Two Saturdays ago an email hit my inbox bearing news that the Bugatti Chiron’s production-car speed record was toast.
This was notable for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Satuday is a curious time for a big press release to land. Saturday is for sanding windowsills. The only only other workish-related email I received that afternoon was a more weekend-appropriate one drawing my attention to a 7.0-litre Lister for sale that sadly I can't afford.
The second noteworthy detail in the email was the company that had done the toasting. Koenigsegg? No. SSC? Nope. In fact it wasn’t any of the usual suspects, who tend to pass the trophy among themselves, but BYD’s luxury arm Yangwang.
What business does the subsidiary of a Chinese car conglomerate famous for vertically integrated efficiencies in EV manufacturing have in smashing the most prestigious road car record around? As much as anyone else. And it has worked.
Two weeks ago few people knew that the U9 Xtreme or even Yangwang existed. Now we’re muttering about how the car’s 1200V electrical architecture, Blade battery and quartet of electric motors can pump out 2958bhp reliably enough to send it to 308.4mph. That’s 4mph faster than the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+. It’s 138m per second. London to Leeds in just 25 minutes. Absolute madness.
It’s a stunning achievement, seemingly from nowhere. A real scalping of the establishment. An underdog triumph! (Only joking: BYD’s market cap is $99bn, more than VW’s and GM’s combined.) Yet I’ve been strangely apathetic. I can’t escape the feeling that this effort, although audacious and requiring prodigious nerve from Marc Basseng on the 2.5-mile straight at Papenburg, has a whiff of gratuitousness.
Don’t they all? Well, not really. Bugatti and Koenigsegg engage in this kind of activity because it’s a core part of their identities. Each record represents years and years of fine-tuning. Yangwang? It will build 30 examples of the U9X, so this wasn’t just a mad one-off held together with liability waivers. Yet the company also makes the vast U8 SUV and a BMW i7 rival: it isn’t a top-speed specialist.
Its Bugatti-busting stunt feels a little artless. My hunch is that conjuring 1578bhp from a quad-turbo W16 and using it to propel a car 300mph while retaining valet-friendly manners is harder than doing the same with four electric motors and twice the power output. Both cars have frightening levels of brute force, of course, but the Yangwang is Nikolai Valuev to the Chiron’s Lennox Lewis.
All of which is horribly unfair of me. Surely the casualness of Yangwang’s achievement makes it more impressive, not less? Given the preposterous U8 can float like a boat in a flood, there’s also a counterargument to be made that Yangwang is doing a host of crazy stuff simply because it can is very cool. A Chinese Rinspeed.
In truth, part of my antipathy stems from the fact these speeds are now unrelatable data points. In the past, if you had ever been 120mph, with great concentration you could wrap your mind around what 230mph in a McLaren F1 might be like. It was the same for the Veyron’s 254mph – for me, peak ‘good God that is wild’.
The genius of the Veyron was that it had an incongruously opulent cabin. In a strange way, this normalised a highly abnormal car. And it had the mythology. At V-max its Michelins would delaminate after 12 minutes, but that was okay because the fuel tank emptied after eight. Every few tyre changes, Bugatti would impose a €50k wheel change, because huge speeds might have compromised the molecular structure of the metal. It was precarious stuff with real-world implications. Some of it was even true.
Can we agree 300mph feels meaningless in a way 200mph doesn’t? The lesser figure remains a potent sales pitch: in the right conditions, a civilian can hit speeds usually reserved for Le Mans prototypes. The same just about applies to 250mph, and I say this as someone who has driven at 220mph on the road. Unhinged as it sounds, I can imagine maxing out a Veyron, having ritually muted the radio for a moment. I can’t imagine even wanting to hit 300mph in anything other than racing overalls and in a controlled space. This kills the romance, like observing a silverback in the zoo, not the jungle.
And now, sorry folks, the big cliché. Look, I’m sure the U9X gets the adrenal gland pumping. But colossal speeds courtesy of a great engine give a unique kind of endorphin rush that emotionally bonds you to the machine. That suspended wail as the oncoming air becomes treacle and as the revs grapple upwards? The car is animalistic, head down, fists clenched. It’s massively evocative. No EV could match it.
