2005

Bugatti Veyron

Hartmut Warkuss (b. 1941), Wolfgang Schreiber (b. 1959), Jozef Kaba (b. 1973)

Imagine that you are one of the engineers working to create the new Bugatti Veyron. A major goal of the project is speed. The team, consisting of designers Jozef Kaban and Hartmut Warkuss and engineered by a team headed by chief engineer Wolfgang Schreiber, is attempting to create the fastest street-legal production car in the world. In 2005, they produced a vehicle capable of a sustained velocity as high as 212 mph.

The key to this kind of speed is horsepower. The reason is because of the engineering reality of aerodynamic drag. When the speed of a car doubles, the power needed to move the car through the air goes up by a factor of eight. If a car needs 20 horsepower to go 50 mph, it will need 160 hp to go 100 mph.

To make it to 212 mph, the Veyron needs an amazing 1,001 hp. The Veyron’s engineers created something unique to solve the problem: an unprecedented W-16 engine with four banks of four cylinders. An engine like this needs to breathe, so there are four turbochargers. The turbochargers pressurize extra air into the cylinders, meaning that more gasoline can burn on each power stroke.

All that horsepower then needs to get to the tires and onto the street, so there is a seven-speed electronic transmission and all-wheel drive. Since the Veyron can travel as fast as a Formula 1 car, aerodynamic lift is a concern. So at 140 mph, the hydraulic suspension automatically lowers the car by four inches and a wing deploys to provide 700 pounds of down force.

At full speed, this engine sucks in a huge amount of gasoline. It gets about three miles per gallon. At 212 miles per hour it only takes 17 seconds to go a mile. So the car burns a gallon of gas in just 51 seconds. Creating a problem: What to do with all the heat from the burning gas? The Veyron has three water radiators and another three oil radiators to keep things cool. You can’t drive for very long at full speed, but it’s fun while it lasts.

SEE ALSO Supercharger and Turbocharger (1885), Internal Combustion Engine (1908), Formula One Car (1938).

The Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the world’s fastest car, driven on September 19, 2010, on the mountain roads around Jerez, Spain.