts to make the Chiron as light as possible, it’s now built on a monocoque underpinning made entirely of carbon fibre.
According to Bugatti, if each individual carbon fibre in the carbon tub was laid out end to end, they could wrap around the planet 86 times and stretch between the earth and the moon nine times.
Despite this, the Chiron is actually heftier than its predecessor, tipping the scales at a portly 1,995kg. By comparison, the Veyron, which used part-steel construction, was a comparatively lean 1,888kg.
2,600,000: How much the Chiron is estimated to cost in USD
Bugatti has stated that only 500 examples of the Chiron will be built in total, with price estimates kicking off from around $2.6 million or approximately £1.9 million.
For that money, you could buy around five Lamborghini Aventadors, hire Bruce Springsteen to play at your private party two and a half times or, er, buy around 170kg of marijuana…
