Bugatti Chiron

Sasha Selipanov came from Volkswagen's Potsdam studio and won the internal competition that set the Chiron's direction, working under Achim Anscheidt alongside Frank Heyl and Etienne Salome. The signature is the C on the flank, an open oval taken from Louis Chiron's own signature, which wraps the cabin and reappears inside as a dividing line in the trim. Selipanov has described the side intake as a deliberate restraint: aerodynamic testing allowed a much larger and wider opening, and they chose a narrow one tucked close to the body so the C stayed readable. The other borrowed line runs front to back over the roof, a central fin recalling the riveted seam down the middle of the Type 57SC Atlantic. The shape was previewed by the Vision Gran Turismo concept at Frankfurt in 2015 and softened considerably for production. Where the Veyron looked like a solved cooling problem, the Chiron looks composed, and that difference is most of the argument for building a second car at all.

No Chiron has raced, and Bugatti has run no competition programme since the pre-war company. There is no class for a two-tonne, 1,500 PS all-wheel-drive road car, and Bugatti Rimac has been consistent that its business is road cars in tiny numbers. The pedigree is in the name. Louis Chiron won the Monaco Grand Prix on 19 April 1931 in a Type 51 that had only just been introduced, finishing roughly five minutes clear of Luigi Fagioli, and he remains the only Monegasque to have won his home Grand Prix. He had already taken the Rome, Marne, San Sebastian and European Grands Prix in 1928, and he won the French Grand Prix at Montlhery the same year as Monaco, sharing car 32 with Achille Varzi. What the modern car did instead was run against a clock, and it took that seriously, with TUV measurement, professional drivers in Juan Pablo Montoya and Andy Wallace, and a purpose-built prototype. Then Bugatti stopped, deliberately and publicly.

On 2 August 2019 Andy Wallace drove a Chiron prototype to 490.484 km/h at Ehra-Lessien and the 300 mile per hour barrier fell. That is the moment the Chiron will be remembered by, and it is also the moment most often described wrongly. The run was made in one direction only, in a modified pre-production car 249 millimetres longer than a production Chiron and carrying a roll cage in place of the passenger seat, so it never met the two-way requirement that makes a record official. Bugatti has always described it accurately, and then did something more interesting: Stephan Winkelmann announced the company was withdrawing from the top-speed contest altogether, saying this was the last time and that Bugatti would focus elsewhere. The other cultural marker is financial. When the single Chiron Profilee crossed the block at RM Sotheby's in Paris in February 2023 it made 9,792,500 euros against an estimate of 4.2 to 5.5 million, becoming the most valuable new car ever sold at auction.

The reassuring thing about the Chiron is how ordinary its trouble has been. Six US recalls exist across eight model years and almost all of them are small: improperly welded seat recliner brackets on 47 cars, a badly positioned airbag heat shield on two, a stability system that failed to return to its default state after an ignition cycle on 73, a rear left driveshaft that could detach on four, one car with a frame support screw torqued to 9 Nm instead of 19, and a seatbelt warning chime on 156 cars configured to European rather than American rules. That is a defect record most volume cars would be pleased with. What owners actually live with is the scale of everything else. Consumables are hypercar consumables, tyres age out by date rather than wear, and nothing can be worked on outside the factory network. The good news is that Chirons get used, so a second-hand one is far less likely to have been sitting than any of the limited-run cars built beside it.