Cheapracer,

Drive somthing nice, bring music, eat food and drink that is easily handled while negotiating 1g turns - a triple heart attack cheeseburger has a terrible friction coeficient when sitting on a bed of mayo...very little mechanical keying.

...did you mean sole or soul? Both work...yes?

Sole.

Veyron has a kerb weight of 1888 kg, out of which about 150 kg is the driver and the fuel. But keep in mind that the 8 litre quad turbo engine, the dual clutch gearbox and the 4WD system is not that light.

In terms of size it's similar to a BMW 3 series, so what kind of cars do you drive where you are from if a Veyron won't fit on the roads? Moped cars?

With Veyron you can accelerate from standstill faster than a F1 car and you can drive faster than 400 km/h given that you have a long enough straight, and almost anyone with a drivers license can manage to do this and it does it without sacrificing comfort. In that way, it's more of a grand tourer than a supercar. So it isn't the ultimate track car, but it does quite well on the track too.

I understand the Veyron is supposed to be the ultimate car, but it does seem to be the answer to a question no one asked. I question how many people will genuinely have the opportunity to meet 400kmh on public roads. Or the wisdom of it.

I understand VW's purpose for producing the car, marketing rather than engineering or driving.
The Veyron is a lot wider than a 3 series. Roads where I come from tend to be single carrageway but narrow bumpy and twisty, width restricts the "line" you can take. I suspect a lot of the worlds roads are more Autobhann like, maybe size and weight isn't such a disadvantage there.
From my point of view a car (any car) has no business weighing two tons. From a design point of view it is easy to come up with a solution that adds weight and complexity, "cleverness" is coming up with better solutions than that.
Personally I am not very interested in aesthetics and marketing fads, most people probably are. I appreciate proper design engineering, elegant solutions rather than throw weight and complexity at it. I also want cars to be fun to drive briskly on a twisty road, this is an important design requirement for me. To me the F1 ticks the boxes, I couldn't afford one but I can appreciate it. I also understand that other people don't have the same values and will appreciate something like the Veyron for what it represents.

According to J's post above, the Veyron weighs about 1.7 tons. Most cars don't weigh a great deal less than that. My Focus weighs 1.3 tons!

Meh. The top five cars are less than a second apart on one circuit, which is insignificant. Dead heat, practically speaking. The differences can come down to tire condition, weather, driver preferences, etc. Test them all on a different course and you will likely get a different order.

Based on these results you can pick the car you think is prettiest, or the one that best suits your driving preferences. The whole deal is a close parallel to your observations earlier regarding each year's quickest sport bikes. By far the largest variable in performance is operator skill... and most of their buyers are better off not trying the vehicles at their limits. Not that I advocate such a thing, but in a purely rational world both the cars and bikes in question would be outlawed. Operated at their maximum potential, the most likely outcome with these vehicles is dead people.

The Veyron weighs over 4000 lbs, which is absolutely obscene for a sports car but rather impressive for what the Veyron is. Whatever that is.

It's probably a sign of old age (probably? no, definitely!) but my ideal of a supercar includes useability. Some time ago there was some comparison road test of supercars, a whole bunch of drivers out with a whole bunch of cars. The slowest was a Bentley Continental R Coupe, the old 6.75 litre turbo job. Everyone had a ball blasting around in the the Ferraris etc, but at the end of the day's fun they all wanted to drive the Bentley home with the sound system playing. It was easily the most useable. Comfort, silence, effortless velocity, and you could get in and out of it without a winch.

As long as you dangle it from a fishing line attached to the headliner this food works...you get a little bite every time you accelerate...or an unusual slap in the face if you are not paying attention

Me too. My idea of a great road car is one that can travel long distances on the Interstate/Autobahn/similar at high speeds in genuine comfort. That's the bulk of my extended driving. Last week I drove a Roush Stage III Mustang on a ~350 mile round trip. Pretty decent ride for what it is and 540 hp is always nice, but honestly a standard Mustang GT probably would have been better suited for the journey. But then my vehicular tastes have changed over the years, just as you say.

The BMW 3 series is a bit over 2 meters wide where it is widest and Veyron is just below 2 meters wide, over the wheels Veyron is about 18 cm wider so there is no big difference. It's also about the same width as for instance Enzo Ferrari, Ferrari F40, Koenigsegg CCX and Pagani Zonbda to mention a few.

An engine which is as driveable as any production engine, hydraulics which can control the rear spoiler and chassi, a twin clutch gearbox and four wheel drive is going to add weight. You could of course skip all this, but then you have an undrivable 1000 hp sportscar that will spin its rear wheel all the way up to, and perhaps above 200 km/h.

But if it weighed 2,200 lbs for example it wouldn't need 1,000 hp...

Perhaps true, but 1001hp was a design criteria.

It would still need around 1000 hp.

The top speed is not very dependant on the weight of the car, so if you're going to build a two seater that has a top speed over 400 km/h you need 1000 hp plus or minus a few hundred horsepower assuming realistic drag coefficients and frontal areas.

Without four wheel drive the acceleration at low speed would also be quite a lot worse. Four wheel drive probably cost 100-200 kg.

Out of interest how long does it's brakes and clutch work for?
I read that many supercars can only take about 3 or 4 full bore starts before clutch replacement.

To be honest, I'd rather see manufacturers subsidise a sporty hyper car with a 1.0 litre engine and less than 1000 lbs. I would have thought this would be far more relevant to their customers, or has the Bugatti sold lots of cars for VW?

McLaren F1 has a carbon carbon clutch and these usually have a long life, in rallycross with repeated starts from standstill with 4WD this type of clutch usually last a whole season (by that time they have worn out several sets of driveshafts).

Veyron have some sort of wet multiplate clutches in the gearbox given that it has a Dual Clutch Tranmission. Not too unlike an automatic transmission in that way.

Veyron and many other supercars these days have carbon ceramic brakes and they have a very long life (if fitted to normal vehicles, they would probably last the lifetime of the vehicle in most cases), corrosion is also not an issue as with iron rotors.

With Veyron they can say that they have the worlds fastest production car, that would not be the case with the small sporty car. The 1.0 litre 1000 lbs class of vehicles is by the way also quite crowded.

Sorry for mixing my imperials and metrics, I meant a 1.0 litre sub 450kg car. Something like their L1 concept but a little lower and sportier would do for me.

http://www.caranddriver.com/news/car/09q3/...gallery?cid=295

A supercar is a car that impresses 15 year old car nuts enough to compel 50 year old executives to buy one. A good supercar is one that impresses the rest of the automotive community as well.

The car in the OP is not a good supercar.

........

it's a cliche.

More than that - its a plethora of cliches.

What do you find impressive about it?

Hint of TR7 in profile.
Hmmmmmmm.

The door : wheelbase ratio (highly important engineering ratio, I am sure) does look a bit poorly proportioned.

They haven't trimmed the back-end off the tunnels yet!