Supercar Sightings: Bugatti Veyron and Golf R20

Welcome to another fabulous edition of supercar sightings. Yes, this is the world-renowned editorial piece where yours truly goes searching up and down the breadth of the country to find supercars being actually used instead of being holed up in pokey garages.

Previously on Supercar Sightings, you saw Tim’s visit to a Bugatti dealership and I had the good fortune of running into a bright orange 2006 Lamborghini Gallardo.

In this edition, I managed to get a little bit lucky. Picture myself stumbling out of a nightclub at 3am, and to my surprise, I see the world’s fastest production car staring back at me, complete in blue and white trim. Yes, I came face to face with the 1000 horsepower Bugatti Veyron.

In the flesh, this car is truly stunning. Forget supercar, this thing is a hypercar and an extremely rare one at that. Coming in at a cool $1.7 million per vehicle with only 300 made for production, and you know that you’re in automobile royalty. This original version has a top speed of 253 miles per hour and is able to accelerate to 60 in a staggering 2.46 seconds. Only the Veyron SuperSports tops this, with a top speed of 268 miles per hour.

Next up at a family wedding I managed to get a glimpse of the new flagship Golf variant, the Volkswagen Golf R20.

For me this was just as exciting, as it’s the car I am dying to get my hands on to review. VW, if you’re reading this, get in touch! Kitted out in 5 spoke black rims this white edition R20 really looked the part at night and the sound it made when driving down the road was perky and exciting. From the sound of things, this vehicle had the 7-speed DSG auto gearbox which pulls off shifts in the blink of an eye.

Stats-wise, this 2.0 litre TFSI makes 270bhp as well as 258 lb-ft of torque between 2,500 and 5,000rpm. Thankfully Volkswagen have put in the Haldex all-wheel drive to control this beast through the corners, and so it doesn’t suffer from potential torque steer like other crazy hot hatches (I’m looking at you Ford Focus RS).

That’s all folks. In the meantime I’m going to keep my eyes peeled for more supercar shenanigans. If you happen to catch any supercars around where you live, and if it’s safe to do so, why not take a quick snap or video and send it to Car Throttle? We promise to give you your 5 minutes of fame guaranteed!

Bugatti 16C Galibier Concept Car Pictures

Bugatti have redefined the cool car yet again with the Bugatti 16C Galibier - a conceptual proposal for a four-door, four seat sedan that could very well go into production in the next couple of years. According to Bugatti's current president, Dr. Ing. Franz-Josef Paefgen, the Galibier is one of several concept studies with which the company is considering for the future of the marque.

For those wondering, "Galibier" was named after one of the most difficult alpine passes along the Tour de France. Bugatti also used the name in the past on a special version of the four door Type 57.

Surprisingly for a car of our age where automotive designers usually try their hardest to create products that stand out of the crowd with distinctively repulsive styling traits, the Galibier 16 C features an uncluttered and straightforward design without any unnecessary gimmicks - okay, sans the.... eight tail pipes at the rear.

Echoing the styling of the famous Type 57 Atlantique, the Galibier 16 C combines a liftback bodystyle with the typical Bugatti radiator grille, large round LED headlights and the distinctive clamshell running the length of the vehicle.

The body of the concept car is constructed of handmade carbon fibre parts colored dark blue while the wings and doors are made out of polished aluminum. The same straightforward design is also found in the interior. The dash panel elements been reduced to the bare essentials with two centrally located main gauges, a small instrument panel in front of the driver and a large LCD screen on the lower center console.

Underneath the bonnet, which folds back from both sides, there's a 16-cylinder, 8-litre, flex-fuel engine with two stage supercharging that can run on ethanol. Like all high-end VW Group products, the Galibier 16 C comes equipped with a four-wheel drive system. It remains to be seen if Bugatti will bring its sedan concept car at the Frankfurt gathering as the company's press release did not say whether or not it will introduce the car at the show.

A Tribute To The Bugatti Veyron

I recently read some news on Auto Express that the next Bugatti Veyron will hit 270mph. This is extremely good news to those who think that 250mph is still slightly pedestrian and extremely bad news to those politically correct spoilsports. Whatever the reason, this has got me thinking again about the big Bug and what it means to motoring and basically humanity as a whole.

To those that do not agree, please do tell me one significant engineering achievement that blew your mind away. The Three Gorges Dam? It’s just concrete blocking a very large river. The Taipei 101? It’s just another tall building that will be replaced by another (has it been replaced? No matter, it isn’t important). I honestly can say that aside from James Cameron giving us Avatar, nothing really awsome like a Lunar Landing or a Pyramid was made in the last 10 years.

You see, the Bugatti Veyron isn’t just a super sports car that holds all the Top Trump Cards. It does various production car records and that is all fine and dandy. It should also hold the record for the most thirsty car in the world when it gulps down the oily stuff faster than an alcoholic emptying that cheap bottle of whiskey but this also isn’t the reason why humanity should praise the Veyron. The reason is that I believe the Veyron is the only engineering feat in the last decade that is worth mentioning.

Of course, one can also blame those bean counters or those in finance and accounting. These are the people that hold back projects as well as hopes and dreams. These are also the people that structure our economy so that there is such a thing as inflation (deflation almost never occurs these days). Want to build a stairway to the moon? Well, someone with a calculator is going to tell you that it’ll cost a bazillion dollars and since you don’t have any colleteral, no one is going to lend you the money to do so. In those days, no one told the Wright brothers that they shouldn’t build that plane of theirs or stop Louis Pasteur from finding penicillin due to a lack of test tubes. But cost always goes up and I actually blame the internet and social networking for slowing down humanity’s progress.

Ever since humanity discovered the internet things have basically gone downhill. Yes, the internet has brought about near instant sharing of information and dis-information throughout the world. We now get to receive news and everything else instantaneously. In the not so good ol’ days, a letter from Singapore may take a good week or so to arrive at an address in Bristol, UK, but now a person in the UK is just an instant messenger, a video-call away or a social network portal away. Everyone can even know what you ate whether they want to or not. Everyone can enter a networking site and poke, finger or whatever they virtually want to do to their friends or total strangers. But aside from bringing the world closer what have Facebooklets, Iphones, Blackberries, Blueberries and other communicators actually done to help advance the human race?

These Web 2.0 applications and smartphones have made people’s life so connected until they get wrapped up in chatting with each other or playing virtual farms, cities and other what nots until they forget things that are really important. Like curing cancer, Aids or trying to map the Human Genome a little bit faster than what’s been done today. They haven’t even sent another man to the moon recently, they haven’t sent someone to Mars 40 years after setting foot on the moon. They haven’t discovered cool Star Trek stuff like teleporting or worm holes.

I blame this on internet chat like MiRC and the discovery of games that allow networking (like Doom and Quake) as well as the internet cafes in the 1990s. This carried on till MySpace appeared and now with Facebook and Twitter it is more important to know about what so and so ate for breakfast instead of finding a cure for any of the major diseases or increasing the average human being’s lifespan by a couple of hundred years or so.

It is this actual lack of inventing due to being too worked up in creating the next Facebook or the next Twitter that if you looked back at the last decade or so the only thing that really, really impressed me the most was the Bugatti Veyron. Some may say it lacked some soul and character but heck, it moved goalposts a good mile or so from its closest competitor. Those that hype about crossing 260mph via the media but never did it need not apply.

Anteater looks aside, it was and still is the most significant achievement that the human race has done over the last decade and therefore I await its replacement gingerly.

New Cool Lego Bugatti Veyron

Check out Sheepo HL's Lego cool replica car of the Bugatti Veyron. More amazing is that this car actually runs! It has a fully functional seven-speed gearbox, retracting spoiler, independent suspension, and more. How cool is this! Watch the amazing video below these next pictures to see how it was made.

New Bugatti Veyron Pictures

The Bugatti Veyron is one hell of a cool car as these pictures quite clearly demonstrate. This super sports car can fly at 200mph!


The Bugatti Veyron has different driving modes, one being top-speed mode which is only triggered by a second key. In this mode, the car will lower the body to the ground giving better control. Speed is the answer with this car, blazing from 0-60 in under 3 seconds. and 0-180 in about 14 seconds. Retail price ranges from 1.2 mill- 1.6 million dollars.



The 2009 Bugatti Veyron Spider is also coming. The spider comes with a top that can lift-off. With the top lifted the top speed is dramatically reduced to 217mph verse the hardtop's 257mph.

New collection of Bugatti Veyron Wallpapers

A collection of cool Bugatti Veyron wallpapers for your PC.

Damn, a Veyron running the Gumball, that's going to go through a lot of gas

From http://autozine.com.br/eventos/gumball-3000-2010-onde-os-ricos-batem-pega

When running full speed, the fuel lasts about 12 minutes, thats about 60 miles at about 250 mph, and few freeways are going to give that type of high speed opportunity, but this is a gas guzzling beast even if you half the speed (125mph) and double the distance and time before you have to fill up again.

Autoblog's years best photos

1937 Bugatti Atlantic Type 57sc at the Mullin museum

Historic races at Monterey

Love the paint scheme and the Barracuda looking custom Challenger. Too bad they don't have the guts to factory make a good Barracuda, I don't give a damn that the "Plymouth" brand doesn't exist... the car would have nothing in common with real 67-71 Barracudas anyway, beside a few retro looking design touches.

XK-SS Jags

1925 Bugatti Type 13 Brescia at the Mullin Automotive Museum that was pulled out of the lake recently, it had been dumped into the lake to avoid paying duties: http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2010/01/1925-type-22-bugatti-pulled-out-of-lake.html

photos from http://www.autoblog.com/