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Kraftwagen König
2009 Bugatti Veyron 16.4 vs. 1997 McLaren F1
Mr. Bean and the Evolution of the $1-Million Sports Car
What is special about the 2009 Bugatti Veyron 16.4 and 1997 McLaren F1 is that they combine warp-speed capability with usability, practicality and reliability. They have been designed to be usable every day, and, given that fact, I feel that my primary aim here should be to try to describe what it would be like to share your life with these cars.
When you wake up in the morning with the Bugatti Veyron and McLaren F1 outside your house, which would you be inclined to take on a 300-mile journey in the pouring rain? Which would you choose for an 8-mile dash up a mountain road? Which, if you were honest, would you be happy to drive to the shops?
These activities might seem mundane, but to me they are important, because a rarely spoken pleasure of supercar ownership is that of doing ordinary things with an extraordinary tool.
Supercar Generations
Our two cars are assembled in the milky sunlight, the 1997 McLaren F1 looking like a very delicate little flower next to the bulbous muscularity of the 2009 Bugatti Veyron 16.4.
First produced in 1992, the McLaren F1 summed up everything that the McLaren Formula 1 racing team knew about building automobiles. It had a BMW-built 6.1-liter V12 that produced 627 horsepower and 480 pound-feet of torque, figures considered titanic until the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 appeared in 2005. And just as you'd expect from a manufacturer of racing cars, the McLaren F1 has no electronic driving aids whatsoever — no traction control, no stability control, and not only no ABS but also not even simple hydraulic power assist for the brakes.
With the Bugatti Veyron 16.4, of course, the engine is bogglingly complex, an 8.0-liter W16 with four turbochargers that develops 1,001 hp and 922 lb-ft of torque. It has the first dual-clutch automated manual transmission (a seven-speed piece designed by Ricardo), which proved to be the first proper alternative to the traditional manual gearbox. Developed by Volkswagen, this is an all-wheel-drive car with all the latest electronics. It is named after Pierre Veyron, who won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1939 in the Bugatti T57 C.
A Misty Day at Rockingham
Unfortunately, if our plan was to test these cars to the limit, this is not the day to do it. We're at Rockingham, only this is the eight-year-old English oval with an infield road course, not the circle track in North Carolina. In an in-between state of autumnal damp like today, it's like an ice rink.
The infield at Rockingham is a perfectly nice little circuit, but unsurprisingly it feels like a go-kart track in cars with the performance potential of these two. The McLaren F1 is a real handful. At the most modest speeds, it is skittering about and drifting through the corners. The understeer in slow corners is dreadful, a tendency I've noticed on the road, where it tends to go straight while coming out of slippery roundabouts. I managed to spin it a couple of times even though I was tiptoeing around the track. Not a comfortable experience at all.
By comparison, the Bugatti is a breeze. This is the first time I've driven a car that has a full regime of electronic nannies on a racetrack and the reassurance imparted by Bugatti's four-wheel drive, assorted differentials and stability system is just astonishing. If you go into a corner too fast or accelerate far too hard, you hear the dugga dugga dugga as the ABS and stability control begin braking this wheel and sending power to that wheel, and then suddenly you are pointing in the direction you want to go.
In the McLaren, you're the lone sailor in the little dinghy, in sole and direct charge of what happens and when. In the Bugatti, you're the captain of a destroyer, with hundreds of ratings and midshipmen scuttling about in order to realize your declared wish to set a course for Egypt. In fact the Veyron feels a bit like a computer game; if you crash, all will be put right by the press of a reset button.
The Modern Way of Speed
Accompanying the Veyron 16.4 on this day is Bugatti's official pilote, Pierre-Henri Raphanel, a charming French racing driver who ironically competed at the 24 Hours of Le Mans three times in the mid-1990s with the McLaren F1 GTR. The GTR was the racing version of the F1 and it had been developed when it became clear that there was no chance of selling the 300 cars that had been part of McLaren's original business plan (there was a recession at the time, remember). Instead the money earned from the manufacture and servicing of the 28 racing GTRs propelled the project into something resembling profitability. A total of 106 McLaren F1s were ultimately built.……
2009 Bugatti Veyron 16.4 vs. 1997 McLaren F1
