The Bugatti Veyron was first sketched on a Japanese bullet train with a W18 engine

Around 25 years ago, the late Volkswagen Group chairman Ferdinand Piëch said he wanted to build a car that boasted 1,001PS and would be capable of over 400kmh. They’d figure out to get there along the way, but the targets had been set.

Interestingly, the all-conquering Veyron was originally planned to have a W18 engine. Bugatti has released these concept car pics outlining the journey from Piëch’s train ride to the fastest car in the world, taking in a few very important concepts.

It was that original ride on a Japanese Shinkansen – the ‘bullet train’ – back in 1997 where Piëch sketched out an 18-cylinder powerhaus that’d fuel his dream of 1,001PS and 400kmh+.

He asked Italdesign’s Giorgetto Giugiaro to deliver him a concept capable of bearing such a thing. The front-engined EB 118 arrived at the 1998 Paris Motor Show as a massive two-door homage to the Type 57CS Atlantic whose long bonnet hid a 6.3-litre naturally aspirated W18 engine with 555PS (547bhp). A long way off his target, but the stage had been set.

A year later came the EB 218, also designed by GG, this time taking the form of a lavish front-engined four-door that doffed its considerable cap to both the Type 41 Royale and the earlier EB 112 concept from the Artioli era. Longer than the EB 118, it too was powered by that 547bhp W18 lurking under the nose.

It took until September 1999 for Bugatti to shuffle the W18 to the middle with the reveal of the EB 18/3 Chiron. This time, GG’s son Fabrizio was in charge of the pencil case, adjusting the shape to accommodate the 547bhp W18 in the middle of the car. It’s the point where the Veyron really began to take shape, all cab-forward aggression wrapped up in a two-door coupe.

A month later, it’d morph again into the EB 18/4 concept penned not by the Giugiaros, but in-house by Jozef Kaban, credited with the final Veyron’s design. Named after Bugatti’s development and test driver Pierre Veyron – who’d won at Le Mans – the 18/4 originally debuted with the same W18.

But, “the immense challenge of reliably extracting over 1,000PS”, as well as managing the heat and complexity of the nat-asp W18 meant in 2000, it was downsized by two cylinders to an 8.0-litre W16. It was also turbocharged to within an inch of its life – four, don’t forget – which allowed Bugatti to hit its targets. And lo, the Veyron arrived.

(And yes, around the same time, Bugatti's stablemates were toying with their own Veyron-esque creations, in the shape of the 1999 Bentley Hunaudières and 2000 Audi Rosemeyer concepts. Both featured a WR16 layout.)

Not a bad motor, that Veyron, by all accounts. Pretty quick. Quite luxurious. Bit expensive. Produced 1,001PS (987bhp) and of course, went on to very much exceed 400kmh in the Super Sport. Job done.