There’s a new slow/fast Bugatti in town, as the slightly-less-than Super Sport 300+ model, called simply Super Sport, is finally reaching production now in time for delivery sometime next year. The 3.9 million dollar W16 hypercar feels like an absolute dinosaur in today’s automotive landscape. It’s big, heavy, and sucks down gasoline like it has an AmEx black with an open tab at the OPEC bar. There’s no finesse here, it just punches air in the face with 1600 horsepower to achieve an electronically limited 273 miles per hour.
“With the Chiron Super Sport, we are following our long-standing tradition of combining top speed with absolute luxury,” says Stephan Winkelmann, President of Bugatti. “The Chiron Super Sport stands for increased comfort and elegance coupled with even greater performance and higher speeds. With this new creation, we established another distinct personality within the Chiron family. It is the essence of what we learned and developed in recent years–the ultimate grand tourer.”
if you want the less-limited top speed champ Super Sport 300+, it’ll cost you about another half million on top of this one. Apparently only 30 examples of the 300+ machine will be built, based off of the non-production spec Super Sport that went 304.773 miles per hour two years ago. The limited Super Sport has not been given a production number, but appears to be basically the same specification, just not as much money. So I guess with the 300+ you’re spending half a mil for an increased top speed limiter.
Apparently top speed is still a relevant data point for rich people. I don’t know about you, but I stopped caring about that number when 200 was a lot. It’s a pointless metric that nobody who ever buys one of these cars will ever achieve. Hell, none of these cars will ever have more than break-in miles on the odometer anyway, so the point is moot.
Based on that 300+ mile per hour one-off, the Chiron Super Sport has the longtail bodywork needed to hit that target number, but it’s been limited to save the special Michelins from being pushed that hard right out of the box. In order to go 300 miles per hour, you actually need like engineers and shit on hand to measure wind speed and direction. It’s incredibly dangerous to go that fast. As if it’s not dangerous as fuck to go 273 anyway.
The front of the car is hit with a pair of massive intakes, some totally rad EB110-inspired hood vents, fender vents aft of the front wheels, and a longer rear end with a bigger and deeper diffuser. There’s a new wheel design, shown here, which makes use of five super thin spokes in a directional pattern that I absolutely despise. Don’t worry, you can also option the mag wheels found on the Pur Sport.
Okay, so 1600 isn’t quite right. The Super Sport’s 8-liter engine will actually make 1578 horses and 1180 lb-ft of torque. Bugatti says that is good enough for a 0-124 sprint time of just 5.8 seconds. It’s seven percent quicker to 248 miles per hour than the standard Chiron. The fact that we just let people buy this kind of world-melting speed with the only pre-qualification being how much money they have tells me that our global system of car buying is irreparably broken.
Is there any reason we should trust rappers or Jeff Bezos with weapons grade speed? One wrong throttle application and this car could wipe an entire city block of pedestrians off the map, and yet there is no requirement that anyone who owns this is a particularly good driver.
Wealth is fucking lost on the wealthy, man. This weird machine from France is going to sit in an air conditioned jail cell for its entire life. At most these cars will be idled around Monaco for a week before the owner finds some other fancy thing to impress strangers. I wonder how many of these things will be imported to the U.S. to sit in a warehouse somewhere with Montana plates on them.
Maybe people should just pay their taxes instead.
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