With today's announcement of the Bolide, Bugatti is boldly encroaching on the rarified air of track-only hypercars. We knew something was in the works yesterday and that it would be incredibly athletic but couldn't be sure if the French company was planning to go racing or just building more billionaire supercar toys to be shuttled off into a garage for the rest of time. Today, we received far more details and a deeper look into what makes the Bolide the baddest Bugatti in history.
Bugatti Is Throwing Down The Gauntlet
The Bolide is a drastic and aggressive look at what Bugatti can do when they remove any regulation and luxury equipment. The theme "What if...?" was paramount throughout the presentation and it's easy to see why. Every recent car from Bugatti has been powerful but always tempered with exceedingly luxurious materials that ultimately weighed the cars down to the point that they simply couldn't keep up in the corners. With the Bolide, all that's changed for good. Nothing that didn't need to be added to the Bolide was.
The W16 engine in the back has been tuned to an insane 1,850 horsepower thanks to various changes including adding more boost pressure from the four turbochargers. The aero is so well engineered that Bugatti says this car can lap the Nurburgring in just 5:23.1. To put that into perspective, Porsche achieved a time of 5:19.55 a while back with a dedicated Le Mans style racer that few humans on earth could pilot properly.
How Does The Bolide Stack Up Against Others?
Lamborghini recently released their own track-only hypercar called the SCV12 Essenza. Aston Martin is coming too with its Valkyrie. Ferrari famously had numerous FXX and FXXK cars that customers could only visit at the racetrack. Bugatti clearly saw the need to get into this game when they realized that chasing top speed was not going to be a sustainable strategy to maintain relevance.
However, there are two sides to this coin. First of all, the Bolide sounds like it takes all those track-focused cars and blows them away. The combination of power and racing technology packed into the car is simply too much for the others to handle. On the other side of the coin though, it sounds like Bugatti is only dabbling in this space right now. The Bolide is technically a concept for now but it seems like it wouldn't be a running driving example if that's all Bugatti had planned for it. The real question is just how real it is.
The Bolide Needs To Prove Its Mettle
There's only one thing Bugatti needs to be focused on right now and that's actually achieving some of its claims. There's more than enough billionaires in the world that are already going to be beating down its door trying to get one of these cars but the actual automotive community is one that requires you to prove your claims when they're this astonishing. Lamborghini and its Huracan Peformante lapped the Nurburgring faster than any production car before people came out of the woodwork to call foul and suggest that the video had been faked. Considering that Bugatti hasn't even shown us what the car can actually achieve seems like we all need to wait until the hard lap times arrive.
Sources: Bugatti