Restraint isn't something you generally associate with Qatar or Bugatti. So it should come as no surprise that the newest special edition Veyron -- shown at the Qatar Motor Show -- is a bit over the top.
The combination of yellow and black was apparently one of Ettore Bugatti's favorite color combinations and this Grand Sport with its exposed carbon fiber represents that idea well. The color scheme doesn't stop on the outside. The seats, dash, steering wheel and gearshift are finished in yellow leather with black stitching, the center console is black carbon.
Pricing starts at $2.05 million for this newest special edition of the world's fastest convertible. Expect another special edition at each major European/Asian auto show until they can finally sell off the remaining cars Bugatti intended to build.
In a completely not-shocking move that will surprise absolutely nobody who's seen the car in person, Bugatti head Wolfgang Durheimer has said that the Galibier, now in the second half of the design phase, will get "some remarkable changes from the original concept."
"The design will be different, especially from the B-pillar back, the ingress and regress to the rear seats will be improved, as will the legroom and ergonomics, the car will be a little longer," he said, finishing with, "and the power of the engine will be at least four figures." Oh good, I was afraid that with a little more length it would be too slow...
Modifying the Galibier concept was done after getting "half of Veyron owners" into the car. "You will still recognize the design from the concept, but now this is a design I can be 100% behind," Durheimer concluded.
Fingers crossed they still keep that spine down the middle.
Overblown theatrics, fireballs, a dozen vehicle introductions, stifling heat and no food? No, that's not the auto show -- it's Volkswagen Group Night, the company's pre-event extravaganza held the Monday evening before the auto show, which starts in a few hours. Man, I've got to get some sleep.
You might think that introducing your cars before the auto show renders their auto show reveal somewhat redundant, but hey, when in Frankfurt...
On the plus side, it was the first time we'd seen some of the VW Group's new cars in the metal.
Here are the top four cars of Volkswagen Group Night.
Yes, advertising appeared racecars as early as 1932, as evidenced by this Alfa Romeo Tipo B Don Lee Special. Photo by Mark Takahashi
Yesterday, we brought you the first installment of the 2010 Monterey Historics weekend that mostly centered around the Motorsports Reunion. We continue today and add in shots from the Pebble Beach Concours and Concorso Italiano.
English coachbuilt excellence at its best -- the 1948 Jaguar 3 1/2 liter Drophead Coupe. Photo by Mark Takahashi
Almost every August since 1950, some of the world's rarest and most expensive cars gather on the Monterey Peninsula in California. This weekend started with the Pebble Beach Road Race and the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in 1950, which is now one of the most prestigious car shows on the planet. As time wore on, more events were added, including the Monterey Historic Automobile Races, the precursor to last year's inaugural Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion.
Bugatti (and Bentley) CEO Wolfgang Durheimer went on record with German car mag, Auto Motor und Sport, with some new information on the new four-door super car coming out of Bugatti.
Now that the run of the Veyron is over, Bugatti is turning its attention to the Galibier a sedan "with much higher usable value than the Veyron" that seats four and has lots of cargo space. Bugatti expects to sell 1,000 - 1,500 of them-- compared with some 300 Veyrons-- at a price of more than 1 million euros.
Figure that's about $1.5 million USD for an 800 horsepower supercharged W16 wrapped in carbon fiber, aluminum and the finest materials available anywhere. The only better way to pick the kids up from their private school in Beverly Hills would probably be the plug-in electric version which is estimated to travel some 25 miles in EV mode. The PHEV Galibier will be available at some point after the first run of gas powered hyper-sedans.
I hope you weren't planning on shopping at your friendly neighborhood Bugatti dealership today, because the last Veyron 16.4 has been sold. Bought by someone in Europe, it was No. 300 of the iconic super car that will go down in history as one of the fastest and most technologically advanced automobiles ever produced. It's asking price of more than $1 million is notoriously far less than the actual production cost.
However, should you have a few extra hundred thousand dollars lying around Mr. Potential Bugatti Customer, rest assured that it's only the lowly base model Veyron that's run out. The Veyron Grand Sport is still trickling out of the factory in France. That's the car that achieved the current top-speed record first set by Top Gear's James May and then bested by VW's own test driver. However, there is rumored to be a carbon-fiber-extensive Veyron successor launched in 2014 capable of breaking that record.
Phew, maybe it was a good thing you didn't get there in time.
So Flo Rida (::shrug::) real name Tramar Dillard, is rich enough to own a Veyron, but too dumb to take a cab / limo / helicopter after a night of clubbing when he's blowing a 0.185 -- twice the legal limit. Nice.
The alternate title here was, "Today in Autocar rumors" at least then you'd know what you were wading into....
For an entire generation, the McLaren F1 was the pinnacle of what a supercar could be. It had a 600+ horsepower NA V12, a manual trans, did 243 mph and had a center seat! It remains to this day the only tasteful use of gold in an automobile.
But then along came a new generation and flaunted the quad-turbo super-computer-with-wheels Veyron and its 267 MPH --in Super Sport trim -- top speed.
The title of Fastest Car in the World, however, isn't something one gives up lightly. Especially not when you're best known as a company of capable, creative racecar engineers. So it should come as no surprise that McLaren is working on a world-beating successor to the F1 that will "eclipse every supercar to date." Or so says Autocar.
Autocar is reporting that the new Mega Mac (which could have 799 somewhere in the name) will get advanced, active aerodynamics, a 799 horsepower V8, Graziano seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox (booo). Autocar is also saying that ABS will be disabeable on racetracks and the Mega Mac will know via GPS when its safe to do so.
Top Gear Veyron v. McLaren F1 clip after the jump.
It's tough being a billionaire family-man. Take Russian billionaire Yuri Milner for example, he had to spend $100 M on a home near Palo Alto just in case his wife and two daughters traveled with him. But once he got to the new pad, then what? Nobody drives a Rolls Royce Phantom and the Bentley Flying Spur? Please. That barely moves the needle of uber luxury.
No, an estate like that requires a sedan worth more than the GDP of a developing nation and right now there is a giant gap in the million-dollar-plus luxury sedan market. And with home sales above $20 M trippling since 2009 in LA, the time seems right for someone to fill the gap.
Enter, then, Bugatti and the Galibier: 1,000 horsepower, $1.4 M and now reportedly approved for production.
"Did you know that there's a Bentley museum in Oxnard?" was all the text that came with a link to this video in an e-mail this morning. Turns out I did know that there was a car museum in Oxnard, it's the "Mullin Automotive Museum: Celebrating the Art Deco Movement" annnnd, it's awesome.
Here's a quick video walkthrough for those of you who can't make it to Oxnard. For those who can, check out the Mullin Museum ASAP.
(BTW: I'm really feeling this sort of video tour of car museums. If you want to show off your local one with a video you shot or found, hit me up at submission (@) edmunds (dot) com )
There are few better ways to waste a LOT of time online than a configurator with....well....every color imaginable available to alter virtually every part of a really expensive car.
Wolfgang Duerheimer, former head of Porsche R&D is heading to the company's luxury side to focus his piercing gaze attention on Bentley and Bugatti as well as assuming the title of motorsport director for the Volkswagen Group.
"Wolfgang Durheimer personifies the outstanding technical competency of Porsche...He will bring this expertise and his experience to Bentley and Bugatti," Martin Winterkorn, chairman of the board of management of Volkswagen AG said in a statement on Monday.
During his time with Porsche, Duerheimer was instrumental in the creation of the Cayenne, Panamera, RS Spyder and the development of the new 911. Durheimer is a Fulbright Scholar and spent time at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University working on his advanced engineering degrees.
Duerheimer is replacing the retiring but still on The Board Dr. Franz-Josef Paefgen, and is succeded in the R&D post by Wolfgang Hatz.
It's not exactly news, but the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport made an appearance at the Volkswagen Group event prior to the 2010 Paris Auto Show. This is the car that set the top speed record for production cars earlier this year.
There aren't too many people in this world that can write a check for $700,000 on a 2008 Bugatti Veyron. And now it appears that the guy who bid $700,000 on just such a car at this weekend's Barrett-Jackson Las Vegas auction is not one of those people either.
As reported on Speed TV, the bidder who has remained nameless, reneged on the deal shortly after making the winning bid. The man was escorted from the premises. First, Chairman and CEO of the auction company, Craig Jackson, said he would assume ownership of the car. Later, he told Speed TV that he'd received a call from a potential buyer.
But even that bizarre scene couldn't quite compete with what we consider the weirdest moment in the auction: someone paid $150,000 for two beige 1981 Corvettes. Let us repeat that: $150,000 for two beige 1981 Corvettes.Yes, one was the last Corvette built at the St. Louis plant and the other was the first Corvette built in the Bowling Green, Kentucky plant. And proceeds went to the Ralph Braun Foundation, which seeks to help provide wheelchair accessible transportation for those that cannot afford it, so great.
But two beige 1981 Corvettes with 3-speed automatics? Really. And somehow this honey only got $10,450. Unjust!
Sure, the big fancy stars at TopGear got the world-exclusive first photo shoot on the upcoming Shelby SuperCars (SSC) Ultimate Aero II -- the rig conceived to take the top-speed record back from that bothersome Bugatti Veyron Super Sport. See above.
But did those guys reveal the inspiration -- nay, the muse -- current styling star Jason Castriota used in designing this new super-duper-ooper sports car? No sir, they did not.
Now it can be revealed. Behold, the 1959 Chevrolet Biscayne, holder of precisely no production car top-speed records.
Remember the orange and black Bugatti Veyron that broke the production car speed record when it reached 267.86 mph on Volkswagen's Ehra-Lessien proving ground last month? The one that will show up on a future episode of Top Gear? Right, that's the Veyron 16.4 Super Sport.
Last weekend the Super Sport showed up at Carmel Valley's Quail Lodge and Pebble's Concours d'Elegance in an outrageous shade of blue -- the better to draw the attention of the hoity-toitiest of all the hoity-toity who were gulping down free bubbly as fast as the Quail staff could bring it out.
The actual record-setting Veyron 16.4 Super Sport made a cameo on Saturday at Laguna Seca, pacing a lap of vintage (read: really old) Bugatti racecars during the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion. There's a video of that after the jump.
Neither of the carbon-fiber-bodied cars got any faster during the flight to California. Bugatti bills them as 1,200-horsepower Veyrons, though their 882-kW rating really only works out to 1,183 hp. The Super Sport also makes 1,102 pound-feet of torque, and would be unimaginably traction-deprived if it were anything other than all-wheel-drive. Accelerating to 60 mph would take 2.4-2.5 seconds, the company claims.
Top speed on the production car that Bugatti will sell you will still be limited to 258 mph "to protect the tyres," says Bugatti. Tires, schmires, we say. If you can afford to spend $2.5 million on a car, you can afford a set of tires for every day of the year. Specs as a downloadable PDF are below.
Who's missing from this photo with the Guinness Book of World Records staff taken after the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport set a new speed record for production cars with a 276.86-mph v-max run on VW's Ehra-Lessien proving ground in Germany? Evidently, the Top Gear crew if a report on the Top Gear website can be taken at face value.
TG writes, "Now, we wouldn't want to give anything away, but you know how TopGear has always been pretty intimately involved with high-speed runs in the Veyron?" Yes, the video of James Mays's 253-mph run in a regular Veyron is after the jump.
And TG continues, "Well, let's just say... it would have been a bit strange for us not to have been part of this astonishing record run in some capacity. We're not saying any more, but keep a close eye on all things TopGear in the coming weeks..."
In officially resetting the world land speed record for production cars that appears in the Guiness World Record book, Bugatti brought in the most potent version yet of the Bugatti Veyron. Behold the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport. Actually, you can't behold it officially just yet, as the car's formal unveil comes at Pebble Beach next month.
The Super Sport's 8.0-liter W16 engine makes 1,183 horsepower (up from 1,001) and 1,106 pound-feet of torque (up from 922) courtesy of bigger turbos (all 4 of them) and bigger intercoolers. (The front intakes are larger, too, and NACA ducts have been cut into the roof.) With that kind of power, it would be ridiculous if the car didn't break some kind of record.
So on July 4, with Guiness staff on hand at the Ehra-Lessien proving ground near Wolfsburg, Germany, Bugatti test driver Pierre Henri Raphanel drove the Veyron Super Sport to a new land speed record of 267.86 mph (a two-way average). This crushed the old record of 256.18 set in 2007 by a comparative little guy, the Shelby SuperCars Ultimate Aero, which coincidentally also carried a 1,183-hp rating.
We're not sure why Bugatti hasn't released video of the record-setting run, but perhaps it will turn up.
This 1936 Bugatti Type57SC Atlantic was part of a model run of 3 aluminum-bodied cars based on the Aerolithe Electron Coupe unveiled at the Paris auto salon in 1935. It was the first car off the line.
And it is very probably the most expensive car ever sold to date.
The auction house Gooding & Company recently brokered a deal between the family of the Bugatti's former owner, the late Dr. Paul Williamson, and the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, California.
Museum benefactors were prepared to pay big for the car, and the Wall Street Journal reports that the sale price was somewhere between $30 million and $40 million. The museum is open to the public, so one of these days, there may be an opportunity to see the car in the metal.
Correction: The Mullin Automotive Museum issued a press release later this week stating that it is not in fact the buyer of the Bugatti. The identity of the actual buyer is not known, but that individual(s) has been in conversation with the Mullin, which will likely have the opportunity to display the car to the public.
