In the fastest group test ever we lined the 252mph Bugatti Veyron up against the Porsche GT3 RS, Audi R8, Aston Martin DB9 and Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera. Steve Sutcliffe and Chris Harris tell us what happened
The fastest group test in history
By Steve Sutcliffe and Chris Harris, with photography by Stan Papior, Tom Salt and Matt Prior
The crusty cabin of a Ford S-Max is an excellent place to sit and contemplate what will happen over the coming two days. Its hushed cruising ability and modest performance represent the perfect preparation for the muscle that awaits us near the Franco-German border.
Emails have pinged about for the past few weeks; the final itinerary is still vague, but the cast is fixed.
Mike Duff will ferry a GT3 RS from nearby Stuttgart, Lamborghini UK has diverted delivery of its Gallardo Superleggera to meet us, Aston had the good grace to loan us its drift-tastic DB9 Sport for the week, and I’m certain someone is currently driving an Audi R8 through France and creating a 50-mile bottleneck of mobile phone paparazzi.
Not wishing to spoil the continuity of authors chosing unsporting wheels, Steve Sutcliffe will arrive tomorrow morning in a rented Opel Meriva with smouldering brake pads to continue the story.
Such is the collection of aluminium, steel and carbonfibre at our disposal, and yet this event has a special significance for me. Until recently, I thought I would never drive a Bugatti Veyron.
This wasn’t something that bothered me too greatly, because the car’s philosophy of scram-jet performance set against vast mass didn’t interest me. But now we’re just a few hours outside Molsheim, home of the Bugatti factory, I’m experiencing twitches of excitement.
At this point I put it down to being a little curious about what 987bhp feels like in a road car.
The following morning, we park the S-Max in the knowledge that it will be cruelly ignored for many hours. It sits outside the new Bugatti factory, its seats full of journalists and photographers with one thing on their mind: “Is this it? Is this really where the world’s most expensive glamorous car is produced?”
Fortress Molsheim is an assembly plant. Outside contractors supply bits and ship them on pallets, and a small staff assembles them in a building no larger than a mid-size Tesco Metro. It is an intriguing operation, and remarkable for the sheer friendliness of its staff.
There is a rule of diminishing helpfulness in this business: as cars become more expensive, so dealing with the organisation tends to become more excruciating. So you understand why we all look at each other in a slightly bemused fashion as PR man Julius leaps from the blue Veyron he’s coasted from the gates, and asks if anyone fancies a trundle in it. “It’s easy to drive,” he begins affably, before a pair of crow’s feet appears either side of his spectacles, “but also a complete animal.”
Enjoying the 987bhp squeeze
He’s not kidding. I had already decided not to think about the value of this vehicle; to do so would have made it impossible to experience its performance.
But as we slide into traffic and a ratty Sprinter van brushes near the rear wing, it is hard to avoid the £839,000 reality. Give or take a few options, that’s eight Porsche 997 GT3 RSs.
Five hundred yards later we filter onto a dual carriageway, I push the throttle pedal two-thirds of the way towards the rubberised stop and my perception of the word ‘fast’ is irreversibly altered. We drive for a while, then stop at the beginning of some fine, empty asphalt.
Two facts spill out of the conversations that mingle among the cars. First, the Veyron is not as physically big as we’d expected.
Second, if Dr Piech had decided to add Aston Martin to his supercar empire earlier this year, he could have chosen any one of these cars as his company wheels. As it is, we’re assured he doesn’t actually own a Veyron. Mrs Piech does instead.
It’s only when you see a collection of cars like this that you appreciate the vast growth in global wealth over the past decade. Bugatti aside, each car here is a profit-returning commodity produced in significant volume. Try ordering a £76,825 Audi R8 from your local showroom and you will be politely asked to wait two years.
This century, Lamborghini’s production figures have grown at a startling rate. There was one full year of production in the 1990s when just 24 new Aston Martins left the factory, but last year production broke the 7000 barrier. And the Porsche 911 is a phenomenon, although the £94,280 GT3 RS is produced in smaller numbers.
But my point is this: the world is supposed to be falling out of love with these cars, and yet more and more people are buying them. They are the target of environmental groups, but the net effect of reducing the CO2 emissions of every Golf
by a couple of g/km would be far greater than removing all of these cars from our roads. These objects should be celebrated
as engineering and styling exercises.
Isn’t it interesting that BMW has been unable to crack the expensive coupé marketplace, and yet Audi – the inferior brand in most respects – has just arrived with unparalleled pomp? The R8 is a majestic thing. Opinion is divided on its styling, but no one can find fault with the size, specification and noise. The RS4 could only ever serve as temporary accommodation for this engine, and as the R8 leaves the car park on a solo sortie, we listen to its exhaust noise pinging between the conifers and nod in appreciation.
Then the Lambo fires up and people dive for cover. Noise becomes physical in this car. As the bypass valves open, the Superleggera makes the most ungodly racket. It’s not especially musical, either, just brutal.
I wonder if cars need to be so loud these days, but anyone with a trace of petrol in their veins cannot fail to be exhilarated by this trick Gallardo, its extra 10bhp and 100kg reduction in kerb weight. I smile as it screams away, then admonish myself for sanctioning such volume. Shame they bought the wheels from Demon Tweeks, though.
Wherever you park a vivid orange GT3 RS, it will attract attention. Some 40mm wider around the hips than a regular GT3 and sporting a wing of some intent, it takes the quasi-racer look to new heights. It is also a baffling combination of the surprisingly useful (the ride comfort is amazing for such a car) and the plain infuriating.
Whoever chose the specification of this well used German press car ignored the box marked ‘air conditioning’. Unsurprisingly, its cabin has already assumed a distinctly tangy aroma.
A front-engined layout marks the Aston DB9 Sport out as the anomalous member of the group. There were damp patches on the route here and the others had to wait a while as the game old Brit tried its best to summon some traction before giving in and titillating its driver with oversteer.
Amusing and attractive it may be, but can the DB9 be anything but overshadowed in this company, or does the front-engined V12 GT still occupy its own special territory? I referred to this car as the new 550 Maranello last summer. Wonder if I was being a touch over-euphoric? And so the stage is set. Over to you, Steve.
It doesn’t matter how long you have been doing this job, or how many times you’ve see a collection of exotic fast cars gathered for a photo shoot. The moment you first see the group as a whole is always a special one. It’s the moment you realise why you are here, and why the tedium of the journey to get you here no longer matters.
And when the lead car of that group just happens to be a Bugatti Veyron, well, your mind goes quickly to another place. You might even need to pinch yourself, or just giggle for a bit for no particular reason.
When editor Chas Hallett and I arrive at the car park deep in the middle of nowhere in the hills above Alsace, we see the group of cars we’re here to drive. And we look at them, then we look at each other, and then we laugh. We’ve driven here in a tired but hired Vauxhall Meriva through heavy rain and even heavier traffic for the last four hours, but the moment we see The Group everything changes.
To the right of the Veyron is a bright orange 911 GT3 RS and to the left of that is a Gallardo Superleggera, an Aston DB9 Sport and an Audi R8. It’s the most astonishing collection of shapes and sizes either of us has ever seen in one place, assembled in theory for just one story. And, of course, the numbers game in this instance is a highly amusing one to play in itself. In the blue and black corner sits the £839,285, 987bhp Bugatti Veyron. Add the combined power and prices of the other four and you get £430,759 and 1795bhp. Just about half the price of the Veyron, in other words, and very nearly two times as much power.
But this is not a group test in any traditional sense of the term. To compare any of these cars directly with the Veyron would be an entirely pointless exercise. Think of it instead as a celebration of all things wonderful when it comes to fast cars. And perhaps we’ll see just how fast the Bugatti is a little later by driving it back to back with some of the others.
IT’S ONLY A CAR
We don’t have long with the Veyron – just 24 hours – so I can’t resist climbing aboard. There’s a slight sense of anti-climax when you get into the Bugatti because, at the end of the day, it’s still only a car.
Initially you climb inside, run your fingers over the turned aluminium that swathes the centre console, feel the comfort and support of the big bucket seat, maybe prod one of the beautifully crafted aluminium indicator stalks (6000 euros
a pop, by all accounts) and you think: it’s very, very nice in here. But it’s still only a car. How can anything on four wheels be worth this much money?
So you turn the key and then press the button, and the 8.0-litre W16 quad-turbo engine bursts luxuriously into life. Wap-wap on the throttle and the crank instantly responds, not quite with the same fury as a competition car’s but very crisply for a big-capacity turbo. And even then you start to wonder. Perhaps it is worth all that money.
Certainly beside even the Gallardo – arguably the next most exotic machine here – the Veyron feels different, more expensive, more complex. Even the way its steering responds so smoothly as I edge out of the car park separates it from the other cars here. There’s a polish, a depth of mechanical sophistication that simply isn’t present in any of the other cars, not even in the Aston Martin (especially not in the Aston Martin, if we’re being brutally honest).
A quarter of a mile up the road and the Veyron is already doing things that the other cars absolutely do not do. When I drove this car on its launch in Sicily in 2005 I was gobsmacked by its performance and by its refinement, true, but I wasn’t blown away by it overall. To be honest, I thought it was slightly devoid of personality.
But on these roads, which are tighter and twistier and way more entertaining than any of the roads I drove on in Sicily, the Veyron is bursting with energy/character/personality, call it what you will. Even after five minutes it feels so much more convincing as The Ultimate Creation.
Perhaps they’ve changed it, perhaps it just works better over these roads; either way, I’m completely knocked out by what the Veyron can do. Not merely by how fast it is when you put your foot down (and it really is heroically, cataclysmically fast) but also by how well it steers, how nimble it is over these narrow roads, how serenely its seven-speed DSG gearbox works, and how cleanly it rides and handles, even over quite lumpy surfaces.
It is genuinely hard to believe that this car weighs 1888kg from the way it snaps so incisively from one direction to another, or how swiftly it stops when you lean on the middle pedal.
But the best bit, of course, is what happens when you find a straight piece of road and put your foot down. Because only then do you get to feel what it’s like to have 987bhp under your right foot. I’ve driven the car that won Le Mans for Audi in 2002 and I’ve driven a Jag F1 car that had 900bhp, and I can tell you here and now, the Veyron feels quicker than either of them within the confines of a winding mountain road.
Okay, in reality it’s not quite as accelerative as an F1 car, because F1 cars have similar amounts of power to the Bugatti but weigh three times less. But factor in the Veyron’s torque – all 922lb ft of it, twice that of a modern F1 engine – and you start to understand how and why it’s as quick as it is.
Truth is, in a straight line it would obliterate any car that lines up on the grid for this year’s Le Mans 24 hours. And above 180mph even an F1 car would start to go backwards beside the mighty Veyron.
It is difficult to describe what that sort of thrust feels like on the public road, harder still to understand how the Veyron deploys so much firepower so neatly and effortlessly to the asphalt. And that might be the most impressive thing of all about this extraordinary car: how calm and controlled it is, considering how quick it is from point to point.
ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING
For a little perspective, I climb out of the Bugatti and into the Superleggera and drive it over the exact same roads I drove the Veyron over. It’s amazing how much less civilised the Lamborghini feels straight away, and how crude its gearbox in particular feels by comparison.
The Lambo’s ride is also miles harder and noisier than the Veyron’s. You feel things in the road surface that weren’t there in the Bugatti, and the stripped-out wheelarch liners fizz with stones and whatever else the Gallardo’s big sticky Pirelli P-Zero Corsa tyres can pick up and fire into them. The din this car makes just driving along the road at 50mph is quite stupendous by comparison after the Veyron.
But it’s not slow, the Lambo, and when you do open it up enough for the engine and exhaust to drown out all the rest of the interference, the sound is nothing if not impressive. It’s not an especially tuneful noise, but in terms of volume it’s up there in the AC/DC league of impact. And you never tire of the sound it makes, either.
The real surprise, though, is discovering how rapid the Superleggera feels, even after the Veyron. No, it’s not in the same class when it comes to raw energy, but you can cover ground in the Lambo very, very quickly indeed. To the extent that you’d need to make full use of what the Veyron can do and be a decently good driver to get away from the Superleggera.
That’s partly because of the Lambo’s tyres and brakes, both of which have been designed to deliver other-worldly performance so long as you are prepared to really lean on them. The flip side to this, of course, is that if you drive it slowly the Superleggera’s tyres feel oddly lacking in bite, while its carbon ceramic brakes are equally dead in response to begin with. But the point is that the Gallardo is the only car here that stands any chance at all of living with the Veyron if the Bugatti decides to go for it.
Throw it down the road by the scruff of its neck and the Gallardo will develop sufficient performance, grip, balance and braking ability to just about keep the Veyron in sight – so long as you don’t come across any genuinely long straights.
Not even in the 911, as we’ll discover a little later, is there enough pure performance to be able to do this. It’s the difference, in the end, between 522bhp in a 1330kg car (Lambo) and ‘merely’ 409bhp in a 1375kg car (GT3 RS). And it’s the difference between being dropped by a Veyron in a heartbeat or having enough pure performance to at least keep the
game alive for a while longer.
Which isn’t the case with the Aston or Audi R8. Driving the DB9 over the same roads as the others is a fascinating exercise because it teaches you that speed is not everything. Compared with any other group of cars, the DB9 Sport would be a hugely fast and accomplished machine, but in this company it feels like driving down the road in your favourite armchair. Yet it’s a delightful car to drive, the DB9, in spite of its softer chassis responses and comparative lack of straight-line go.
For starters it makes a lovely noise, one that’s almost as loud as the Lambo’s blaring soundtrack but more textured in quality. It also steers beautifully and rides with way more sophistication than the Gallardo.
The Aston is also so nicely balanced and such a sweet car to drive that it feels game for anything you’d care to do with it, be that stroking it along at 40mph or scrubbing the shoulders off its tyres drifting it at 60mph. But ultimately it’s not in the same game as the others. It’s a classic GT machine. We invited it originally to keep honest the Ferrari 599 that was also supposed to turn up.
In the event the Ferrari failed to appear, which meant the Aston had the playground all to itself. If that also meant it was an oddity on its own among a group of rear and mid-engined supercars, so be it. To a man, each of us adored driving the Aston, especially on the long slog back home to
the United Kingdom.
The same goes for the Audi R8, which is genuinely the most civilised supercar the world has ever known. You climb into this car and somehow know instinctively where everything is and how it works. It has an amazing sense of logic and clarity to its design, and that stretches to the way it drives. If the fact that there are no surprises whatsoever lurking in its closet makes the R8 just a teeny bit plain and sensible in this company, then in the real world that’s an enormous compliment.
Here is a genuine 187mph supercar that sounds and goes and handles very much like the real deal (because it is the real deal). But it’s also a car you can jump into and drive for hundreds of miles in almost as much refinement and comfort as there is in the Aston. From most angles it also happens to look rather sensational. As a package, it’s hardly surprising Audi can’t build them fast enough and has sold out of cars until 2009.
Yet within the context of this particular group of cars the R8 is blitzed by at least three others. The Aston it can handle, but if you encounter and try to live with a Superleggera or a GT3 RS in your new R8, be warned: you will come very unstuck
very quickly. And if a Veyron happens to appear in your rear-view mirror, it’s best to wave a white handkerchief out of the window and pull over, if only to save yourself from the ignominy.
PLAYING CATCH-UP
As it happens, I was in the GT3 RS and not the R8 when, finally, the Veyron appeared in the mirror. My friend Mr Harris was driving the Bugatti and the deal had been that he would leave the car park 20sec after I set off. Then we’d see how long it would take him to catch me and, when he did so, whether it would be possible for him to get past.
On the way down the mountain the GT3 RS completely blew me away. I expected it to have explosive throttle response, fabulous steering, mighty brakes and fantastic body control. And it did, just like the regular GT3 I drove a couple of months back.
But I also expected it to ride like a rollerskate and be generally pretty evil to drive unless I was at 10/10ths, but no. The RS felt damn near as smooth and refined over the ground as the R8, only the 911 had a much bigger punch down the straights and a lot more bite at its front
end. “Perhaps he won’t be able to catch me at all,” I started to think.
And then it appeared, hovering like a missile behind me, its xenon headlights burning two big holes in the back of my head. As the road got tighter and twistier I became aware that I was driving the GT3 RS about as hard as I’m prepared to drive a car on the public road, yet the Veyron would not go away.
It just sat there, watching me, watching it. Waiting. Then a shortish straight appeared, I caned the 911 as frantically as I could in third gear and, whoosh, Harris and the Bugatti just blew by me and the GT3 RS like we were standing still.
I will never, ever forget what that looked and sounded and felt like. It’s some car, the Veyron, it truly is. And this was some group test. Cue credits, roll the soundtrack. Oh yes, and don’t forget to watch the DVD of it all next week.