The Veyron is already the most extraordinary performance car ever built. Now Bugatti has launched the roofless Grand Sport version. Henry Catchpole straps himself in and prepares to have his senses assaulted
Far from sun-drenched roads, far from warm tarmac and the cockpit of a Veyron Grand Sport, I’d like you to put yourself in a coastguard’s cottage at night. It’s bare inside and the small building is being assaulted by a gale force storm. The wind is whistling and howling through the cracks around the doors and windows. Outside, every few seconds a wave breaks on a shingle beach before crashing into the rocks on which the cottage is standing. It’s quite a night, and, like all the best nightmares, there’s a lion in it too. Obviously you’re adding to the cacophony by kicking the angry Aslan and making it emit a sort of low guttural growl/snarl. Then you close your eyes and turn your back on it all, so that behind you there is the sound of wind, waves and a snarling lion…
Open your eyes. The sound remains, reverberating in the air around you, but you’re not in a coastal cottage. Now you’re in third gear, braking, entering, exiting, turbos lit then wastegating, engine growling, pounding through Sardinian corners in a Veyron Grand Sport.
It’s this sound and the sensations of speed that really sets the Grand Sport apart from the original. Travelling in the closed car is apparently like travelling in a bubble – quiet, refined and, aside from the G-forces trying to rearrange the natural position of your internal organs, almost serene. I say apparently because until today there has been a Veyron-sized hole in my CV. I’d tried to convince myself that it didn’t really matter. After all, according to The Knowledge, it’s not even our favourite supercar, so how much could I be missing out on?
But when I arrived at the hotel in Sardinia on Sunday evening and saw the Grand Sport sitting outside reception I knew I’d been kidding myself. Matt Vosper and I both dropped our bags and just walked round it like wide-eyed schoolboys. I don’t think we even dared touch it. It had the roof on then and to be honest looked identical to the coupe except for a slightly extended windscreen and a roof section that jutted out slightly between the two intakes (which now house roll-over hoops). The bizarre thing is that the Bugatti isn’t an extravagant shape, and painted in metallic brown (titanium on the colour chart) it could, should be a big non-event. Yet it isn’t. It is utterly fascinating and mesmerising. It has the ‘wow’ factor and then some. It’s a bit like meeting a famous person – although they’re dressed in a grey suit and clearly just a human being like anyone else, they’re still somehow very much not like anyone else. Bugatti describes the Veyron as having a ‘low profile but high presence’, which sums it up quite neatly.
