When it comes to top speed, there are certain cars that immediately come to mind. Some of these cars are Koenigsegg, Pagani, Mclaren and most importantly, Bugatti. As a young chap, I would go online to browse for the World’s fastest cars and then download their images to use as my wallpaper on my Nokia Asha 201. One car brand that always kept its place in the top spot on the list was Bugatti. The Bugatti Veyron for example held the title of the world’s fastest car for several years.
At the moment, the Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut holds the position for the fastest car in the world with a top speed of 531 kilometres per hour (km/h) or approximately 330 miles per hour (mph). To put things into perspective, the top speed of an average conventional car is typically around 160-200 km/h (100-125 mph). When you are on a journey and screaming at the top of your lungs, ‘Baba e rora’, Baba is probably just doing about 140 km/h. So, you can only imagine how fast these hypercars are, doing four times the speed of a conventional car on the highway.
Bugatti’s New Record
To the news of today, Bugatti has just broken the open-roof road car record with their one-off Bugatti Mistral. Under the hood of the Mistral is Bugatti’s 8.0-litre quad-turbo W16 engine. The Mistral attained an independently verified top speed of 453.9km/h (282.04mph) at the Papenburg test track in northern Germany. If you were paying close attention, you would have noticed that the Mistral’s top speed is less than that of the Koenigsegg that I mentioned earlier. This is because the Mistrals record is for the top speed of a car without a roof, basically a cabriolet.
The Bugatti Mistral stole the open-top record from the Hennessey Venom GT Spyder, which attained a top speed of 427km/h (265.6mph) back in 2016. The Mistral is a one-of-99 limited open-top Bugatti that is based on the chassis of the Chiron hypercar, which all use the same 1,578bhp engine. As a one-off model, this meant that Bugatti had to borrow it from its owner to break this record. Isn’t that ironic? But I bet the owner was more than glad to lend Bugatti his car, because he now owns the fastest drop-top in the World.
Overall, Bugatti has once again proved that they know a thing or two about automotive engineering. The Mistral is a very fast car and it also looks really good while tearing up the tarmac. For a price tag of 5 million USD, I guess the Mistral is worth every penny. What are your thoughts?
