Inside Château Bugatti
Piëch’s million-euro supercar inches carefully closer to reality.

BY: RAY HUTTON
PHOTOGRAPHY: MIKE VALENTE
DATE: May 2005

No one really understood why Volkswagen boss Ferdinand Piëch decided to acquire the rights to Bugatti in 1998. During his reign, VW collected exotic-car companies. First he bought Lamborghini in Italy and then Bentley in the U.K. (Piëch thought he had Rolls-Royce there as well but was out-smarted by Bernd Pischetsrieder, then head of BMW, and the British owners of Rolls.)

Having secured the historic Bugatti name, Piëch's next action was to buy Château St. Jean, a mansion in derelict condition a short walk from the factory in Molsheim in the Alsace region of France where, from 1909 to 1939, Bugattis had been made. This was the guest house, where legendary owner Ettore Bugatti entertained clients for his expensive and exquisitely engineered road and race cars.

Volkswagen commenced restoration of the château but was unable to acquire the old Bugatti plant, which is now part of Snecma, the nationalized French aerospace company. It was not until August 2000 at a lavish dinner in Carmel, California, on the eve of the Pebble Beach Concours d'Élégance that Volkswagen announced a new Bugatti would be produced at the marque's ancestral home—in a new factory to be built alongside Château St. Jean.

The following spring at the Geneva auto show, Piëch dropped his bombshell. The new Bugatti would be the most super of supercars, a mid-engined two-seater with 987 horsepower and 922 pound-feet of torque and a top speed of 252 mph. The price of the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 was to be €1 million ($1.3 million), with just 50 or 60 cars to be built annually and deliveries starting in 2003.

The car would be Piëch's crowning glory—the fastest, most powerful, and most expensive car in the world. But even as the applause and gasps of amazement abated, the project was already going downhill.

Two thousand three came and went, but the car didn't. A press preview was canceled, at least one Veyron prototype was crashed, and another spun out very publicly in a demonstration at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Karl-Heinz Neumann, the VW drivetrain-development chief who had been named president of Bugatti, became increasingly irritated by suggestions that the car's design was unsound, that it couldn't meet its performance objectives, and that the whole project was likely to be abandoned. Whatever the truth, it certainly missed all its deadlines.

Then VW's fortunes waned. Ferdinand Piëch retired as chairman, and his place at the head table was taken by none other than Bernd Pischetsrieder, who, as head man at BMW, had been shown the door for the dismal result of the German automaker's purchase of Britain's Rover car company. But Pischetsrieder—he also owns a Ferrari Enzo and famously crashed another million-dollar supercar, the McLaren F1, when he was at BMW—drove the Veyron and pronounced it unsuitable for sale. It was too much like a race car, too demanding for most of the wealthy clientele at whom it was aimed, he deemed.

Over the past few months, Pischetsrieder has been saying with more certainty that the Bugatti Veyron would be available to its first customers this fall. When questioned about the millions invested in its development at a time when VW is deep in an economy drive, he replied that the cost of the Bugatti project is no more than 40 percent of what BMW spends on Formula 1 racing—and, ultimately, should represent better value for the corporate dollar.

It's early February, and we are invited to lunch at Château St. Jean by the new president of Bugatti Automobiles SAS, Thomas Bscher (pronounced BEE-sher). He is keen to show us that the project is alive and well and has overcome its difficulties. Bscher, 53, could be an inspired choice to lead the company. He is a race-car driver who won the 1995 FIA GT championship in a McLaren F1. He came to Pischetsrieder's attention when he ran a year-old BMW in the 1999 Le Mans race. But Bugatti is a part-time job for Bscher, who is a highly successful banker and has been known to commute from his home in Cologne to business in Frankfurt at 200 mph in his McLaren.

We are the first people, outside the company and its suppliers, to visit the beautifully restored mansion, which houses the company's headquarters on its top floor. Older buildings on either side of the main house (built in 1856) have been converted into a quality-control laboratory, a customer reception area, a library with the company archives, and guest rooms for visiting executives and clients. A hundred yards away is the atelier—the workshop—and it stands in startling contrast to the baroque style of the château—a futuristic, curved single-story structure of glass and brick sitting, literally, in a field.

In the atelier, two preproduction cars are nearing completion. It is a cool, light place, clinically clean and more like a Formula 1 race shop than a car factory. The EB emblem of Bugatti is engraved proudly on the hydraulic lifts and other pieces of equipment. This is an assembly shop, where components and subassemblies arrive from suppliers. The carbon-fiber monocoque and the painted body panels come from Italy, the mighty W-16 engine from VW in Germany, the seven-speed twin-clutch automated manual from Ricardo in Britain.

Bugatti's design and engineering are not done at Molsheim but at the advanced engineering center of VW's home office in Wolfsburg. When Bscher became president in December 2003 upon Neumann's retirement, VW transmission expert Wolfgang Schreiber was appointed to head Bugatti Engineering. Bscher gives Schreiber the credit for getting the project back on track and resolving the thousands of detail issues that arise when the quality, production, and safety standards of a huge company are applied to a roadgoing machine that is faster than most race cars.

We were able to examine the definitive Veyron sans bodywork for the first time. The elaborate monocoque structure includes the roof. The rear side pieces and a crossmember are attached after the engine and gearbox have been installed.

The layout is like a Lamborghini Murciélago's, with the gearbox in front of the engine, nosing between the seats, and the driveshaft passing backward through the engine and forward to the front wheels via a center differential.

The 8.0-liter engine is unique to Bugatti but is, in effect, a doubled-up Volkswagen W-8: that is, two narrow-angle V-8s mounted at 90 degrees to each other and driving a common crankshaft. The extraordinary performance ambitions required all the engine technology in Wolfsburg's locker: four camshafts, 64 valves with variable timing, direct gasoline injection, dry-sump lubrication, and four small turbochargers.

The engine develops its maximum power at 6000 rpm. The dashboard has a "boast gauge" alongside the tachometer that indicates output up to 1001 horsepower (987 SAE net).

Bscher is especially proud of the seven-speed twin-clutch gearbox. "It's a great technical achievement," he says. "No one has a gearbox that can cope with 1100 pound-feet of torque [922 pound-feet SAE net], not even in racing." The permanent four-wheel-drive system has a fixed torque split—30 percent to the front wheels, 70 percent to the rears. Bscher is sure it's necessary. "You cannot have a 1000-horsepower car without four-wheel drive. Six hundred horsepower, yes, but not a thousand," he declares.

Unlike the 618-hp McLaren F1, which was stripped of all weight-increasing driver aids, the Veyron has a panoply of safety devices: stability control integrated with traction control and ABS for the carbon disc brakes, power steering, and a hydraulic system to deploy the rear wing and lower the car's ride height at high speeds. Like the Mercedes SLR McLaren, the rear wing is also used as an air brake.

This is a complex car, packed tightly in its carbon-fiber skin. The dimensions are similar to a Ferrari 360 Modena's. The Veyron isn't light, though. The final version is expected to weigh 4300 pounds.

VW's engineers and aerodynamicists seem to have achieved adequate cooling and the required downforce without much change to the style of the original concept, but we can imagine they cursed Piëch's promise of a 252-mph top speed.

One problem was overcome by Michelin's producing a road tire capable of going 250 mph. It is a special version of its run-flat PAX System wheel-and-tire combo that has unique sizes—in this case, about equivalent to 20- and 21-inch wheels.

In the end, they optimized the Veyron for speeds up to 230 mph. If you want to go faster than that, you have to prepare the car by stopping and turning a special key on the dashboard. This action drops the ride height, positions the wing near horizontal, and adjusts flaps within the front wheel arches to cut drag—but of course at the expense of downforce. While stopping short of telling owners not to try this at home, Bugatti expects most drivers who want to take their Veyrons to the max to do so at specially arranged sessions at VW's Ehra-Lessien proving ground in Germany.

Most will be content to experience what should be record acceleration figures. Bugatti anticipates 0 to 100 km/h (62.1 mph) in 2.8 seconds and 0 to 300 km/h (186.4 mph) in 17.0 seconds. No wonder Schreiber says, "The acceleration is more impressive than that of a jet plane as it is taking off."

The Gestation of the Veyron

Volkswagen tried several different concepts before settling on the Veyron as the Bugatti for the new generation. When the idea first appeared (at the 1999 Tokyo show), it had a fearsomely complicated 18-cylinder engine, the ultimate extension of VW's modular engine program that Piëch thought appropriate for its grandest marque.

Earlier concepts—the EB118 coupe, the EB218 four-door (right), the mid-engined EB18/3 Chiron—had been designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, but the Veyron (named after Pierre Veyron, Bugatti's Le Mans winner in 1939) was the work of VW design chief Hartmut Warkuss. Both designers had to accommodate the prominent horseshoe grille of old Bugattis, which doesn't sit very comfortably on a modern supercar. Warkuss also embraced the two-tone color scheme that was characteristic of the prewar Type 57.

The Veyron show car was built on a Lamborghini Diablo chassis. Installing the 18-cylinder engine, with its three widely spaced cylinder banks, was a nightmare, so the W-16—it first appeared in the 1999 Bentley Hunaudières concept—was adopted instead and fitted with four turbochargers, hence the name Veyron 16.4.—RH

BUGATTI EB16.4 VEYRON
Vehicle type: mid-engine, 4-wheel-drive, 2-passenger, 2-door coupe
Estimated base price: $1,300,000
Engine type: quad-turbocharged and intercooled DOHC 64-valve W-16, aluminum block and heads, direct fuel injection
Displacement: 488 cu in, 7993cc
Power (SAE net): 987 bhp @ 6000 rpm
Torque (SAE net): 922 lb-ft @ 2200 rpm
Transmission: 7-speed manual with automated shifting and clutch
Wheelbase: 106.3 in
Length/width/height: 175.8/78.7/47.5 in
Curb weight: 4300 lb
Performance ratings (mfr's est):
Zero to 62 mph: 2.8 sec
Top speed (drag limited): 252 mph

Excerpt from www.caranddriver.com

This car is damn crazy... For the price though you would have to be insanely rich to own one. To bad money doesnt grow on trees in my back yard...

Jeremy

The 8.0-liter engine is unique to Bugatti but is, in effect, a doubled-up Volkswagen W-8: that is, two narrow-angle V-8s mounted at 90 degrees to each other and driving a common crankshaft. The extraordinary performance ambitions required all the engine technology in Wolfsburg's locker: four camshafts, 64 valves with variable timing, direct gasoline injection, dry-sump lubrication, and four small turbochargers.