World Title Fight : Bugatti Veyron vs. McLaren F1 ( Video & Article )
#1
Super Moderator
Thread Starter
World Title Fight : Bugatti Veyron vs. McLaren F1 ( Video & Article )
February 26, 2006
Is the new pretender to Best Car on the Planet really better than the old champion? Nicholas Rufford and Andrew Frankel of The Sunday Times duelled it out
View : Exclusive Video Footage oft he Bugatti and McLaren F1
BUGATTI VEYRON
It was to be the face-off the world has been waiting for; the duel between the two greatest road cars, the like of which will almost certainly never be seen again in an oil-hungry, emissions-regulated, eco-friendly world.
Not since Ben Johnson took on Carl Lewis in the 1987 Rome world championships, or Muhammad Ali rumbled George Foreman in the sweltering heat of the Zairean jungle in 1974, would two such evenly matched heavyweights contest the right to be the greatest. And where better for the Bugatti Veyron to meet the McLaren F1 than the Nürburgring in Germany, scene of some of the most awe-inspiring races in history.
That, at least, was the plan. Things started well: Bugatti would make the Veyron available. But the F1 proved more difficult. McLaren at first said it would be delighted to help. Then it had second thoughts and a PR lady called Ellen wanted to know what the F1 was going to be tested against. When she heard it was a Veyron an iron curtain suddenly descended.
“I have checked with our customer care department and I’m afraid that we are unable to help on this occasion,” said a final frosty e-mail. This is the effect the Veyron has on people. It is feared like a mythical creature.
The contest would have to take place in absentia. We would test the Veyron near the Bugatti factory in Molsheim, France, then fly back to Britain and drive a privately owned F1 on an airfield in Wiltshire.
McLaren’s concern was understandable (though it would have been braver to accept the challenge). The statistics for the Veyron are fearsome. Its 1001bhp engine delivers 922 lb ft of torque — three times as much as a Land Rover Discovery and yet it weighs a third less. At top speed it covers the length of a football field every second; truly it is a monster.
It has been claimed that the Veyron, named after a 1930s racing driver, is so quick that it could allow the F1 to start first and reach 120mph and would still reach 200mph first. In fact this claim is unfair to the McLaren — but not by much. You can let the McLaren reach 65mph and the Veyron will still beat it to 190mph before leaving it for dust.
That is not the only advantage the Veyron has in a straight fight with the McLaren. In every way — performance, build quality, ingenuity of design — it is the better car. It will fool you with just how well behaved it is, cruising quietly on B roads or nosing through the traffic. But it is cuddly in the same way as a polar bear. Put your foot down and it sprouts teeth and claws. It’s like being in a Ferrari F430 going through an Incredible Hulk metamorphosis. Being pushed back in your seat on the way to 60mph is one thing, but experiencing the same acceleration passing 160mph is a new sensation. The landscape becomes speed-blurred like a cartoon. Other cars appear to be going backwards. You expect to look in your mirror and see you’ve blown their doors off and sucked out their radiator grilles.
Flipping between gears with the steering wheel paddles takes just 0.015sec. The power delivery is seamless, the engine note rising from a deep burble like a powerboat tethered to a jetty to a howl like a Formula One car
It’s hardly surprising the Veyron is the stuff of myth. Europe’s richest car company poured tens of millions of pounds into developing it in a fit of extravagance. Exactly how much, Volkswagen won’t say, but it was a lot more than poor old Gordon Murray had to spend when he was knocking up a prototype F1 back in 1992.
In 1998, the year that McLaren stopped production of the F1, VW bought the Bugatti marque. Quietly, it started going around Europe like Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven, recruiting the best component suppliers. What it was asking for was as far-fetched as using only seven men to defend a Mexican town from a small army: a transmission that didn’t disintegrate; tyres that didn’t explode; brakes that didn’t melt. Furthermore, every part of the Veyron had to be tested to engineering tolerances closer to those applied by Nasa than in car manufacture. Not too ambitious, then.
Remarkably, Bugatti got almost all it wanted. The seven-speed double-clutch gearbox is produced by Ricardo in Leamington Spa. The carbon-fibre monocoque chassis is from ATR, which also makes the chassis for the Porsche Carrera GT and the Ferrari Enzo. The body shell is spray-painted by Weiss, which has the contract for Maybach. The leather interior is stitched by Boxman, supplier to Bentley; the seats are by Sparco, which also supplies Ferrari and the World Rally Championship, and the brakes are made by AP Racing of Coventry, one of the most renowned suppliers of racing brakes.
The alloy fascia with analogue instruments has the feel of old-fashioned, burnished quality. You can choose your colour or combination of colours for the interior for the basic price of £810,345 (if you want safety belts to match it’s an extra £24,000). Compare that with the F1, which is more like an overgrown go-kart with no comforts, just a big carbon-fibre baby seat for the driver, a three-point harness and a smell of petrol.
Thomas Bscher, the suave former banker who is now Bugatti’s president, used to own an F1. He drove it to work every day for two years from his home in Cologne to his office in Frankfurt before selling it in 2003 to an American collector Miles Collier. He doesn’t like comparing the two cars but says the Veyron is better in every respect bar one: the McLaren was lighter (“. . . although it didn’t feel it. It felt much heavier than it was”).
View : Jeremy Clarkson's review of Bugatti Veyron
Bscher won’t reveal who his customers are but confirms 60 Veyrons have been ordered by discreetly wealthy buyers — “old money” car enthusiasts as opposed to internet entrepreneurs or gangsta rappers. One of the first cars, an all-black model, has been bought by Ralph Lauren, a man who already owns an F1 and, according to some accounts, two of them.
You can understand why every billionaire wants a Veyron; only 300 will be made and there will probably never be anything like it again. When it was conceived by Ferdinand Piëch, former boss of VW, it was nicknamed Piëch’s folly. The rumour goes that as a youngster Piëch was never satisfied with his hand in Top Trumps and wanted a car that could beat all rivals.
The Veyron is that car. VW’s chances of recouping Piëch’s huge investment are the same as seeing Jeremy Clarkson in a tutu. Already the car’s days are numbered. Within five years Bugatti will have tamed the mighty engine and gearbox and put them in a more practical and slower four-seater car. The Veyron will remain unsurpassed.
We eventually borrowed an F1 from Nick Mason, the drummer from Pink Floyd and author of Into the Red, a book about the world’s best cars. Mason is rich enough not to care whether his McLaren F1 isn’t the fastest road car any more. Indeed, he’s so rich he wants a Veyron.
Nicholas Rufford
VITAL STATISTICS
Model Bugatti Veyron
Engine 7993cc, 16 cylinders
Power 1001bhp @ 6000rpm
Torque 922 lb ft @ 2200rpm
Transmission Seven-speed DSG, manual and auto
Performance 0-62mph: 2.5sec
Top speed: 253mph
Price £810,345
Verdict Masterpiece that gives everything a good spanking
Rating Five stars
McLAREN F1
The first two days of May 1994 are unlikely to slip my mind. On May 1 Ayrton Senna, the only hero I’ve ever had, was killed, and on May 2 I became the first journalist to test the McLaren F1, a car created by Gordon Murray, who had also designed Senna’s Formula One cars.
I drove the F1 to 211mph on an airfield runway and then predicted that the twin pressures of budgetary constraint and political correctness meant that there would never be a faster road car than this.
Well, I got that wrong. It’s taken more than a decade but as Nick Rufford will doubtless delight in telling you, the Bugatti Veyron is indeed faster than a McLaren F1. It will do 253mph, while the fastest a McLaren has gone is a mere 240.1mph.
But this is meaningless to all bar the statistically obsessed. Achieving the maximum possible speed was so far off Murray’s and McLaren’s agenda when he made the F1 that it was four years before they bothered to find out. The brief, in Murray’s own words, was to produce “the best sports car in the world”. Not the fastest, just the best.
What he wanted was much more subtle. He wanted a car small enough to thread through city streets, yet big enough to take three people and their luggage. He wanted it to have a 6.1 litre V12 engine — the most powerful then seen in a road car — yet weigh less than a small family shopping car. All he had on his side was vision, determination and technical brilliance.
The car he designed was made from carbon fibre and was so strong it could drive away from its front-impact crash test because the damage was so light. To save weight and keep the driving experience pure there are no airbags, ABS or power steering. You sat in the middle of the car just as you would in an F1 car, with your passengers to the side and slightly behind.
The V12 produced 627bhp, which may seem a far cry from the Veyron’s 1001bhp, but when you factor in weight a different picture emerges. The Bugatti provides 513bhp for every ton of car, the McLaren a touch more than 550bhp per ton. The Bugatti accelerates faster because it has four-wheel-drive traction.
The F1 was so fast that when customers told McLaren they wanted to race theirs at Le Mans, Murray created a stripped-out racing version that promptly went out and destroyed all-comers at its first attempt.
The car you’re looking at is more powerful than the standard road car. It is a racing F1 modified for road use by its owner Nick Mason, the drummer with Pink Floyd. More than 220lb lighter than the road F1, and with those tiresome engine race restrictors removed, it has 53bhp more than the road car. In short this is a car like no other you’ll find wearing a tax disc.
I’ve never known another road car that, even on a dry, straight runway, requires courage just to press your foot to the floor. Wheelspin renders first and second gear useless, and even in third you can light up the gargantuan rear tyres at speeds under 100mph. The forces on your body are so strong you struggle to accept that it is a mere car rather than an aircraft. On the two-mile runway, and being mindful of the trust Mason had placed in me, I ran it up to about 180mph seemingly in an instant.
But this is not what distinguishes it from the Veyron. The Bugatti is not only apocalyptically quick, it’s also comfortable, quiet and refined.
Which is good for those who like long-distance cruising, but not for those who want to be reminded what it’s like to be alive. The Veyron has a sense of remoteness, a result of its weight and electronic complexity, that removes you from the driving experience.
By contrast, nothing puts you closer to the action than this F1. The steering provides feel comparable to running your fingers over the road. Think about turning and it turns, tread just a smidgeon too hard in a tight corner and you’ll be facing the way you came before the first expletive forms in your head. Get it right, however, and it will corner at a speed that beggars belief.
The V12’s sound is mesmeric not simply for its race-bred purity but also the jack-hammer volume. This is a car that will reward good driving like no other and punish even slight mistakes with unparalleled severity.
The truth is, apart from being the two fastest cars to set foot on the public road, there is little common ground between the Bugatti and the McLaren. Which is preferable depends on who you are. Would you rather sit in supersonic luxury in seat 1C on Concorde, or be deafened, frightened and thrilled beyond description flying an F-22 fighter? Me too.
Andrew Frankel
VITAL STATISTICS
Model McLaren F1 GTR
Engine 6064cc, 12 cylinders
Power 680bhp @ 7500rpm
Torque 525 lb ft @ 4700rpm
Transmission Six-speed manual
Performance 0-60mph: 3.2sec
Top speed: 240mph
Price £627,000 in 1994; about £1m now
Verdict No longer the fastest supercar, but still the best
Rating Five stars
source : driving.timesonline.co.uk
Is the new pretender to Best Car on the Planet really better than the old champion? Nicholas Rufford and Andrew Frankel of The Sunday Times duelled it out
View : Exclusive Video Footage oft he Bugatti and McLaren F1
BUGATTI VEYRON
It was to be the face-off the world has been waiting for; the duel between the two greatest road cars, the like of which will almost certainly never be seen again in an oil-hungry, emissions-regulated, eco-friendly world.
Not since Ben Johnson took on Carl Lewis in the 1987 Rome world championships, or Muhammad Ali rumbled George Foreman in the sweltering heat of the Zairean jungle in 1974, would two such evenly matched heavyweights contest the right to be the greatest. And where better for the Bugatti Veyron to meet the McLaren F1 than the Nürburgring in Germany, scene of some of the most awe-inspiring races in history.
That, at least, was the plan. Things started well: Bugatti would make the Veyron available. But the F1 proved more difficult. McLaren at first said it would be delighted to help. Then it had second thoughts and a PR lady called Ellen wanted to know what the F1 was going to be tested against. When she heard it was a Veyron an iron curtain suddenly descended.
“I have checked with our customer care department and I’m afraid that we are unable to help on this occasion,” said a final frosty e-mail. This is the effect the Veyron has on people. It is feared like a mythical creature.
The contest would have to take place in absentia. We would test the Veyron near the Bugatti factory in Molsheim, France, then fly back to Britain and drive a privately owned F1 on an airfield in Wiltshire.
McLaren’s concern was understandable (though it would have been braver to accept the challenge). The statistics for the Veyron are fearsome. Its 1001bhp engine delivers 922 lb ft of torque — three times as much as a Land Rover Discovery and yet it weighs a third less. At top speed it covers the length of a football field every second; truly it is a monster.
It has been claimed that the Veyron, named after a 1930s racing driver, is so quick that it could allow the F1 to start first and reach 120mph and would still reach 200mph first. In fact this claim is unfair to the McLaren — but not by much. You can let the McLaren reach 65mph and the Veyron will still beat it to 190mph before leaving it for dust.
That is not the only advantage the Veyron has in a straight fight with the McLaren. In every way — performance, build quality, ingenuity of design — it is the better car. It will fool you with just how well behaved it is, cruising quietly on B roads or nosing through the traffic. But it is cuddly in the same way as a polar bear. Put your foot down and it sprouts teeth and claws. It’s like being in a Ferrari F430 going through an Incredible Hulk metamorphosis. Being pushed back in your seat on the way to 60mph is one thing, but experiencing the same acceleration passing 160mph is a new sensation. The landscape becomes speed-blurred like a cartoon. Other cars appear to be going backwards. You expect to look in your mirror and see you’ve blown their doors off and sucked out their radiator grilles.
Flipping between gears with the steering wheel paddles takes just 0.015sec. The power delivery is seamless, the engine note rising from a deep burble like a powerboat tethered to a jetty to a howl like a Formula One car
It’s hardly surprising the Veyron is the stuff of myth. Europe’s richest car company poured tens of millions of pounds into developing it in a fit of extravagance. Exactly how much, Volkswagen won’t say, but it was a lot more than poor old Gordon Murray had to spend when he was knocking up a prototype F1 back in 1992.
In 1998, the year that McLaren stopped production of the F1, VW bought the Bugatti marque. Quietly, it started going around Europe like Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven, recruiting the best component suppliers. What it was asking for was as far-fetched as using only seven men to defend a Mexican town from a small army: a transmission that didn’t disintegrate; tyres that didn’t explode; brakes that didn’t melt. Furthermore, every part of the Veyron had to be tested to engineering tolerances closer to those applied by Nasa than in car manufacture. Not too ambitious, then.
Remarkably, Bugatti got almost all it wanted. The seven-speed double-clutch gearbox is produced by Ricardo in Leamington Spa. The carbon-fibre monocoque chassis is from ATR, which also makes the chassis for the Porsche Carrera GT and the Ferrari Enzo. The body shell is spray-painted by Weiss, which has the contract for Maybach. The leather interior is stitched by Boxman, supplier to Bentley; the seats are by Sparco, which also supplies Ferrari and the World Rally Championship, and the brakes are made by AP Racing of Coventry, one of the most renowned suppliers of racing brakes.
The alloy fascia with analogue instruments has the feel of old-fashioned, burnished quality. You can choose your colour or combination of colours for the interior for the basic price of £810,345 (if you want safety belts to match it’s an extra £24,000). Compare that with the F1, which is more like an overgrown go-kart with no comforts, just a big carbon-fibre baby seat for the driver, a three-point harness and a smell of petrol.
Thomas Bscher, the suave former banker who is now Bugatti’s president, used to own an F1. He drove it to work every day for two years from his home in Cologne to his office in Frankfurt before selling it in 2003 to an American collector Miles Collier. He doesn’t like comparing the two cars but says the Veyron is better in every respect bar one: the McLaren was lighter (“. . . although it didn’t feel it. It felt much heavier than it was”).
View : Jeremy Clarkson's review of Bugatti Veyron
Bscher won’t reveal who his customers are but confirms 60 Veyrons have been ordered by discreetly wealthy buyers — “old money” car enthusiasts as opposed to internet entrepreneurs or gangsta rappers. One of the first cars, an all-black model, has been bought by Ralph Lauren, a man who already owns an F1 and, according to some accounts, two of them.
You can understand why every billionaire wants a Veyron; only 300 will be made and there will probably never be anything like it again. When it was conceived by Ferdinand Piëch, former boss of VW, it was nicknamed Piëch’s folly. The rumour goes that as a youngster Piëch was never satisfied with his hand in Top Trumps and wanted a car that could beat all rivals.
The Veyron is that car. VW’s chances of recouping Piëch’s huge investment are the same as seeing Jeremy Clarkson in a tutu. Already the car’s days are numbered. Within five years Bugatti will have tamed the mighty engine and gearbox and put them in a more practical and slower four-seater car. The Veyron will remain unsurpassed.
We eventually borrowed an F1 from Nick Mason, the drummer from Pink Floyd and author of Into the Red, a book about the world’s best cars. Mason is rich enough not to care whether his McLaren F1 isn’t the fastest road car any more. Indeed, he’s so rich he wants a Veyron.
Nicholas Rufford
VITAL STATISTICS
Model Bugatti Veyron
Engine 7993cc, 16 cylinders
Power 1001bhp @ 6000rpm
Torque 922 lb ft @ 2200rpm
Transmission Seven-speed DSG, manual and auto
Performance 0-62mph: 2.5sec
Top speed: 253mph
Price £810,345
Verdict Masterpiece that gives everything a good spanking
Rating Five stars
McLAREN F1
The first two days of May 1994 are unlikely to slip my mind. On May 1 Ayrton Senna, the only hero I’ve ever had, was killed, and on May 2 I became the first journalist to test the McLaren F1, a car created by Gordon Murray, who had also designed Senna’s Formula One cars.
I drove the F1 to 211mph on an airfield runway and then predicted that the twin pressures of budgetary constraint and political correctness meant that there would never be a faster road car than this.
Well, I got that wrong. It’s taken more than a decade but as Nick Rufford will doubtless delight in telling you, the Bugatti Veyron is indeed faster than a McLaren F1. It will do 253mph, while the fastest a McLaren has gone is a mere 240.1mph.
But this is meaningless to all bar the statistically obsessed. Achieving the maximum possible speed was so far off Murray’s and McLaren’s agenda when he made the F1 that it was four years before they bothered to find out. The brief, in Murray’s own words, was to produce “the best sports car in the world”. Not the fastest, just the best.
What he wanted was much more subtle. He wanted a car small enough to thread through city streets, yet big enough to take three people and their luggage. He wanted it to have a 6.1 litre V12 engine — the most powerful then seen in a road car — yet weigh less than a small family shopping car. All he had on his side was vision, determination and technical brilliance.
The car he designed was made from carbon fibre and was so strong it could drive away from its front-impact crash test because the damage was so light. To save weight and keep the driving experience pure there are no airbags, ABS or power steering. You sat in the middle of the car just as you would in an F1 car, with your passengers to the side and slightly behind.
The V12 produced 627bhp, which may seem a far cry from the Veyron’s 1001bhp, but when you factor in weight a different picture emerges. The Bugatti provides 513bhp for every ton of car, the McLaren a touch more than 550bhp per ton. The Bugatti accelerates faster because it has four-wheel-drive traction.
The F1 was so fast that when customers told McLaren they wanted to race theirs at Le Mans, Murray created a stripped-out racing version that promptly went out and destroyed all-comers at its first attempt.
The car you’re looking at is more powerful than the standard road car. It is a racing F1 modified for road use by its owner Nick Mason, the drummer with Pink Floyd. More than 220lb lighter than the road F1, and with those tiresome engine race restrictors removed, it has 53bhp more than the road car. In short this is a car like no other you’ll find wearing a tax disc.
I’ve never known another road car that, even on a dry, straight runway, requires courage just to press your foot to the floor. Wheelspin renders first and second gear useless, and even in third you can light up the gargantuan rear tyres at speeds under 100mph. The forces on your body are so strong you struggle to accept that it is a mere car rather than an aircraft. On the two-mile runway, and being mindful of the trust Mason had placed in me, I ran it up to about 180mph seemingly in an instant.
But this is not what distinguishes it from the Veyron. The Bugatti is not only apocalyptically quick, it’s also comfortable, quiet and refined.
Which is good for those who like long-distance cruising, but not for those who want to be reminded what it’s like to be alive. The Veyron has a sense of remoteness, a result of its weight and electronic complexity, that removes you from the driving experience.
By contrast, nothing puts you closer to the action than this F1. The steering provides feel comparable to running your fingers over the road. Think about turning and it turns, tread just a smidgeon too hard in a tight corner and you’ll be facing the way you came before the first expletive forms in your head. Get it right, however, and it will corner at a speed that beggars belief.
The V12’s sound is mesmeric not simply for its race-bred purity but also the jack-hammer volume. This is a car that will reward good driving like no other and punish even slight mistakes with unparalleled severity.
The truth is, apart from being the two fastest cars to set foot on the public road, there is little common ground between the Bugatti and the McLaren. Which is preferable depends on who you are. Would you rather sit in supersonic luxury in seat 1C on Concorde, or be deafened, frightened and thrilled beyond description flying an F-22 fighter? Me too.
Andrew Frankel
VITAL STATISTICS
Model McLaren F1 GTR
Engine 6064cc, 12 cylinders
Power 680bhp @ 7500rpm
Torque 525 lb ft @ 4700rpm
Transmission Six-speed manual
Performance 0-60mph: 3.2sec
Top speed: 240mph
Price £627,000 in 1994; about £1m now
Verdict No longer the fastest supercar, but still the best
Rating Five stars
source : driving.timesonline.co.uk
Last edited by Gojirra99; 02-27-06 at 11:41 AM.
#3
Guest
Posts: n/a
FI for me everytime.....Its visionary, it could not and still barely gets beat in some performance areas, 10 years later.
Seat in the middle.
Gold plated engine to keep things cool
It weighs 2200 lbs
The Verynon is a great achievement but VW needed that money instead, as things are floundering, not some 1.4 mill car that looks like a cross between a Crossfire and 350Z and Trans Am.
Seat in the middle.
Gold plated engine to keep things cool
It weighs 2200 lbs
The Verynon is a great achievement but VW needed that money instead, as things are floundering, not some 1.4 mill car that looks like a cross between a Crossfire and 350Z and Trans Am.
#5
Lexus Fanatic
iTrader: (1)
mclaren F1 is still a superior car and still is the best supercar
sweet
When you push a car past 180mph, the world starts to get awfully fizzy and a little bit frightening. When you go past 200mph it actually becomes blurred. Almost like you’re trapped in an early Queen pop video. At this sort of speed the tyres and the suspension are reacting to events that happened some time ago, and they have not finished reacting before they’re being asked to do something else. The result is a terrifying vibration that rattles your optical nerves, causing double vision. This is not good when you’re covering 300ft a second.
Happily, stopping distances become irrelevant because you won’t see the obstacle in the first place. By the time you know it was there, you’ll have gone through the windscreen, through the Pearly Gates and be half way across God’s breakfast table.
Happily, stopping distances become irrelevant because you won’t see the obstacle in the first place. By the time you know it was there, you’ll have gone through the windscreen, through the Pearly Gates and be half way across God’s breakfast table.
Last edited by 4TehNguyen; 02-27-06 at 01:58 PM.
#7
Going 240 MPH in a car made by VW? Was I the only one who worried what would happen if any of those crazy technical systems failed at high speed? This car is awesome, but come on. VW can't even make a Jetta with good reliability. It's a great collectors' item, but I definitely wouldn't trust my life to some system of adjusting body panels... Also the fact that the rearview mirrors are necessary to keep the nose on the ground would make me pretty nervous!
Trending Topics
#9
exclusive matchup
iTrader: (4)
Originally Posted by 1SICKLEX
FI for me everytime.....Its visionary, it could not and still barely gets beat in some performance areas, 10 years later.
Seat in the middle.
Gold plated engine to keep things cool
It weighs 2200 lbs
The Verynon is a great achievement but VW needed that money instead, as things are floundering, not some 1.4 mill car that looks like a cross between a Crossfire and 350Z and Trans Am.
Seat in the middle.
Gold plated engine to keep things cool
It weighs 2200 lbs
The Verynon is a great achievement but VW needed that money instead, as things are floundering, not some 1.4 mill car that looks like a cross between a Crossfire and 350Z and Trans Am.
#10
G35x - RWD/AWD goodness
If you can't see the video
To everybody who can't see the video, go to:
http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/art...056987,00.html
And click on it from their. I wasn't able to see it either w/o going to the UK site.
http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/art...056987,00.html
And click on it from their. I wasn't able to see it either w/o going to the UK site.
Thread
Thread Starter
Forum
Replies
Last Post
Vh_Supra26
Car Chat
3
03-01-15 08:46 AM