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The impossible brief
Ferdinand Piëch set the brief and then refused to move from it: 1,001 metric horsepower, 400 km/h, and a car that could be driven to the opera in comfort. Volkswagen's engineers spent years discovering how hard each of those was, and harder still in combination — the project was announced in the late 1990s and did not reach customers until 2005 because the physics kept objecting. The engine that resulted was two narrow-angle VR8s joined on a common crankshaft to make a 7,993 cc W16, force-fed by four turbochargers and cooled by ten radiators. Behind it sat a seven-speed Ricardo dual-clutch gearbox, at the time the strongest of its kind fitted to any road car, driving all four wheels because no two tyres could have taken the load.
Bugatti Veyron Vitesse SE · PerttuTorvinen · CC BY-SA 3.0
