The Bugatti Veyron: the Quest to Outrun Gravity

The Veyron is what happens when unlimited money and colossal ego meet the hardest automotive-engineering questions ever raised. It was built to be the fastest production car in the universe and also the most expensive. This is the story of what it takes to create something the world couldn’t imagine. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey Eddie here, before we get started, I wanted
you to know that you can listen to Car Show
add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. You'll also
get access to detours, bonus episodes of Car Show where
we go for extended drives, play outtakes, and more fine

(00:37):
Pushkin Plus on the Car Show page in Apple Podcasts,
or at Pushkin dot Fm. The year is two thousand
and five. I'm thirty four years old and on assignment
for Men's Journal, a magazine dedicated to the fantasies that
prowl the hallways of young men's minds. Climbing everest, eating fugu,

(01:03):
dazzling women's old factories with your new bottled musk. That
kind of stuff. My brief, then, is fittingly fantastical. I
am to drive a brand new high performance car for
two days down the California Coast from Carmel by the
Sea on the Monterey Peninsula down to the La Basin,

(01:25):
then report back. I can do this, I told myself.
My route would include America's most celebrated coastal road, California
Highway One aka the Pacific Coast Highway, the mythical PC

(01:48):
IF you've driven it, you know that PC is an
amazing piece of winding, rhythmic asphalt. It unfolds like a
fable under a great canopy of redwoods. It is perfect
for small, nimble sports cars like Mazdamiata's and Subaru br Z's,
where power is less critical than handling and flow. But

(02:12):
the car I was driving that day in two thousand
and five felt neutered and bridled on PC's densely treed switchbacks,
too wide, too powerful, too magnetize to the pavement. I
was never really able to incork it. There was two
little distance between the curves to exercise this car, and

(02:33):
I was growing frustrated. Then south of San Luis Obispo,
I drove Inland on the one oh one four lanes
of Primo Callie Concrete. I opened it up. Now, in

(02:57):
most really fast cars, when you hit the accelerator, the
scenery blurs and the cars you pass received gracefully in
your rear view mirror. But when I hit the gas
in this car, the scenery didn't blur. It bent in
my vertiguously linear ascent to the upper reaches of the spedometer.
The cars I passed didn't recede in any graceful paget No,

(03:21):
the cars behind me just disappeared, vaporized, not even specs
in the mirror. It was low scale time travel, a
kind of hyperspace effect. The car I was driving the one,
the only Bugatti Veyron. I'm Eddie Alterman in this is

(03:53):
Car Show. In this episode, we will explore the Bugatti
Veyron and how it was able to break every automotive
barrier that ever existed, and some human barriers too. It
had a thousand and one horsepower, a thousand at a
time when the top series production Ferrari had five hundred

(04:13):
and fifteen. It costs more than one million dollars to
that Ferrari's paltry two hundred and fifteen thousand, and it
radically re oriented our relationship to speed. The Veyron is
what happens when unlimited money and colossal ego meet the
hardest automotive engineering questions ever raised. That drive down PC

(04:54):
in two thousand and five wasn't my first encounter with
the Veyron. I saw the car in person a good
two years before that road trip, but in much the
same setting. Carwheek is officially bad. The deafening sounds of
classic cars taking center stage on Alvarado's rail, exciting car
enthusiasts of all ages. Every year, the Monterey Peninsula hosts

(05:18):
a vintage car celebration known as Car Week. My friend
Mercedes Benz Pierre Supremo Rob Moran calls this week cars
at their best, people at their worst, and indeed it
is a miasma of obscene wealth, jaw dropping cars, and

(05:42):
state of the art plastic surgery. The acne of Monterey
Car Week is the Pebble Beach concord to elegance that
happens on Sunday, but Friday and Saturday are dominated by
the vintage car races at WeatherTech Raceway, right over the
hill from Pebble Beach. When I got to the racetrack

(06:05):
that Saturday, I saw a huge dove gray shipping container
with the burgundy Bugatti logo on its side. This was
to be the first public running of the Veyron, the
first demonstration of its metaphysical capabilities. The assembled journalist had
popped their popcorn. The moment was vibrating with anticipation. The

(06:33):
Veyron made its way onto the track. From where I
was standing on the backstraight leading into turn one, I
saw the black and red coop streak by sounding like
some chimera of an F eighteen and a rhinoceros. It

(06:57):
cleaved the air, It just reeked of lethality, and then
instead of making the left hand corner and staying on
the track, it spun right into the gravel track, a
nimbus of tawny dust. This was highly embarrassing to the

(07:22):
man in charge of Bugatti's parent company, the Volkswagen Group,
because the Veyron was a product of his monomaniacal vision.
He fired just about everyone associated with that moderate misshapp
and installed a new team to bring the Veyron to
the road. The man's name was doctor Ferdinand Peck. He
cut and thrust his way through his family's corporate labyrinth

(07:45):
to become chairman of the Volkswagen Group. Once there, he
built it into the greatest carmaking juggernaut the world had
ever seen. It made nineteen fifties general motors look like
young brands. To Volkswagen and Audie. He added Bentley, Lamborghini,
Portia and Bugatti. He was a slight but fearsome man.

(08:09):
He looked like a German tank commander, ice blue eyes,
close crops, scalp very deliberate in his small economical movements.
Tom McDonald, the former head of VW Group PR in
the seventies and eighties, worked closely with PC and experienced
his unique management style. His rule was law. He fired

(08:33):
more of his direct reports, let's say, than probably any
other executive in the history of the automotive industry. Do
you remember the first time you met him. Yes, we
were doing an Audi five thousand pre dealer meeting before
the launch and I met him there and he had

(08:53):
this very early I would say, weird look. Somebody called
it Betty Davis eyes. I mean, he had this strange
look on his face, and he'd be talking to you
and he'd turn away and you kind of thought, well,
am I done as he finished or what. Tom was

(09:14):
the head of PR for the Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche
brands when the OUTI five thousand started becoming notorious for
the phenomenon of unintended acceleration, that is, going when it's
driver thought she was stopping. Great car, very advanced, and
suddenly in a pot of very hot water, people were

(09:35):
driving them into swimming pools. People were getting hit. Here's
how PK, the head of Audie at the time reacted
to the issue. So p was getting involved at the
very highest level and it became an absolute nightmare. Had
to go over to Germany several times to give her

(09:56):
presentation to PK and the board. What the status was,
what the PR, what our communication strategy was, what were
we doing offset it from an engineering point of view,
from a PR point of view, a marketing advertise point
of view. And Pier was saying there and he'd listen
and listen and as system, the problem is your stupid

(10:21):
Americans don't know how to drive. Oh no, holy crap. Yeah,
well no, sir, It's not that. P rarely spoke. He
never carried cash. Reports vary, but he sired either twelve
or thirteen children from four women. He once threatened to

(10:43):
fire all of VW's body engineers if they didn't get
the tolerances between the body panels on their cars down
to an exceedingly tight three millimeters in six weeks. He
was obsessive, demanding, strange, and antisocial. Suffice it to say
that he didn't have many arguments with underlings. This P guy. Now,

(11:06):
forgive me if I go off piece here for a moment.
I'm not trying to celebrate him as a person. This
is a version of the artist conundrum applied to carmaking.
Artists have been forgiven for nauseating behavior because we have
long value the public output more than the private interpersonal damage.
That's changing. Finally, you won't see many more Bill Cosby's

(11:28):
stand up specials on HBO. We have to confront p
K the same way we have to square the artist
against the art. But there's very little recourse when someone's dead.
So at this moment, the question that most interests me
is can we get p X kind of brilliance without
the antisocial behavior. I don't know if we can. It's

(11:50):
tied to power and the unbridling of social limits it affords. Now,
we have no record of any specific p X trespasses.
People didn't talk about him, and he rarely did interviews.
But stories like the one Tom told aren't great stupid
American driver. Just as in good marketing, imperiousness enables the

(12:13):
vision and what Piek wanted to build. The car he
invested with all his power and brilliance would be nothing
less than the capstone of his career. It would be
hard to beat what he'd already accomplished. He helped develop
the Portion nine eleven and the Lamong winning nine seventeen simultaneously.

(12:34):
He's the guy behind Audie's Quatro system. He was maybe
the greatest automotive industrialist that ever lived. Henry Ford be damned,
and he wanted to go out by building the most
astonishing car in the world, a car that defied physics,
not to mention logic and economics. That was his vision
for the Veyron. Once you experience it, you don't forget it.

(13:00):
It's like your fondest lover, always lingering in the back
of your mind, a distant channel emitting a faint hum.
I wish I could have cured when to drive for
this episode, to be back on that stretch of one
on one south of San Luis Obisbo. But these cars
are impossible to find. They don't exactly have them at
the Hurtz Gold Counter. They are all squirreled away in collections.

(13:24):
In the eighteen years since the car came out, I
have never seen one on the road. To get up
close and personal, we had to make a pilgrimage to
the Peterson Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. Here I am
with my producer Sam in their second floor gallery, so
cool there. It is the very ron So it is

(13:47):
hard to get a sense of how small it is
when it's up on the slinth like this. But it's
basically just shrink wrapped around the engine and transmission. I
mean it is just a it's a very small car.
It's sort of like the size of an Audi TT
or something. The presence is gigantic, but the size is small.

(14:09):
And here's a back of an envelope drawing by doctor Peck.
He sketched an eighteen cylinder engine on an envelope while
riding on a train in Japan. This turned out to
be a sixteen cylinder engine with four turbos on it,
but the idea was to go big from the start.

(14:32):
We went to the Peterson because the museum had recently
mounted a hypercar's exhibit featuring the Bugatti. So what is
a hypercar? A hypercar is not merely a sports car,
some bauble for the wealthiest ten percent. It's not merely
a supercar for the ostentatious one percent. A hypercar is

(14:55):
a car that seems to defy possibility, sanity, and decorum.
A car for the point zero zero zero one percent.
A hypercar is of that rare class of machine that
has le avishly hand constructed, ultra rare, sickly capable, and
grossly expensive, a car worthy of being celebrated in museum galleries.

(15:21):
Hypercars are atomic wedges, winged pizza slices, MiGs on wheels.
In pet terms, the supercar is to the golden retriever
as the hypercar is to the Zebra. You need Zebra
money to own one. And the car that started at all,
the very first true hypercar, the car that created the

(15:41):
category was p X Veyron, the million dollars car. The
hypercar exhibit at the Peterson had super rare cane eg
Zaggs and La Ferraris and Hennessy venoms, but the first
thing that greets you when you enter the gallery is
the Bugatti, the centerpiece. The Bugatti has long been enshrined,
and sung I was ahead of Bugatti. Batt I don't

(16:30):
know what now it is enshrined in the halls of
automotive history. Excellent curating, gents, this is car show. We'll
be back with a Veyron after the break back at

(16:56):
the Peterson. We are in the thrall of this beautifully
lit brown Bugatti. Many many cows were killed for this interior.
I mean it is exquisitely done. Everything is leather wrapped
or real metal or real carbon fiber or titanium. It's
just exquisite, exquisite materials and everything you touch is heavy.

(17:16):
It feels great, and this car is super heavy. Do
you see references to any of other of px kind
of calling cards in this or is this a true
original for him? Well, it's funny because Bugatti was an
Alsatian brand pre war at Tory Bugatti the carmaker. His
cars were beautifully French, They were live, and they had

(17:39):
terrific flowing bodywork. Even the race cars had these beautiful
boat tails and they were really elegant. This is a
little bit more German like the widest part of the
car is at the base. It just feels very planted,
and it's more of a German styling vernacular. It's a
little bit more like if you imagine the most insane
Portia nine to eleven of all time, it's kind of this, right,

(18:02):
got it? So, Eddie, how would you describe the experience
of driving it? Disorienting? Crazy. It's the fact that it's
so heavy adds to the sensation of momentum and speed,
and it's like, how is this thing that is so
heavy and so kind of a nert feeling going this quickly?
How is it kind of reversing time? It goes so fast,

(18:25):
it's like reversing the rotation of the Earth. And it's
it's weird, Like you see how menacing it looks, just
sitting still. It's wild. I had this thought like when
we came around to the front of it, like like
what if it was like bearing down on you? It
would be the hell out of the way. Yeah, it is.
It's sinister. It's almost hard for your mind to wrap

(18:46):
itself around the extremes of this thing, the extreme luxury
and the extreme performance. It's totally totally maxed out. Is
this our guy? Yeah? Hey, how are you Patrick? How's
it going doing well yourself? Good? Good? This is Patrick Thomas.
He works for the Peterson Museum. He looks like the

(19:09):
lost beach Boy, a clean cut Wilson relative. He's the
Peterson's resident Veyron fiend. So we wanted to ask you
some questions about the Veyron. Are you a Veyron head
a little bit? And so kind of why I like
cars so much? As I first saw this growing up. Really. Yeah.
It all started back when I was in elementary school

(19:31):
and they did the scholastic book fairs every elementary school
kid went to and they had this car on the
cover of it, and for some reason, like a little
switch just went off on heads, like I wanted to
read this whole book. I still have it in my
childhood room back in my parents house. It's called Fantasy Cars,
and I just cleaned out that room and I found
it again, and I just felt like a kid, and

(19:51):
I was reminded that, oh, hey, we have this at
my workplace, and this is where it all began. All
began in the sense of what curiosity I got that
thing when I was oh four was when I first
saw that book, I believe. And now we're in twenty two,
eighteen years later, and I'm still just as in love
with the cars. And so it was the look of
the thing. It was the look of the thing. It

(20:12):
was the numbers, it was the price, it was the exclusivity,
it was the whole shebang. Everything about it just made
it so appealing. It's like, my little seven year old brain,
is this still the pinnacle for you as far as
hypercars go? Yeah, personally, I think so. They were the
first to make the whole uber one million plus dollar hypercar,
and that just stuck with me ever since. So that's

(20:34):
what qualifies hypercar's hypercar nowadays is if there's only like
twelve of them made in some tiny little barn out
in eastern France, and then the engine was made by
a bunch of magical ferries, And that's what makes a
hypercar hypercr Before the Veyron, no one dared to charge
one million for a production car, not even McLaren with

(20:58):
its limited run F one three seater, but a Prey
La Bugatti, the Deluge. The Veyron made the world safe
for million dollars cars, for hypercar and for the lucky
souls who buy them. So tell me about the engine
a little bit. Yeah, this is an eight leader W
sixteen configuration. It's called the sixteen point four because the

(21:19):
sixteen cylinders that come in the motor with the four
turbos attached to it. It was one of the first
of its kind as far as more than just two
turbos goes sixteen cylinders four turbos, and PC originally wanted
eighteen cylinders. So tell me about the brakes inside. Of there.
What's going on? They look like dinner platesgantic. Yeah, you

(21:40):
could probably fit like three turkeys on the side of that.
The calipers about the size of American football and they're
meant to they're meant to stop you from two hundred
and fifty six miles an hour in a safe amount
of time. And the body work, it's all rendered in
this beautiful carbon fiber, the sort of dark bronze carbon

(22:01):
fiber with this clear code over it. The bodies are
carbon fiber, correct, that's correct. The bodies are carbon fiber.
But since it is part of the hype car class,
it's all very bespoke. So the original customer of this
car said, I want a carbon fiber exposed body, and
I want a clear coat with a little bit of
gold overtones too. He says, that's real gold. I wouldn't

(22:23):
say it's real gold. I'm just saying the overtones are gold.
Are there any memorable reactions you've had from people who
come in and see it? Actually, yeah, there was one
the other day. I remember there's a kid that just
turned the corner behind me and just like threw both
of his hands on his cheeks and just like just
like his mouth hit the floor and he could really speak.

(22:46):
His dad was just like laughing, and I knew exactly
what was going on because I was the same way
the first time I saw one of these cars at
that age. Well, Kevin McAlister full Kevin literally the Vincallister,
like the right here, right in his cheek bones, mouth
on the floor. Surely the interior is just as over
the top. No, yeah, the interior is all leather. It's
very sensitive. You can just take your thumbnail and ruin

(23:06):
its value, just like if you just nick in the
wrong direction. So this this is a car bought by
people who defy gravity. They have they exert no weight
onto the seat. They are special humanoids who never scuffed
the leather, who you know can drive this thing with

(23:26):
one pig key, that's true. Or they just don't to
pay taxes. I can't tell. It's a glory to behold.
It really is. Ah. I remember we were received it
this day. This is only two weeks in this exhibit
so far. I was there when we received an I
was just felt like I was that kid again. I

(23:49):
was like, ah, there you are, I missed you. Meet
your heroes, right, meet your heroes. And then often sometimes
they disappoint, but this one definitely did not. I'll tell
you that the Vey Run was built to be the
fastest production car in the universe and also the most expensive,

(24:12):
But it was also a highly personal project. As with
Patrick our museum guide, Doctor pas obsession was tied to
a book. He wanted the car to produce a thousand
and one horsepower because his favorite story as a child
was A thousand and one Arabian Nights. He wanted it
to go two hundred and fifty three miles per hour

(24:34):
because his Porsche nine seventeen and Durance Racer topped out
at two fifty two on the Mosan Strait at Lament
In Pax a half like pursuit, the Bugatti became less
a car than a physics problem, a solution to a
cascading series of impossibilities. It's the old if you give
a mouse a cookie scenario. How can we make a

(24:56):
thousand and one horsepower hypercar that anyone's grandmother can drive
and make sure it starts every time at minus thirty
degrees fahrenheit. To make all that power, it will need
sixteen cylinders and four turbos. With all that plumbing, it
will need twelve radiators to keep its engine from imploding.
To get that power to the ground, it will need

(25:18):
all wheel drive. The added weight of the all wheel
drive system will require stronger suspension and tires, and at
top speed, even the strongest tires will rip themselves apart
before the car runs out of fuel. So the custom
Michelin tires are unit with the wheel and cost seventy
thousand dollars a set to replace. Final total price tag

(25:42):
a whopping one million euro a copy, and Bugatti still
lost money on each one funny story about the tires.
When Pech told Michelin that he needed a road tire
that could survive the car's two hundred and fifty three
mile an hour top speed, they told him he was nuts.

(26:02):
They said that customers who wanted to experience the car's
phenomenal top speed capability would have to take the regular
tires off the car and installed dedicated racing tires to
make the run. Then, proving that Michelin was indeed correct
about PC being nuts, he allegedly threatened to cancel all
of Michelin's tire contracts for all of the VW Group's cars.

(26:26):
We're talking millions of units per year times four. If
they couldn't deliver a street tire that could go all
the way from zero mph to two fifty three without delaminating,
guess what happened. So, yes, the Vay Run only exists
because the guy in charge was steaming furiously toward this

(26:47):
thing in his head and willing to lay it all
on the line to make it happen. And it only
exists because he was willing to lose wads of money.
Even though the car costs seven figures, Bugatti only planned
to make three hundred of them over the entire run.
That would hardly cover the cost of the dedicated headquarters
and factory he built to make the car in Moulzheim, France,

(27:10):
at the ancestral home of the original Bugatti family. As
our friend Patrick at the Peterson made clear, the price
tag was significant because it crossed a psychological chasm unprecedented
at the time one million dollars. But and this is

(27:32):
going to be rare for the show, I'd like to
focus here on the performance rather than the psychological chasms.
Without the performance, there'd be no way to justify the
helicopter adjacent pricing. But the most important thing about the
Veyron's performance is that it crossed a threshold that was
as significant as it was invisible. It was faster than

(27:55):
gravity free fall acceleration equates to zero to sixty miles
per hour in two point seven seconds. That's the force
of gravity. The quantifiable accelerative speed of one. Previously zero
to sixty and two point seven seconds, or the rate
of free fall, was thought to be the physical limit

(28:17):
of car acceleration on the road, but the veyron slipped
past that rate. It hit sixty miles per hour in
two point five seconds. So this thing, in a manner
of speaking, this thing out accelerated gravity. Well, firstly, that

(28:38):
is not a meaningful sentence. Yes, and no. Gravity will
propagate through space the speed of light, so it travels
at a thick speed. But maybe a way of saying it,
doctor Carl, is that it'll go faster on the pavement
than if you drop it off a building. Oh god, yes, yeah,
which is absolutely astonishing. It's crazy. That's Australian physicist doctor

(29:02):
Carl Kushelnitzky. We spoke with him about what the veyron
was able to achieve speedwise and how it was able
to do it. Doctor Carl, why do you think no
other car achieved what the veyron was able to achieve
one g of straight line acceleration. They were getting close,
but you needed immense, ridiculous horsepower. You know, if you

(29:27):
get five horsepower, go for a thousand, right, mind you,
A lot of that was needed because of the immense weight.
Nearly two times so they the front of the tire
kissed the road at no stage with the tires slippy.
So it was just because it had that maximum amount
of horsepower. And of course good electronics you can deliver

(29:48):
all of that horsepower to the ground. Though explainable now,
it just seemed impossible at the time, even to people
who get paid to know about this stuff. I once
commissioned world famous science guy Neil de grass Tyson to
rate an essay for us at current driver on the
nature of speed. In our discussions about the piece, he

(30:08):
claimed no vehicle could accelerate faster than the speed of
freefall see or to sixty and two point seven seconds.
Then I showed him the acceleration curve of the veyron.
Oh right, he said, I wasn't factoring in the grip
from the tires. This was the equivalent of breaking the
sound barrier in flight or the four minute mile, and

(30:32):
like those other once impossible feats, after it happened the
first time, it suddenly seemed achievable and easy. Many other
cars followed in the Veyron's gravity beating wake, but it
was the Bugatti that set the template for sub two
point seven seconds sprints. It did it by combining its
tarmac ripping, all wheel drive, traction, quad turbocharged sixteen cylinder engine,

(30:59):
and launch control system. These three elements together are what
spear the Bugatti toward the horizon with sickening speed. And
when you do accelerate full out in the Veyron, you
realize that you are testing the limits of the human machine.

(31:23):
We Homo sapiens, were not engineered to accelerate this quickly.
Our brains and inner ears are keyed to the force
of gravity. Falling out of a tree may have scrambled
your brain when you hit the ground, but not on
the way down. But going from zero to sixty in
less than two point seven seconds, that's a roller coaster

(31:44):
ride parked in your driveway. You've got a train for it.
It rattles your organs and robs your brain of blood.
It literally takes your breath away p X. Veyron pushed
the envelope, not just the mechanical one, the human one.
In the writing about cars business, one of our horrious

(32:05):
cliches is that a really fast car seems to defy physics.
I even used it earlier in this episode time Worn.
Though the phrase may be, it makes no sense when
you think about it. By its very nature, physics can't
be defied. It's our understanding of physics that's incomplete. If

(32:27):
something seems to defy physics, well then our conception of
the science itself needs to change. That's what the Veyron
did for the automotive universe. It expanded our understanding of
the possible. You can thank the little Austrian guy with
the bad attitude for that. Car Show is written and

(33:06):
hosted by me Eddie Alterman. It's produced by Sam Dingman,
Jacob Smith and Amy Gaines. Our editor is Jen Guera.
Original music and mastering by Benaladay. Our executive producer is
Mia Loebell. Our show art was designed by Sean Karney

(33:26):
and airbrushed by Greg la Fever. Our patron saints are
Leetal Malad and Justine Lange. Car Show is a production
of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show in others
from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus
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(33:48):
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