2017 Bugatti Chiron
From the December 2016 issue
“Where the hell do you put silverware in a Bugatti?” the customs officer asked, staring at the eating utensils packed in engineer Dennis Rohlfs’s fancy aluminum Zarges case, which was otherwise filled with spare parts for hot-weather testing of the new 1500-hp Bugatti Chiron. At Bugatti, even the engineers have expensive luggage. Rohlfs explained that he wanted to show good manners in America by using a knife and fork when eating the hamburgers he expected to be deluged with out in the desert west. Shaking his head, the customs officer let the weird foreigner pass. Welcome to America.
That episode was two weeks ago, and Rohlfs’s silverware remains unused, lying in his box between the cables, seals, and other exotic Bugatti bits. He has already learned to eat burgers with his hands, lest he draw unwanted attention or marriage proposals, and those same hands are currently on the steering wheel of “PT5.10.” That’s the glamorous name for our blue-and-white development car, what the industry calls a “pre-series” model from the earliest stages of production. Together with three more Chiron development cars, PT5.10 is cruising on 120-degree tarmac, the tires a toasty 149 degrees by the test-equipment sensors.
It is 10 a.m., and we are loafing along doing the double-nickel. Fifty-five mph is not even one-quarter the car’s top speed. The crankshaft of the huge 8.0-liter, 16-cylinder Gorgon in back turns lazily at 1500 rpm in seventh gear. “That’s a moderately raised idle speed,” says Rohlfs, smiling. Out from Volkswagen headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, Rohlfs is responsible for a very specific widget on the W-16, the ionization-current misfire-detection system that effectively turns each spark plug into a sensor. Judging from Rohlfs’s nonchalance, the Bugatti is barely breaking a sweat. This despite the fact that it’s being slow-roasted on the pavement of Death Valley, where the famously lung-collapsing summer heat annually draws a few German tourists intent on proving their hardiness by jogging into the fiery teeth of the afternoon—only to be later found as dead as dried prunes.
And why should any of the car’s readings be abnormal? Isn’t the W-16, as well as the rest of the Chiron, but a mere evolution of the gobsmacking Veyron that preceded it? The Veyron went into production in 2005, and, after 450 copies built, how many glitches can there possibly be left to uncover? Well, it’s not quite that simple, we found out after talking with Bugatti’s head of engineering, Willi Netuschil, and his team, also frying their carcasses out here in Death Valley for the glory of Molsheim.
“We started the development of the Chiron as a facelift of the Veyron, and we ended up with a completely newly developed high-performance car,” he explains. In particular, the goal of raising horsepower from 1200 in the late, great Veyron Super Sport to 1500 in the Chiron led engineers to make a few conceptual changes. The Chiron is no power-tuned Veyron. “It is a completely new car with different driving behavior,” Netuschil insists. Well, okay!
Even the world’s least tedious car needs to be capable of the most tedious driving. That requires tedious testing and also hamburgers.
Our impression, after many hours in close contact with Chirons in different stages of development, is that the new Bugatti is in no danger of being deposed as the fastest GT in automotive history. A breathtaking monster of a machine, it is nonetheless neither wild nor brutal but amazingly easy to handle. A coupe offering high comfort, equipped with state-of-the-art safety features and excellent handcrafted details, it is a finely honed object of ultimate driveway jewelry, priced at 2.4 million euros or whatever the spot exchange rate is in dollars (about $2.7 million at this writing).
“For raising up the engine power by 300 horsepower [compared with the Super Sport], we did not just build in bigger turbochargers,” says Netuschil, “because the result would have been an almost undrivable car due to brutal throttle and acceleration response.” In the end, the engineers decided to go for a tiered intake-pressurizing system of a type never tried before on a gasoline engine for the road. “So, technology-wise, we went into uncharted waters,” Netuschil says.
The heart of the complex system is a pair of air shut-off valves. Under low load, they block the exhaust flow to two of the engine’s four identical turbochargers so that only half of them initially make boost. The valves open to wake the other two snails around 3800 rpm, but are phase-lagged so that the third turbo starts spooling a little bit earlier than the fourth. The secondary turbochargers accelerate and all four blowers reach the same turbine speed between 3800 and 4000 rpm, and then, with all the oars in the water pulling, the engine really gets going.
It all sounds very simple, an effort to deliver the W-16’s massive firepower not in one enormous bang but in a measured and civilized surge. In reality, however, the scheme demanded a complex development process requiring endless miles of testing. For example, the engineers started with exhaust-gas-regulating flaps from Volkswagen’s Paris–Dakar racing Touareg. But what worked perfectly in that diesel engine was not robust enough for the extreme high-temperature flow of the Bugatti’s gasoline exhaust system. In the end, Bugatti engineers needed and developed more-robust metal and ceramic materials for the air flaps, actuators, and mountings.
During our drive, engineer Michael Gericke played attending doctor to this complex boost system as it sucked the blistering dry heat of the lowest spot in North America. “In Death Valley, it has to show its reliability in real life,” he says, implying that Death Valley in the summer is real life. At the very least it is the devil’s own pottery kiln, a circle in Dante’s Inferno where they send the people who complain about the air conditioning in their Ferraris.
Following essential initial materials changes, the entire drivetrain needed to be upgraded, with new aerodynamic thermal management to maximize airflow in and out of the car. Bugatti developed more-powerful control computers for the car, as well as the obviously new body shape on top of the (now) all-carbon-fiber-compound structure. By the time we come along, all the hardware development has been tested to a fare-thee-well, which is why we’re doing 55 mph. The engineers are beyond the “stress tests” during this hot-climate testing, says Netuschil. Here in Death Valley, all the systems have to show perfect reliability on normal, regular daily drives. Netuschil: “We are driving like a Chiron driver will do in extreme heat,” meaning, most likely, those Chiron drivers who live in the sandier and more intemperate parts of the world where petroleum is the family business.
In fact, this slower-speed test creates very special difficulties for cars like the Bugatti. Unlike with a sedan’s four-cylinder front-mounted engine, there is pretty much no headwind reaching the Chiron’s fully encapsulated mid-mounted boiler at low speed. That’s why all cooling systems in the Chiron are working under maximum load. “The stress at low speed is much higher than at fast speed,” Netuschil explains.
The control computers are permanently monitoring and adjusting a total of 51,552 different points of data. As soon as some imperfection pops up, the engineers go at the problem, wading into a jungle of 31,974 possible adjustment points in the control map. On location, and via laptops sitting on the passenger seat, an enormous amount of data flows from the ionization-current system alone.
The data is generated by the ignition coils, one per spark plug, and from time to time it indicates a misfire. At that point, Rohlfs immediately stops talking, pushes the Chiron into various driving modes, changes the gears manually, and makes the engine work under various load conditions. He has to find where the misfire is coming from. After a while, he pulls over, grabs his laptop, and plays on the keyboard like a virtuoso, twisting the adjusting screw of the digital age.
We get gas, and our small armada of Franco-German cruise missiles with a combined 6000 horsepower departs the convection oven of the Valley, climbing up into the surrounding mountains. Highway 374 toward Beatty, Nevada, is an ascent that takes almost 30 minutes. Suddenly, Gericke starts sniffing the air like a coonhound trying to pick up a scent. Gericke is responsible for the OBD system (onboard diagnostics). Does he smell something? We arrive at the 4316-foot Daylight Pass and pull over, Gericke now out of the car and sniffing hard. In the Valley, we had filled up with fresh, relatively cold gasoline. By now, the fuel has warmed and is outgassing, which can cause both an unpleasant smell as well as a failed EPA shed test. To avoid that, the Chiron’s active carbon canister needs to be flushed with air. Gericke at last announces that he does not smell any fuel. He looks satisfied. The canister purge capacity is sufficient now, and another box is checked. We turn our cars around and head back into the kiln toward the lowest point in North America, Badwater Basin, descending over the next 36 miles from more than 4000 feet to minus 282 feet.
Four Bugatti Chirons in formation, a surging flotilla of starships from Planet 10, are rolling out a low-frequency sound carpet over one of the hottest regions on earth. They decorate this desert with road-legal, high-performance technology never imagined by the prospectors who once populated this place and thought that their 20-mule teams were pretty tough stuff. Broad, flat, and crouching on the tarmac, the Chirons blink through their pairs of quad-eyed headlight clusters. It looks as if they are on the alert, on the qui vive, prepared to jump to hyperspace at any moment. “No,” says Netuschil, “not here! High performance we only test on racetracks.” Germans are nothing if not rule followers.
Though the Death Valley excursion is a test of extreme thermal stress under cruising conditions, the trip is also proving to be a kind of test marketing of the styling. Tourists chase us into a parking area, where the engineers read engine-temperature data while the fashionably modern three-eyed bystanders record every detail through the two orbs in their faces and the unblinking one on their phones. Suddenly, at Furnace Creek, a hard-braking minivan with wailing tires disturbs the quiet. Like a parachutist, a guy jumps out of the still-moving vehicle. “Are . . . these . . . real . . . Bugattis?” The man, apparently Australian, is trying both to speak and gasp for air. He doesn’t wait for an answer. “I never expected to see a real Bugatti! Here’s four! Unbelievable! You made my holiday, guys.”
If you were thinking of ordering your Chiron in flat black, don’t. We prefer PT5.10’s Mercury-Villager-Nautica-edition paint scheme seen above.
Unaffected, and perhaps not even understanding the man through his breathless accent, the engineers continue checking endless columns of figures and charts. Gericke is watching the stability of the cooling temperatures for the turbochargers; Norbert Marek shuts off the engine of PT5.10 for exactly one minute, then fires it up again to check if every cylinder follows the precisely defined timing. Transmission man Siegbert Slobianka is kvetching about the gearbox behavior during deceleration; he doesn’t like the little jerk that happens when the ’box downshifts at low engine speed, usually right before the car comes
to a stop. He opens his laptop now in order to dive into the deep forest of software, wading deep into the Chiron’s own flickering matrix.
Engineers like Slobianka don’t talk much. They prefer to demonstrate, as when he executes a downshift from seventh while changing from normal into sport mode. Third gear kicks in, and Slobianka gives the thumbs up; the transition is perfect. It’s amazing how fast this fine-tuning produces results.
After finishing all the steps outlined in “BG744 Hot Climate Approval Death Valley,” Netuschil’s team continues to Denver and Phoenix, focusing on stress-testing the turbocharger technology at high altitude. Asked about any remaining challenges in his project, Netuschil smiles, a burger the size of the Bugatti’s trunk on the plate in front of him. “We crossed the mountain! There are only some approval loops left to do.” Even though most Chirons will never voyage very far from their air-conditioned garages, Netuschil is ensuring that the car is ready for anything. And, holding the burger, he ensures that he has also adapted to America.
Specifications >
VEHICLE TYPE: mid-engine, all-wheel-drive, 2-passenger, 2-door coupe
ESTIMATED BASE PRICE: $2,700,000
ENGINE TYPE: quad-turbocharged and intercooled DOHC 64-valve W-16, aluminum block and heads, port fuel injection
Displacement: 488 cu in, 7993 cc
Power: 1500 hp @ 6700 rpm
Torque: 1180 lb-ft @ 2000 rpm
TRANSMISSION: 7-speed dual-clutch automatic with manual shifting mode
DIMENSIONS:
Wheelbase: 106.7 in
Length: 178.9 in
Width: 80.2 in Height: 47.7 in
Passenger volume: 54 cu ft
Cargo volume: 2 cu ft
Curb weight: 4400 lb
PERFORMANCE (C/D EST):
Zero to 60 mph: 2.3 sec
Zero to 100 mph: 4.8 sec
Standing ¼-mile: 9.4 sec
Top speed: 261 mph
FUEL ECONOMY (C/D EST):
EPA combined/city/hwy: 10/8/15 mpg
