Bugatti Bolide review: the grand finale to the legendary W16

Simple question, what’s the Bugatti Bolide like to drive?

Simple answer, less menacing to drive than it is to look at. Just as well. If it drove like it looked I’m not sure anyone would survive a lap in it. Sinewy and spare it lurks in the pit garage at Paul Ricard like a wheeled knuckleduster. I can’t say exactly why, but it puts me in mind of the minotaur, a remorseless beast that lurks in the darkness and annihilates anyone who strays across its path. Maybe it’s that the horseshoe grille mimics a bull’s nose ring.

The €4 million-plus-local-taxes Bolide is halfway mythical already given only 40 are being built and Bugatti admits some owners will probably never drive theirs. I understand the ‘wheeled artwork’ argument sometimes, but not here, not with this. If all you do is look at it, you’ll never discover it, never find out that the tingle of fear you feel as it lurks in the back of your car cavern morphs into something altogether different when it starts rolling.

So it’s a pussycat, is it?

First we need to remember where it’s come from and why it exists. It exists to provide the fabled 8.0-litre W16 quad turbo engine with a suitably epic finale before the Tourbillon turns up with its hybridised V16. Sixteen cylinder engines. That still gets me every time.

It developed a thousand horsepower when it first arrived in the Veyron back in 2005 (that car set so many firsts: 1,000 horsepower, €1 million, >250mph max) and now, as it bows out, it has 1,600. OK, technically this is metric horsepower and us imperial heel-draggers call it 987/1578bhp, but in this instance we’ll make an exception.

The Bolide exists to celebrate the W16. It’s a VGT fever dream made real. Anyone else think it was pure designer hookum when it was first announced back in October 2020? I did. And sure, it’s not the 1,250kg, 310mph-plus racer that was promised then. But it’s commendably close.

How did Bugatti take so much weight out of a two-tonne Chiron?

By not starting with a Chiron. The entire carbon monocoque is unique to the Bolide (a technique Pagani also employed for the Huayra R), built by race specialists Dallara it meets current Le Mans hybrid regulations. On top of that everything that a road car requires has been junked. And yet the W16 itself is little changed to cope in a chassis capable of generating 2.5g of cornering force and 2,900kg of downforce. Even the fuel and oil pumps are the same, just some minor changes to the tanks themselves.

So you’d imagine what you end up with is a freak of nature, an automotive Frankenstein, where fully half the weight of the car is its locomotive-like powertrain (that much is true) and the rest is a fragile, skittish racer likely to buckle under the pressure.

Over to Mate Rimac: “The hardest thing for this project was to make it a Bugatti in terms of detail and quality. Race cars are fascinating things, but they’re not Bugattis. A race car just needs to work and be as light as possible, it doesn’t matter if the fit and finish isn’t right, the paint quality and carbon and so on. But I don’t think anyone ever did a track car with this level of quality.”

Do you agree with him?

I’ll deal with that a bit further on, as I don’t think the Bolide is unique in that regard. But it does look, feel and act commendably like a Bugatti. Mate admits that the weight climbed because when presented with choices, they erred on the side of aligning it with Bugatti values. “Ultimately it’s not about lap times in this car, it needs to be engaging for our customers to drive. And many of them are not racers.”

Which means it couldn’t be snatchy to drive or cars would be spearing into barriers at race tracks around the world. Good for the bottom line in the parts department, bad for customer relations.

What’s the cockpit like?

Tighter than I expected. The door is tiny and the fixed seat is set quite far forward, blocking part of the opening. The shoulder support is actually mounted on the door, clamping you in place when it’s closed (best get someone else to do that for you). Getting in is a fairly undignified wriggle and let’s not pretend it’s spacious or glamorous in here. But it is dramatic. The steering butts up close to the A-pillar, the view out is pinched by front arches higher than my eyeline and trappings of luxury extend no further than some flexible plumbing pipes for the aircon. Those, it’ll turn out, work brilliantly. Can we have them in the road cars now, please?

The steering wheel is 3D printed, compact and gorgeous, the dash three small square screens of densely packed information, the seat and wheel move to fit, the brake pedal is solid, the throttle feels expensively sprung. And that’s about all there is to play with.

Apart from the W16…

It’s what happens next that sets the tone. The W16 woomphs into life. It’s not brash or attention seeking, it just has this enormous presence. If you’ve stood near a Chiron while it’s running you’ll understand what I mean when I say it uses the road underneath it as a resonating surface, so you feel the throbbing soundwaves as much as hear them.

Here, unsilenced, it’s rowdier, but still conveys a deep, primal power. This is the W16 experience and there’s nothing else like it. I head off down the pitlane, limiter engaged, but I can’t bring myself to do what Andy Wallace had instructed as he strapped himself in alongside me: “Once you’ve got the pit speed on, just put the throttle wide open and hold it there.”

“In first gear?” I reply bemusedly.

“Yep, in first. And then at the end of the pitlane, knock the limiter off and hold on tight.”

I point-blank refuse. “No way. It’ll spin all four wheels and I’ll be straight into the barriers.”

“Honestly. As long as it’s got good tyre temperature, it’ll hook up without a trace of wheel slip.”

I can’t do it. Not at my first exposure. Later I do, and it’s sodding hilarious. The turbos are primed and spooled, yet there’s no sense of the car straining against the limiter. It sits smoothly at 40mph, you thumb the button release and are swatted down the track like a suddenly flattened fly. I hoot with laughter. Andy reckons it’s even more vivid than launch control from a standstill. I can believe him.

The fastest thing you’ve ever driven?

Trouble is I’ve driven the McMurtry Speirling, which kind of ruined me for anything else this side of a top fueller. In all honesty at higher speeds I don’t think the Bolide’s any faster than the Koenigsegg Jesko I drove last year either. But up to 100mph that couldn’t get the power down through its rear wheels. No such issues with four fat slicks sharing the load.

What’s the sensation of speed like?

Interesting you should ask, because the Bolide doesn’t actually feel that fast. There’s a few reasons why: traction and stability is amazing so you always have the sense the chassis can cope, the power delivery is super linear, meaning there’s no real top end crescendo and you don’t have to get too involved because the upshifts are automatic. Plus the speed readouts are small and hard to see.

In other words you feel safe and secure, and that’s the surest way to diminish the thrill of speed. What you have is this immense sense of pressure and force pushing you smoothly back into the deep seat. And soon after the realisation of how rapidly you’ve dispatched the 600m main straight and that you’re up over 300kmh (186mph in old money), pretty much from a standing start. And all the while, there’s this addictive thunder from behind you, a huge, gargling, delightful noise, like the best hard-charging V8 you’ve ever heard. It’s not got the sharpest response, nor the most penetrating noise or most savage manners. Smooth and mighty, it’s just the king of engines.

How do you go about stopping something so mighty?

So here’s a cool fact for you – lapping flat out, the Bolide has to shed more energy in a lap than any racing car you care to mention. That’s a legacy of its power and weight: it’s heavier (1,450kg is the dry weight, so around 1,625kg with fluids and driver on board), yet it arrives into braking zones travelling faster, a kinetic energy conundrum that Brembo has solved by fitting the Bolide with 390mm carbon-carbon brakes that apparently feature F1 materials. And ABS. Rare, perhaps unique, combo. They’re foolproof and the stopping power hangs me in the belts every time. Ever sky-dived? That breath-crushing feeling when the parachute is yanked? It’s that. Every corner. Mega pedal feel, I see operating temperatures up over 800 celsius and those outside get glowing discs.

What would Ettore Bugatti make of it?

It’s almost like you can read my mind. I wonder this as Bugatti has parked an original Type 35 in Paul Ricard’s lobby. It was a lightweight machine from the brain of the man who famously dismissed the heavyweight Bentleys he competed against as “the world’s fastest lorries”.

I’m not convinced he’d be aligned with the idea of a track car that’s not able to race, nor see it as a good thing that it has to get rid of such vast amounts of energy in a lap. But hell, times change, and if regulations changed as well, how good would it be to see the Bolide competing against an Aston Valkyrie?

How much driving do you get to do?

I have six laps in the Bolide. That’s it. Not nearly enough time to get fully used to its capabilities. It also started spitting with rain as I sat in the pitlane ready to go out. Joy – and another reason not to bury it in first. That first lap, with tyres still chilly, involved a fair bit of slip-sliding – and in a way that was the most revealing thing of all.

The traction and stability control performed perfectly, enough slip to allow a bit of movement, but never so much as to be alarming. The brakes were there pretty much immediately, the balance was spot on, and by the end of lap one I had the most valuable thing of all: confidence.

The Bolide is a 1,600 horsepower track weapon, yet it’s friendly, benign, approachable. There’s nothing tricksy about it. The steering rack is fast but not Ferrari twitchy, there’s not much actual steering feedback but it’s positive and incisive into corners and there’s loads of feel through the seat of your pants. The chassis is a great communicator. Hadn’t expected that. Despite the weight loss it doesn’t feel like a light car in my hands, there’s a heft and control to the way it changes direction, it likes to be poured smoothly through corners.

But the best bit happens after the apex. And it’s not just because you get to feed air and 102-Octane fuel into the W16. It’s how the wheels deal with the resulting torque onslaught. Because the diffs are sensational at putting the power exactly where it’s needed to maximise traction without spoiling trajectory. It’s just wonderfully flattering, makes me feel like a hero as it exits slow corners with a whiff of four wheel drift.

The twin clutch ‘box has new ratios and final drive, better suited to sprinting up to the 380kmh (236mph) max. Downforce at that speed hits 2,900kg. Once into sixth at, what, 170-odd mph, I notice the acceleration let up as drag takes effect. There’s one corner on the circuit to exploit it – a fast right after the back straight, taken in fifth, but in the limited laps I haven’t quite got the nads to go full bore there.

If there’s an issue here it’s the narrow operating window of the tyres. Due to high speed aero load on the Bolide, Michelin insists the tyres are run relatively hard – around 2.4-2.6 bar, and Wallace says that grip drops away significantly when they go above that.

Does it have rivals?

Do cars at this level have rivals when their owners are never making either/or decisions? Philosophical point. I’d flag the Pagani Huayra R as the nearest thing I’ve driven. That’s a car that nails the quality and bespokery every bit as well as the Bolide. Similar brief too, in that it feels like the whole car exists to celebrate its engine – in that case a nat asp 6.0-litre V12 screamer capable of 140db. The yin to Bugatti’s yang.

Others do – purposefully – try to deliver more of a race car feel. Ferrari’s FXX K and Aston’s Valkyrie AMR Pro sit here. They’re more stripped out and race-focussed than the Bolide. The one I’m most looking forward to? Gordon Murray’s T50S.

Bugatti’s take on this is interesting – the track-only Bolide exists as a rolling display case for its road-going engine. A powertrain that shows its breadth by feeling thoroughly at home on circuit.

Anything else you want to get off your chest?

I thought the Bolide would feel compromised, but instead it seems to have been as rigorously developed as a Chiron by people with a very clear idea of who it’s for and what it needs to do. It’s polished and approachable, which gives the driver the bandwidth to enjoy and appreciate the Bolide’s centrepiece: the 16 pulsating pistons and conrods, four turbos and 64 valves that make up the world’s one and only W16 engine.