Bugatti Veyron

The shape is Jozef Kaban's, drawn under chief designer Hartmut Warkuss, and it exists because Warkuss decided to stop outsourcing. Volkswagen's first four Bugatti concepts, the EB 118, the EB 218 and the 18/3 Chiron, were Giugiaro designs carrying an 18-cylinder engine. The EB 18/4 Veyron shown in Tokyo in October 1999 was the first done in house, and the EB 16/4 that followed in 2000 brought the W16 with it. Warkuss even commissioned a proposal from Walter de Silva at SEAT and then rejected it in favour of his own. What reached production is compact and deliberately undramatic, a squat two-box form with an enormous horseshoe grille at the front and the engine visible behind the cabin under a low cover. The two-tone split along the flank is the signature, borrowed from pre-war coachwork and used on almost everything Molsheim has built since. Nothing about it chases theatre. It is a shape drawn around a cooling problem, ten radiators worth of one, and it looks like exactly what it is.

The Veyron never raced and was never meant to. There is no class anywhere for a two-tonne, all-wheel-drive, 1,001 PS road car, Volkswagen ran no factory programme under the Bugatti badge, and the money that would have funded a campaign went into the engine instead. What the car has is a name and a substitute. Pierre Veyron was a Bugatti development engineer, test driver and works racer who, with Jean-Pierre Wimille, won the 1939 24 Hours of Le Mans in a supercharged Type 57C Tank, the second and last Le Mans victory the marque ever took. The competition the modern car did enter was against a clock at Ehra-Lessien, and it was treated seriously: TUV measurement in both directions, Guinness observers present, and a driver in Pierre-Henri Raphanel who had raced in Formula One and won at Le Mans. That is the closest a Veyron has come to a grid, and given what the car was built to prove, it is the right substitute.

No car of the 2000s was discussed more and understood less. Top Gear made itself the Veyron's chief interpreter and kept returning to one comparison: James May called it our Concorde moment, Jeremy Clarkson called it the greatest car ever made and reached for the same aircraft, and the programme voted it Car of the Decade at its end-of-2010 awards. May drove one past 407 km/h at Ehra-Lessien himself, then repeated the exercise in a Super Sport. Richard Hammond raced one against a Eurofighter Typhoon and lost, and against a McLaren F1 over a mile in Abu Dhabi and won, going past the older car somewhere between 200 and 300 km/h without using launch control. Gordon Murray, who designed that McLaren, had called the Veyron the most pointless exercise on the planet while it was still in development, then drove one and revised his verdict to a huge achievement. Martin Roach wrote an entire book in 2011 on the premise that the car had become a celebrity in its own right.

A Veyron is a more robust thing than its reputation suggests, and the honest headline is that its problems are logistical rather than mechanical. The recalls show where the weak points were rather than that the car is fragile: a fuel gauge that could read high, thirteen early cars with a battery cable that corroded where it met the alternator, and eighty-seven needing underbody panels resealed and riveted. Beyond that, the failure mode owners actually meet is disuse. Ten radiators and a great deal of plumbing means a car left standing will seep somewhere, and heat cycling turns a small leak into a large one quickly. The dual-clutch gearbox is strong but expensive to be wrong about, so harsh shifts or a warning light are worth investigating straight away rather than living with. Tyres age out on a calendar regardless of mileage. None of this is mysterious and none of it stops anyone, but a Veyron rewards being driven, serviced and kept warm far more than it rewards being stored.