by angib » Tue Mar 06, 2007 9:45 am
It's an interesting technological challenge to get a car to go that fast and not require to be rebuilt after you've done it. The amount of money that VW (who own Bugatti) threw at the car's development must have been really scary - it would have been easy to make a 100mpg production car for the same money....
The snippet I liked was that a huge amount of the work was in keeping the car cool and it has coolers, 10 in total, for just everything - even the diff gets its own cooler! And of course all the air going through those coolers creates a lot of drag. Of its 1000hp, something over 300hp is spent just pushing air through its cooling systems, not pushing the car along.
It's clever, but also very pointless.
Andrew