by Ben Collins
Hammond and May looked relieved to be standing more than two inches apart, after thirty-six hours crammed into the tiny Cessna. They hadn’t reached the stage of the Russian cosmonauts on the MIR space station, who passed written notes to one another so they didn’t have to speak, but they were close. May hunched over a cocktail table with his hair draped over the ashtray, and Hammo leant against the bar, sinking Belgium’s finest without letting it touch the sides.
Clarkson had won, so he was in jubilant form, propping his fag up in the air like an antenna and reminiscing about the last couple of days. He handed me the key and grinned. It weighed heavy in my hand, solid metal bound in red patent leather, the Bugatti oval enamelled in the centre.
‘You’ll fucking love that.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh …’ He shook his head. ‘Epic.’
The inbound crew were soaking up the booze. It looked like the makings of a damn good party, but we had orders from Nigel to get moving.
Down in the basement, producer Alex Renton and a giddy Jim Wise-man were circling the Bugatti like frenzied hornets. Wiseman was wearing a shocking set of Elvis sunglasses.
‘Nice shades, Jim.’
‘With a future this bright, you know it makes sense. Speaking of which, mmm, I see you’re holding the keys to a Vey-Ron. We’ll see you out of here, mind the kerbs.’
I climbed inside the cabin and landed in the U-boat captain’s chair. I shut the door and felt the cockpit pressurise. Gauges and dials littered the maroon leather dash, poised to confirm when every one of the 1001 horses had been deployed. The main console was made of tortoiseshell-patterned steel. A pistol-grip gear selector at its centre looked primed to fire torpedoes. The wheel was so sturdy it must have been solid cast metal. All the controls were hard-wired to the functions of steering, gear-box and engine.
I pushed the start button, and a heavy-duty starter motor screeched the engine reactor into life.
The Veyron had been boxed in, nose into the wall of the underground car park. Rear vision was poor, probably because nothing stayed close enough to worry about. But it meant that my first minutes behind the wheel were spent sweating bullets, reversing it up a narrow parking ramp at less than one mile an hour.
Casper and I finally headed into the amber night. A single wallop of the throttle dealt with the Blackwall Tunnel, then we headed east into the City. The crew stopped somewhere near ‘Wall’ at 2am to set up an elevated tripod, to get a glimpse of the Bugatti hammering around a big roundabout system. Then the police turned up.
Casper’s brow furrowed as he climbed out of the passenger seat. A few minutes later he was back. ‘Spoken to the Law. They’ve got a message for you: “Give it some shit”.’
My pleasure.
With adult supervision, I floored the Bug around this roundabout for the next twenty minutes. In a straight line the four-wheel drive could accelerate the rig from 0 to 60mph and back to 0 again in less than five seconds.
I reached under the steering wheel and depressed an innocuous silver button to disengage the traction control and dumped the throttle at the traffic lights. The four wheels clawed at the greasy road then shot off. I aimed around the corner and clung on to the wheel just to stay in my chair. It grappled its way across the wet manhole covers with a few minor slippages along what was otherwise a 90mph tramline.
My exuberance got the better of me that night as the warm glow emanating from Casper’s camera encouraged my right foot to slip on the empty carriageways. The kidney pinching thrust that went with every impulse of the accelerator was in a class of its own, and compellingly addictive. Even the strobing flashes through the Limehouse Link tunnel failed to bring me back to the real world. F1, eat your heart out.
We picked up our German escort from VW some hours later and began the two-day journey to Italy. Getting from A to B took longer than the actual race, because we kept stopping to position film crew and because every traffic cop in Western Eurpope wanted to see how fast it would go.
The Bug had a paddle shift to pick from seven gears or you could leave it in automatic and take pot luck. It paid to remember which one you were in. If you floored it in ‘D’ there was a slight delay as the gearbox considered the most powerful cog. By the time you realised what was going on, the acceleration thumped you into the back of the seat and you entered warp speed. Nothing on the autoroute moved like this. It was like flying a UFO after someone had pressed the pause button on the rest of the traffic.
For any good road trip, you needed a wingman. Frenchie was a loveable wide-boy from the production team who, as he constantly reminded me, had once owned an MX-5: ‘Rear-wheel drive, did doughnuts, my pride and joy, tragically caught fire and burned to a cinder one day …’ He wiped his eye.
Frenchie took his duties seriously, kept the Bug brimmed with snacks and occasionally noted signposts between bursts of neck-breaking laughter every time I so much as tickled the throttle.
There was a burst of static from the radio. ‘Turn right at this junction, please, we’re going left to film you …’ We’d almost forgotten Nigel was there. ‘No, sorry, come with us now. Take the left.’
The left lane was heaving with traffic at a red light whilst my lane was green. I hooked the indicator to a chorus of French horns.
‘I feel your pain. A thousand pairs of Gallic eyes burning into the side of your faces.’
‘Thanks, Nige.’
Actually, the eyes didn’t give a monkey’s about the side of our faces. They were simply captivated by the Veyron. We drew a crowd wherever we went. As we thundered through the bucolic countryside people waved from the fields, and children ran towards it as we cruised slowly through the villages. Back on the open road, tree-lined boulevards whirled by as I snapped at the gear paddle like a junkie on a crack pipe.
We stopped to film at a remote wood and a crowd gathered within minutes, young and old, some taking photos, some just marvelling that such things could be. The Bug made everyone smile; it conjured anew the innocent delight we can all feel when admiring a beautifully crafted automobile.
‘OK, Mr Collins, time to move on.’
Nigel set up a camera in a copse for a panoramic shot of the Bugatti crossing a small suspension bridge over a sparkling river. I zapped across in the blink of an eye.
‘Fuck me,’ Frenchie groaned from the footwell, ‘did you feel the G as we came round the bend?’
I was grinning like an idiot. ‘Mega, isn’t it?’
Nigel was back on the radio almost immediately. ‘Let me know as soon as you’ve turned, please.’
We had a specific time permit to film through the Mont Blanc tunnel, crossing the border from France to Italy, so we couldn’t hang around.
After a brisk contretemps with a construction truck we made it back on to the main drag and overtook everything except the fuel stations. I coasted down every mountain in neutral to save fuel, using modest blats to sail past other cars like they were signposts. Even so, we guzzled fuel. Nigel was beginning to tire of my incessant requests for a top-up.
We made it to the tunnel in the nick of time. Ben Joiner hopped in with me to film as the orange lighting danced around the interior. With CCTV monitoring every millimetre, I didn’t break the speed limit, but I flicked the throttle as soon as we were out and watched Ben’s smile spread from ear to ear.
We set up at a motorway service station to do an all-wheel-drive launch to 100mph, which the Bug achieved in five seconds. The VW engineers had to phone Bugatti’s head office in Germany for permission to engage the launch control system. We changed the setting from stun to kill by turning a magic key behind the seat. The whale tail wing rose behind me and the Bug’s active suspension lowered the nose into the ground like a raging bull, ready to charge.
‘Nigel, why don’t you hop in for this one?’ I said.
He climbed in reluctantly, scooched his long body into the passenger footwell so he couldn’t be seen, and set the cameras running. I applied the brake with my
left foot, which acted like a clutch, floored the gas with my right and then lifted the anchor.
The car charged forward like the Millennium Falcon going into hyper-space, and the wide expanse of tarmac suddenly narrowed on to the motorway. Sure enough, the Bug transported Nigel into another world. He said nothing. He just rocked back with fits of carefree laughter.
For most of the shoot I ran the Bug in handling mode, which was good for 233mph, only switching to speed mode, with the wing down, when I needed a bit of extra juice. As you passed around 140 the downforce sucked the car into the road and the suspension reassuringly locked itself in. The amount of powered rubber in contact with the ground meant the Bug was always poised to take a direction. You held on and drove it, 100 per cent of the time.
Beyond 180, ahem, the aero balance started to favour the rear and made it less willing to dart around.
As we crossed the border into Switzerland we started seeing more German plates and seriously powerful Porsches. Good sport.
I noticed an orange ant in my mirror, closing at a rate of about 80mph. Appropriately enough, some hard Haus music started pounding out of the radio. You only live once.
‘Watch this, Frenchie.’
I notched down to fourth and let the 911 Turbo run past at flat chat, then nailed the throttle. We matched his speed within a second, then splash, bye-bye Porker. For good measure I opened the tap all the way, leaving the boy marooned in the fast lane.
The Bug firmed up, tyres hissing and roaring. At 230mph, a sparsely populated autobahn metamorphosed into a Grand Prix circuit. Dotted white lines became a seamless blur. Cat’s-eyes pummelled the undercarriage like speed bumps. The slightest kink in the carriageway became a corner.
Your eyes only moved from the road’s horizon for milliseconds, anticipating the cumbersome trajectories of the other ‘static’ road users well in advance as the Bug gobbled tarmac at a rate of 340 feet per second, the length of a football pitch in a blink of an eye.
A line of flashing lights whipped into view, blocking the fast lane. Traffic accumulated. I pulled the ripcord and hit the brakes, knocking the Bug out of speed mode. The rear wing went vertical to form an air-brake, the suspension adjusted smoothly to the interruption and the ABS crackled underfoot.
They told me it could stop dead from 250 in ten seconds. What bull. It took less than that.
If the Bugatti was the fastest car in the world, the second fastest was the Audi RS6 containing the VW engineers who were trying to keep an eye on us. Whenever I sped off, the Audi would loom into view a few moments later. As our journey progressed, a mutual respect developed between the TG crew and the Teutonic boffins who were supporting us.
I lost count of how many times we up and passed the camera and the number of roads we did them on. Through kaleidoscopic tunnels, stunning archways of trees, tiny Italian villages, across open fields, up twisting mountain roads, past wind farms, vineyards and fast-flowing rivers, the visual feast of continental Europe unfolded before our windscreen.
The trip seemed to end as suddenly as it had begun. In Milan I reluctantly handed back the keys for the final time. My life would never be the same again. The Bug was being snatched away from us by a journo for review. He’d been hounding Nigel all week.
To say I was jealous would be like claiming that Cindy Crawford was mildly attractive. I could only console myself with the hope that my rival for the Bug’s affections might be a plump, balding man with glasses. In that, at least, I wasn’t disappointed.
Chapter 23
Track Record
I was reunited with the Bug when the time came to spank it around the Dunsfold circuit. Bugatti didn’t have one available, so Top Gear convinced a private owner to hand over his keys. Amazingly, he only had one stipulation …
Our new fast-talking Series Producer, Pat Doyle, had been around the TV block; he was as canny as a one-armed snake catcher. His thankless task was to try and control our spiralling budget and keep a leash on the pack of hounds chasing editorial nirvana. He had a curly brown mullet and a mouth that beamed whenever something unconscionable or surreal was unfolding. With TG that meant most of the time, and now was no exception.
‘How many laps do you think you need, Stig?’
‘That’s as long as a piece of string. At least six or seven; as many as it takes to get the tyres working.’
‘OK, six laps. The owner’s over there …’ His brow furrowed. ‘He’s giving me chapter and verse of his life story; he’s only just bought the car, yada yada, and the deal is we have to pay for these tyres if you screw ’em. So, less laps is good. Can you do less laps?’
‘I can try. It depends on track conditions and how accurate you want the time to be. Can I use launch control?’
‘Um … Yeah … Will that screw the tyres?’
After grappling with rubber it was time to talk fuel. We needed some. I didn’t fancy driving this guy’s brand-new baby on the open road in case someone drove into the back of it, so we dispatched him to the petrol station. He returned with a gouge running down the length of the right side, having had a minor disagreement with the concrete plinth beside the pump. I still had to watch those tyres, though.
I wanted the Bug to do well on the track, but in spite of its unrivalled power-to-weight ratio it still weighed a ton more than a Ferrari 430 and it proved hard going to stop, point and squirt it out of the tight corners at Dunsfold. On the straights, it was phenomenal, but out of the corners the all-wheel drive hunted fruitlessly for traction before being blown out by the massive engine torque.
The Bug was the King of the Road, the most awesome car ever made. But my granny could have popped her dentures in the cup holder and driven a more electric lap with her mobility chair.
I arrived early another morning for a different powertest altogether, grabbed a coffee and hooked up with Wiseman.
‘We’ve got the Big Daddy today, Stiggy. We’ve got the Koenigsegg.’
‘Sounds great. What is it?’
For driving on the edge, nothing was more fearsome or difficult to pronounce than the Koenigsegg CCX. This 806 horsepower Swedish landmine was the brainchild of the company’s founder Christian von Koenigsegg, who dreamt of making a car that would break world records. In 2005 the CCX scalped Guinness records for both the fastest and most powerful production car in the world. In 2006 they brought the car to TG for a crack at posting the fastest time on our leaderboard.
As Jim filled me in, Jeremy appeared from the other end of the office in a haze of smoke. ‘Be careful in that car. Look, I know you’re a good driver but, trust me, this is like nothing you have ever driven before. It’s a beast. The cornering is … something else. Just wait; you’ll see what I mean.’
That was odd. Jeremy never did that.
Jim and I made our way down to the start to see how things were shaping up. The camera crews were busily making their way around the track in their little black vans. I could make out a large square object hogging a big section of the parking area. A flurry of men in dark overalls hovered around it NASA style, probing things. They opened an enormous engine cover, and for a moment it looked as though the car might transform into an aircraft-carrier.
It sat on fat 20-inch tyres that neatly fell in line with the square side profile, but the car seemed noticeably shy of downforce. There was no sign of any wings that would generate high-speed grip, and the bodywork was too flat. As I quizzed Christian von K, the car’s ethos became clear. It was designed to avoid drag at all costs, in order to go as fast as physically possible in a straight line and break the world record.
Christian could easily have passed for Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s cheery cousin. He was passionate about his baby, showering me with facts and figures to illustrate its prowess. He was living out a boyhood dream to build a dominant supercar. His team anticipated another striking performance around Dunsfold, but as the Bug had discovered, the track could be a cruel mistress.
I peered into the engine bay to have a look at wha
t would shortly be pushing me along the strip at 170mph. Once you hit the track you were either totally committed or you shouldn’t be there at all.
The 4.7-litre V8 engine was locked into the rear bulkhead, in a similar layout to a Le Mans car, with the springs and dampers clearly visible over the double wishbone suspension. The all-carbon air scoop snaked across the top of the engine like the taut neck of a body-builder.
I lifted the door up, not out, towards the sky, and was surprised to find my helmet wedged into the upholstered ceiling when I sat inside. I squidged around to find a less claustrophobic position and strapped myself into the belts.
I gunned the engine and felt the brawn of the cylinders rumbling behind the seat.
I gave Jim the thumbs up. He grinned. ‘Be careful out there!’
‘Never.’
‘Stand by to roll, everyone, track is going live in 3, 2, 1 …’
I dropped the clutch at just over 4,000 revs and shot off with the rear bouncing. Aboard the Koenigsegg you actually felt the spinning wheels patting the tarmac. The engine barked a raw note as the revs peaked and fell each time the wheels broke traction. In just over three seconds the car reached 60mph, and a few seconds after that it was running at 120 into the first corner. I squeezed the brake pedal and felt the weight swing across the rear axle. With minimal downforce to keep it in check, the rear twitched and my world started rocking.
Changing gears required the dexterity of a brain surgeon to avoid crossing the gate and grabbing the wrong gear. A fumbled down-change would lock the rear wheels in an instant and could spit the car off the track. On the up-change, it might over-rev and blow the engine to bits.
As I exited the first corner I short-shifted a gear to reduce the wheel-spin and make life easier. There was so much grunt that she still let loose and I strained into the belts as the back swung away.
The steering wheel felt as small as a beer mat when I whipped it over and struggled to find the return point, the moment in the slide when the grip came back and required me to straighten the front wheels. Leave it too late and the slide would go into transition and spit me off. The CCX had a slow steering rack, which meant I had to work the wheel twice as much as normal. I was aware of the flurry of my white gloves and suffered the added indignity of accidentally setting off the horn buttons on the wheel handles.