David Says The Bugatti Veyron Is A Marvel Of Engineering. Jason, Uh, Disagrees

“The Bugatti Veyron is the best piece of engineering that the world has ever seen.” “No, dude, you’re wrong, and I regret ever starting this venture with you. What the hell are we even talking about, man?”

I may be taking some creative liberties with the above statements, but if it’s not a distillation of this week’s podcast episode, then I don’t know what else would be! On this week’s episode of Carbage Time, The Autopian’s very own automotive debate show, David and Torch argue about the merits of the Bugatti Veyron and whether or not it’s actually, y’know, important.

Long-time readers of the boys will be familiar with this argument, as they wrote about it in the ancient times of 2023, and I assure you the podcast was just as meaningful a discussion as their prior writing.

Watch and listen below (or click here):

Here’s Torch from the previous iteration of this whole hullabaloo:

Here’s my fundamental point: For all the attention and adoration and some other word that starts with “a” that the Veyron has gotten, it’s proven to be a car that just doesn’t really… matter. Let’s be honest, here: who really gives a shit about Veyrons? Do you see people driving them or racing them or, hell, even really enjoying them in any significant way? Or are almost all of them just helping to anchor air-conditioned garages safely to the Earth?

David originally dropped an editor’s note in the middle of it, which is pasted below:

[Editor’s Note: I do. I consider it the greatest automotive engineering marvel of my lifetime. What it offered in 2005 was mind-numbingly advanced. Nothing came close. -DT].

Now, I have no object permanence, let alone thought permanence, so reading something from 2023 and abiding by the previous train of thought is really taxing for me. Instead of listening to either of their opinions, I’ll tell you where I land on both sides of the argument.

No Racing, No Caring

Long-time readers of this scumbag known as Griffin [Ed note: Scumbag? Gee whiz, Griff – Pete] should know that I’m a racing nerd before I’m a car nerd, and because of that, I don’t like a Bugatti.

I could write about this at much longer lengths, but essentially my thought process is: why build the biggest, baddest, most advanced thing in the world if you aren’t interested in proving it? During the podcast, David talked about going to the moon as a comp to something like the Bugatti, to which I’ll say, emphatically, that’s a horrible comparison.

What Bugatti has done with the Veyron is build a rocket that they just aren’t using. Are rockets cool? No doubt. Big phallic thing that spews white stuff outta one end and produces incredible propulsion because of it? Always a good time. But what’s the point of spewing all that if it’s not going anywhere? Put the phallus on the moon. Finish the job.

The Bugatti Veyron is, disappointingly, not quite phallic, and it certainly doesn’t have an ultimate purpose the way a rocket does. It’s just engineered shit for the sake of engineered shit.

And let the record show that I have no anti-Bugatti-Veyron agenda; the above sentiment goes for all hypercars for me. I used to like Paganis in my youth, but got a bit tired of them as time went on (who woulda thought multi-million dollar cars would get boring when you have no shot of getting one!), and I just never cared about Koenigseggs. At least not until they debuted their new car at The Quail.

It still looks like any old Koen*g (censored for racist trouser mouth), which I’ve just never liked. However, Top Gear did a video on the car with Christian von Koenigsegg (CVK), and the founder explained that the car was actually built to go racing in the GT1 class of endurance racing (meaning it would’ve gone against icons like the Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR/LM, the Porsche 911 GT1, and the McLaren F1  – more on that in a moment), but the GT1 class was folded before they ever had a chance to race it. As a result, K-segg had a GT-homologated car that never got a chance to stretch its legs.

We’ll never know how it would’ve done, but it immediately made me respect CVK a lot more because he didn’t just want to be opulent and excessive with his car. He wanted to prove it was the best. I respect that.

Anyways, here are our thoughts about CVK:

 

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“It Was the Best To Do IT”

Let’s refer to David’s quote again:

I consider it the greatest automotive engineering marvel of my lifetime. What it offered in 2005 was mind-numbingly advanced. Nothing came close.

I haven’t carbon-dated David recently, so I can’t speak to when specifically he was spat out in this cruel world (happy birthday again, Dave, love you buddy). What I will say is that, at least in my opinion, the McLaren F1 has to be the best car; it was just barely before our time.

Let me start by saying I’m not an F1 glazer the way so many car people are. In fact, I’m really sick of it and Gordon Murray, and I’ve got another 30-billion words in me about why I’m done with it, but I’m keeping that to myself right now. Now, I could be misremembering my history of automotive development, but Gordon Murray didn’t necessarily set out to build the fastest, most insane car ever. Instead, he just built a car, and it happened to be the baddest out there.

In 1993, it was already hitting 231 MPH at the ring. In ’94, it was clocked at 230 by Autocar; Car & Driver had it at 221, adding, “it’s still accelerating. Gordon Murray, the F1’s designer, is convinced that with taller gearing, the car is capable of at least 230 mph.” And a few years later, Andy Wallace got it to an average two-way speed of 240.1 miles per. To this day, it’s still the fastest naturally-aspirated production car.

This isn’t an essay about the F1; it’s me giving the original hypercar its flowers for being the car that created everything that the Bugatti became. It’s a segment that straight up didn’t exist prior to the F1, and nothing had speeds quite like it before, and it STILL has some records that will likely never be touched, and it’s just because Gordon built a damn good car. The Bugatti Veyron (and, by extension, kinda every hypercar built since the Veyron) was built to dethrone the F1.

While I think that makes the aura of the F1 even cooler as the old dog that’s still putting up generational numbers, it also means that any successor just has to be bigger and badder. Where the F1 used a 6.1 L NA V12 making 618 horsepower, the Veyron had an 8.0L QUAD TURBOCHARGED W16. Four fuckin’ snails, an engine roughly ~33% larger with 33% more cylinders, all combining to make 987 horsepower.

Here’s another kicker: the F1 was also Rear Wheel Drive. The Veyron? All Wheel Drive. While the F1 was “effortlessly” incredible, the Veyron was engineered exclusively with the goal of being batshit and better than anyone else on the pavement next to them. Any one of those factors probably would’ve given it a chance to dethrone Gordon’s car, but for good measure, they did it all.

I’m a big metaphor guy in my normal life, but I truly can’t think of another comp to something like the Bugatti in history. I don’t know my boxing history enough to talk about whether there was a person watching Ali who decided “I’m going to dedicate my entire life to taking this guy’s head off” and showed up able to run a four-second 40 with an extra hundred pounds of muscle (I’m ignoring weight classes here, okay). Maybe it would be like if someone had the fastest jet in history, then the next innovation that could even get close was a Millennium Falcon-level vehicle that has some kind of hyperwarp drive nonsense that allows it to summon thrusts from hell to get it past its old competitor.

While there’s a beauty to the simplicity and flawless execution of something like an F1, the all-out, excessive, and borderline stupid levels of engineering that were poured into the Veyron make me appreciate it quite a bit. So hat’s off, Bugatti.

Also, give me a C8 ZR1X over all of them. Cheers, y’all try the veal!