Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse: By The Numbers

 A blast from zero to 60 in 2.6 seconds is guaranteed to have anyone grinning from ear to ear. A max speed run at 255mph would get the heart pounding like a jackhammer. Drop the Veyron’s top, and at 255mph you’d have nothing left to worry about. The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse was the grand finale of the car that changed how we define exotic cars when it debuted back in 2003. Now that Chiron production is in full swing, we can take a look back at how the Veyron changed the world of exotic cars. Vitesse is French for ‘speed’ – and it combines the manic 1,200 hp of the record-breaking Super Sport coupe with the targa-topped body of the Grand Sport. What you have here is quite simply the world’s fastest production convertible. Power comes from essentially the same 8.0-liter, 16-cylinder nuclear reactor that motivated the original Veyron, but now with a quartet of enlarged turbos and even more cooling capacity.

The result is a power hike from a crazed 987 hp to an absolutely insane 1,183 hp – that’s an extra 196 hp. Max torque takes a similar leap; from 922 lb-ft to 1,106 lb-ft. This is the motor that punched a Veyron Super Sport to a record top speed of 267.81 mph at Volkswagen’s test track. Bugatti rightly caps the Vitesse’s top speed of 255 mph with the roof in place. Without the roof, the top speed is limited to 233 because of cockpit turbulence. A big chunk of that $2.3-million purchase price goes to the hundreds of hours of wind tunnel testing that helped create seemingly small but extremely effective features like the clip-on aero lip that attaches to the top of the windshield. It makes conversation actually possible at 200 mph-plus. Though we’re not sure what kind of conversation a driver should be engaging in when the world is screaming past at 293 feet every second. Yes, there is a carbon fiber hardtop, but if you remove it you’ll have to leave it at home as there’s no place for it inside the car. Just as in 2003, there is still no car that compares to a magical Veyron. It’s a car everyone should be given the opportunity to drive just once in their life. The last Veyron was a Grand Sport Vitesse known as La Finale, and it signaled the end of an era.