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Bugatti Veyron: World's FASTEST commercial car
Get Ahead reader Aishwarya Sharma outlines the real story behind how the world's fastest commercial car, the Bugatti Veyron, that does an eye-popping 400 kmph, was conecptualised and brought to fruition in response to our reader invite (below).
Aishwarya is currently pursuing Mechanical Engineering from NIT, Bhopal.
Speed, we're forever being told, kills. Slow down proclaim the ads on TV and the hoardings out on the roads. The message is clear and constant but you might as well tell a fish to dance about than tell us to go slow.
We need speed like we need air and water and food. And I ain't talking about the usefulness of speed either. Obviously the faster you travel, the faster you get to wherever you are going. Speed is pretty useful that way. But what I am talking about is the need for speed, not its want.
You don't need to pump in drugs to get a high all you need to do is slip inside a Bugatti Veyron, (which incidentally is the fastest commercial automobile) and go break some speed records.
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Bugatti Veyron: World's FASTEST commercial car
It all started when Ferdinand Piech, the former boss of Volkswagon, bought Bugatti and had someone design a concept car. 'This', he proclaimed, 'is what the next Bugatti will look like.' And then he went on to drop this bomb on his poor engineers, 'this car will have an engine that develops 1000 horsepower and it will go to a top speed of 400 kmph.'
His engineers were horrified, but set to work anyway (obviously cannot say no to the boss). Two Audi V8 engines were mated to create an 8 litre W-16 engine. And then it was sprinkled with four turbochargers. Needless to say, the end result produced as much power as an exploding volcano, which worked out just fine. Bu to cool this volcano, the Bugatti has no engine cover and 10 -- no, your eyes do not deceive you -- 10 radiators.
So the power part is taken care of. But you also need to harness this power.
To do this Volkswagon went to Ricardo -- a company having huge experience in designing gearboxes for various F-1 teams. Regardless of their experience, Ricardo faced huge problems in designing gearbox for the Veyron. Understand the unique problems faced -- a gearbox in an F-1 car has to last at max a couple of hours.
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Bugatti Veyron: World's FASTEST commercial car
Volkswagon wanted the Veyron to last 10-20 years. And the Veyron is a damn sight more powerful than any F-1 car. The result -- a seven-speed, double-clutch flappy paddle affair, took a team of 50 engineers 5 years to perfect.
Gr8!!! So that's the car all sorted out, you might think. But no hold your horses for a moment. We have got one of the targets that is, 1000 bhp of power but the other and the considerably more important one, that of a top speed of 400 kmph was still some distance away.
Next Volkswagon tied up with Sauber F-1 team to get the body of the car right. After a lot of testing in Sauber's F-1 wind tunnel it was found that in spite of the 1000 bhp of power, the car was unable to get the desire top speed of 400 kmph.
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Bugatti Veyron: World's FASTEST commercial car
Apparently, the body was not aerodynamic enough. The sensible thing would have been to change the shape of the car. But Bugatti was in no mood to do that and wanted the basic shape of the car to be preserved.
So they had an impasse. And Sauber did the only sensible thing. They told Bugatti, 'It's your damn problem, you guys deal with it. We won't be splitting our hairs over this anymore.'
So now Bugatti had to find some 30 kmph of speed to reach the desired top speed of 400 kmph. Now some of you might think -- "use more power. Duh uh!! You already have a horsepower of 1000. Throw in a few horses more and voila you get what you wanted!!" If only it was that simple... Each extra 1 kph increase in speed required 8 bhp of power. So 30 kph required an extra 240 bhp of power and that was simply not possible.
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Bugatti Veyron: World's FASTEST commercial car
So no change to the engine and no change to the body, at least no major changes. So VW decided to change the small things. They started by fitting smaller side mirrors. It kinda worked and then again it did not that is, it increased the top speed a bit but also made the car unstable.
It turns out that the bigger mirrors were generating downforce which kept the nose of the car on the ground. Without them the stability was gone. And that just goes to show you, how tricky it can be to manage the airflow at these speeds.
Ultimately after lots of research, trial and tribulations they hit on the idea of a TRANSFORMER. Yeah, you got that right. We already had a working transformer in the Bugatti Veyron when the movie was released.
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Bugatti Veyron: World's FASTEST commercial car
What I am getting at is that the car changes its shape automatically depending upon the speed at which it is going. At 220 kmph, the nose of the car lowers by 2 inches and the big rear spoiler slides into the slipstream. The effect can be instantaneously felt. You can actually feel the back of the car being pressed into the road.
However, with the rear spoiler in place the drag is so great that you cannot go past 370 kmph. To go faster than that, you have to stop and insert the ignition key in slot in the floor. This lowers the whole car still further and locks the big back wing down.
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Bugatti Veyron: World's FASTEST commercial car
Now you have reduced downforce and you can happily go past 400 kmph. But there is a catch. Due to the reduced downforce the cornering capability of the car is reduced to a great extent and you can only go straight in this mode.
Though I guess at these speeds by the time you think of turning, the turn would be a kilometer past.
See, what reduced downforce does
This car cannot be judged in the same way that we judge other cars. Technically it is a car and yet it just isn't. There is absolutely no need for a car like Bugatti Veyron in today's world, yet the world is a much better place because of the presence of the Veyron in it.