Bugatti Chiron Super Sport and Its W-16: One Last Dance With Hypercar Royalty

Third gear, 3,600 rpm. Floor the gas pedal. Whoomp! You're shoved into the seat with colossal force. A stupendous roar like an erupting volcano is at your back. The scenery blurs in your peripheral vision, and your neck muscles strain to hold your head clear of the headrest as the tach needle breezes past 6,000 rpm and storms toward the 7,100-rpm redline. Snick the right-hand paddle to upshift, lift off, and breathe. Check the readout in the center console. It says 6,866 rpm and 1,581 hp.

There will be future Bugattis that will have more power, that will shave whole tenths of a second off the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport's acceleration times. But they will never be like the Chiron Super Sport.

They'll be cars propelled by streaming electrons and spinning armatures, cars propelled by the smooth and silent symphony of the subatomic world. They won't be dancing on the edge of destruction a thousand times a second, turning the explosive power of gasoline and air violently compressed and set on fire into a harmonious fusion of power and torque and forward motion.

They won't have the Chiron Super Sport's huge lungs and thumping heart. They won't have the Chiron Super Sport's soul.

They won't have the Chiron Super Sport's extraordinary 8.0-liter W-16 engine.

I've driven versions of all three modern Bugattis, from the EB110 to the Veyron to the Chiron, and emerged from each astonished and amazed. But when I got out of the Chiron Super Sport for the last time, there was a tinge of something else. Sadness, I think.

Bugatti will soon announce one more variant to be built on the Chiron architecture, a car specifically designed to celebrate the mighty W-16 one last time. As it should. For we shall never see this engine's like again.

Until now, I've tended to regard the Bugatti Chiron, like the Veyron, as a somewhat one-dimensional machine, all shock-and-awe acceleration on the way to the fastest top speed of any production car in history. But driving the Super Sport made me realize that in the context of the coming age of the lightswitch-quick, all-electric hypercar, it's not just what the Chiron does that makes it special. It's how it does it.

I've driven one of Mercedes-Benz's replicas of the 1886 Benz Patentwagen, long regarded as the first practicable motor vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine; 1.0 liter of displacement, one cylinder, 0.75 horsepower. The Chiron Super Sport's titanic engine has eight times the capacity, 16 times the cylinders, and … more than 2,100 times the power.

Those are numbers the Patentwagen's creator, Karl Benz, could never have imagined. What's more, the W-16 engine meets worldwide production vehicle noise and emissions standards. It is a benchmark internal combustion engine.

There are internal combustion engines with higher specific outputs and better efficiency. There are much lighter, more compact high-performance engines, too. But there's a gilded-age excess to the 1,080-pound W-16 that makes it stand out, a leviathan majesty to its execution that railway magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt would have understood.

Features editor Scott Evans drove a Chiron Super Sport in California earlier this year. My afternoon with the car on the quiet country roads around Molsheim affirmed his conclusion: The Super Sport is the best all-rounder of the Chirons.

It might have 1,578 hp, pump out 1,106 lb-ft of torque, hit 60 mph in just 2.5 seconds, and have a top speed of 273 mph, but the Super Sport is a car that, if you had the wealth of a gilded-age Vanderbilt—or a 21st century tech titan—you could choose to drive every day. It's smooth and well mannered around town, effortlessly relaxed and easy to drive.

And on winding roads, it's dynamically more agile and responsive than a car of its size and mass has any right to be thanks to suspension and steering tweaks shared with the speed-optimized Super Sport 300+ and the more track-focused Pur Sport.

In case you wondered, the average Chiron or Veyron owner drives their car about 1,200 to 1,300 miles a year, says Bugatti test driver Pierre-Henri Raphanel. The highest-mileage Veyrons now have more than 30,000 miles on the clock, and the Chiron test mule and customer demonstration car has now covered more than 80,000 miles.

Although those relatively low distances have more to do with the owners' time choices than any concern about running costs, the Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2s on the Chiron Super Sport represent a dramatic improvement over the tires used on the Veyron in terms of their cost. And, more remarkably, a dramatic improvement in performance, too.

Each Veyron tire took Michelin technicians an hour to hand build. A set of four cost $42,000, and they lasted maybe 6,000 miles. At 253 mph, they'd survive a maximum of 15 minutes before the heat and enormous forces would simply tear them apart.

Fortunately, the Veyron would run out of gas in less than 10 minutes at that speed.

To guarantee the integrity of the bead seal, Michelin would only allow two tires to be fitted to an individual Veyron wheel before the wheel had to be scrapped. A set of replacement wheels cost a cool $69,000, which made fitting that third set of tires a $111,000 proposition.

The Cup 2s on the Super Sport—285/30-ZR20s at the front and 355/25-ZR21s at the rear—have been specially developed for the car. Coded BG2 (the regular Chiron Cup 2s are coded BG), they have stronger metal strands wrapped around the carcass before the final layer of rubber is laid on.

As such, they're rated for an incredible 310 mph, says Bugatti's other test driver, Andy Wallace, who set the 2019 production speed record of 304 mph in the Chiron Super Sport 300+ using the tires. "At that speed there was about 15,500 pounds of force trying to tear each tire apart," Wallace, who was accompanying me on my drive, noted dryly.

Wallace says Michelin supplied 11 sets of tires for the record attempt, but he only used three sets. "We only changed tires during testing when we went above 290 mph." All of which makes the $15,000 Michelin charges for a set of Chiron Super Sport tires sound like a bargain.

Bugattis have always been cars imbued with the vision of a singular individual.

Founder Ettore Bugatti saw engineering as art. Born into an artistic family in Milan, Bugatti was as obsessed with the form and finish of his cars' mechanicals as their function. "Nothing is too beautiful, nothing is too expensive," said the man who once snorted that W.O. Bentley simply built fast trucks.

The Bugatti EB110, just 139 of which were made between 1991 and 1995, was the brainchild of Italian businessman Romano Artioli. He built a factory just outside Modena, got Marcello Gandini, the man who designed the Miura and the Countach for Lamborghini, to sketch a concept, and hired a team of engineers to build a car to outperform the Ferrari F40.

The Chiron and Veyron were the result of then VW Group boss Ferdinand Piëch's steely determination to build the fastest, most powerful supercar in history.

Piëch simply informed the engineering group he selected to develop the Veyron that it would have 1,001 hp, that it would do 253 mph, and that it would look just like the concept he unveiled at the 2000 Geneva Show. Oh, and that it had to be civilized enough to allow him to drive Mrs. Piëch to the opera in it.

From the whispering 12.7-liter straight-eight that powered Ettore's majestic Type 41 Royale, to the jewel-like quad-turbo 3.5-liter V-12 of Artioli's EB110, to the herculean W-16 of Piëch's Veyron and Chiron, extraordinary engines have been a key part of executing their vision of Bugatti.

Bugatti is now part-owned by Croatian ultra-high-performance EV specialist Rimac. Founder Mate Rimac's quad-motor Nevera, which boasts 1,941 hp and 1,741 lb-ft of torque and will hit 60 mph in 1.9 seconds on the way to a top speed of 258 mph, shows he knows how to build an EV that measures up to the hypercar hype.

There's no question Mate Rimac can create an electric-powered Bugatti that will make the right numbers. But could he create an electric-powered Bugatti that has soul?

That, I suspect, might be a much tougher task. Which perhaps explains why the first Bugatti to be built on Mate Rimac's watch, the first new-from-the-tires-up model from the marque since the Veyron launched in 2005, won't be all-electric. It will be a plug-in hybrid.

An extraordinary one, hopefully.