Bugatti Chiron prototype breaks 300 mph barrier, but not Koenigsegg's World Record!

Humans love to break barriers. The speed of sound has been broken and if Volkswagen is successful, they may even cross the speed of light. A little too much you feel? Well, they just crossed the 300 mph barrier (483 kmph), but they still do not have the record for the fastest production car, read on to know why.

I know the headline says Bugatti and I have been barking about Volkswagen, well they own Buggati, the same way they own Lamborghini, Audi, Ducati and Bentley. In fact, they are the Sheikhs of the automobile world.

Buggati decided to have some fun with the Chiron, their latest hypercar which replaced the Veyron and has gone one step ahead by even breaking the 300 mph barrier. The car driven by Le Mans winner and Bugatti’s official test driver, Andy Wallace at the VW group’s, top secret, Ehra-Lessien race track.

To perform this feat, the car was slightly modified with a taller 7^th gear and a 1,600 PS producing 8.0 litre W16 quad-turbocharged engine which is an upgrade over the standard car’s 1,500 PS output engine. Michelin constructed special tyres for just this test which could handle enormous forces at such incredible speeds which resulted in each tyre turning 4,100 times each minute! To ensure the tyres were in perfect working condition, each tyre was x-rayed before it was used to check for even minor issues.

The speeds achieved in this test were so fast that the live telemetry which fed information to engineers could not record the speed which Wallace had achieved and it was only after the car returned to the pits could the crew analyse the onboard GPS data and learn what Wallace had achieved.

Coming back to the point of how this record braking achievement has not made it to the Guinness World Records. To achieve a world record, one needs to drive the car in both directions and achieve an average speed above the previous speed to be classified as a world record. Bugatti chose not to run the car in the opposite direction as year of testing cars at the Ehra-Lessien track in the clockwise direction has resulted in the road surface and graining to go in that direction and trying it in reverse would have resulted in excess heat build-up in the tyres which could be dangerous.

This decision has allowed the Koenigsegg Agera RS to keep its title as the world’s fastest production car set in 2017 at Nevada.