The Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este is one of the most renowned automotive events in the world. Every year, the most opulent multi-million dollar luxury cars are packed onto a perfectly manicured lawn overlooking Italy’s breathtaking Lake Como. Due to the prestige of the event, car manufacturers like to use it to unveil their most impressive cars. One such car was the Bugatti Bolide, which not only showed up, but also boasted its cannon exhaust sound.
Last year Bugatti announced the Bolide, a lightweight version of the ultra-luxurious hypercar Chiron. The idea was to increase engine power, give it a unique carbon fiber body, strip all the luxury out of the cabin and see what its quad-turbo engine could do without the burden of the Chiron’s immense curb weight. What started as a pure experiment quickly became a limited (40 units worldwide), $4.8 million track-only monster.
This video shows the Bugatti bolide being unloaded from a trailer and you can hear its cold start sounding like hell as its 8.0-litre quad-turbo W16 comes to life. When Bugatti first announced the bolide it was said to produce 1,825 hp on 110-octane racing fuel, but Bugatti then decided to use commercial fuel for the limited-production cars, bringing the output down to 1,578 hp. It also makes 1,180 pound-feet of peak torque at just 2,250 rpm.
If you look inside the bolide, you won’t find the same lush leather or beautiful trimmings. Instead, you get fixed carbon-fiber racing blades, an F1-style racing wheel with a dozen labeled buttons, a small digital readout screen, and a couple of switches mounted on a carbon-fiber center console. By forgoing all the luxury of the Chiron and opting for an all-new carbon-fiber body, the car’s unladen weight drops to just 1,450 kilograms (3,196 pounds). It is therefore lighter than a Porsche Cayman GT4 RS, but has more than three times the performance. I think that’s why Bugatti claims it can go from 0 to 311 mph in just 20 seconds.
I understand if you’ve got hypercar fatigue and roll your eyes at every new multi-million dollar exercise measuring spec sheets, but it’s hard not to be impressed by the Bugatti Bolide. It’s totally out of reach for anyone without a ten-figure bank account, but it’s the kind of car you get when you give engineers complete rein, budgets be damned, and that’s always fun to watch.
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