THE FUTURE OF POWER
The McLaren F1 was always supposed to be a line in the sand, but then came Veyron, followed by a whole raft of hybrid hypercars, and now Chiron. What next in the power wars?
The power game is strong, but by how much?
TTWO-TIME WORLD SUPERBIKE champion Troy Corser doesn’t just have a fast name but delivered perhaps the drollest line ever uttered on the subject of speed. Asked by a wide-eyed reporter after one race what it felt like to do 200mph on two wheels, he replied: ‘much like 199mph’.
I interviewed him in the early 1990s and can confirm that, in the spirit of his native Australia’s favourite raincoat, the Corser take on most things was dry as a bone. He told me that doing 199, 200 or 201mph meant absolutely nothing to him. All that mattered was his speed in relation to that of the other bikes he was racing – differentials of probably no more than 3-5kmph. That was the epicentre of his attention, what his senses and reflexes were attuned to, the font of his personal buzz.
In one respect, of course, he was absolutely right. The expression of extreme speed is like a billionaire’s level of liquidity: just a big number. And without a point of reference – the proximity of scenery, another fast-moving car, a low-flying jet – the sensation per se won’t even be that engaging. Einstein understood. To really deliver, speed requires heaps of context, not merely a rapidly escalating blur of numbers. Want to experience hypercaresque 1 G-plus acceleration in the comfort of your own people-carrier? Swivel one of the rotatable seats through 180 degrees and get the driver to stand on the anchors at 110kmph on an empty stretch of road. The forces acting on your body will be the same as those you’d experience from a standing start in a 1500-horsepower, 16-cylinder, quad-turbo, 420kmph (limited), launchcontrolled Bugatti Chiron. You’ll be pushed back in the seat with just the same sustained ferocity but, chances are, it will just seem vaguely unpleasant instead of the thrill of a lifetime. You’re missing a few crore rupees of context.
The necessary bond between the hyper-rich and the most expensive and powerful hypercars is what will continue to underwrite not just their survival but also the persistent push for ascendency. And numbers are the drug. The higher they go – price, power, speed – the stronger the weird over-arching psychology they create. We’ll call it the never-having-to-try paradox. Because everyone knows he or she doesn’t have to, a Bugatti Chiron owner truly giving it the beans on the public highway is probably something you’ll never see. Like the nuclear option, the potential is the power, not power itself. Which seems like a bit of a waste. Nor is spare capacity for the sake of it likely to end there. Peak overkill is in sight but we haven’t reached it yet. It means that a 480kmph series-production hypercar emerging in the next few years isn’t a possibility but a stonecold certainty, the next ultimate example of ‘untouchable automotive omnipotence with nothing to prove’.
The promise will attract the money but, in truth, the untouchable message won’t really wash anymore. The Chiron’s predecessor, the 987bhp, 407kmph Veyron, like the McLaren F1 before it, was meant to be the ultimate embodiment of the notion, a definitive line in the sand. Instead, it effectively kick-started the hybrid hypercar projects prosecuted by Porsche, McLaren and Ferrari with the 918 Spyder, P1 and LaFerrari – all cars that could match the Bugatti’s acceleration in any real-world scenario without the need for a bombastic top speed, and run rings around it dynamically. It was only a matter of time before the Veyron became a whipping post for the Nissan GT-R tuning industry, countless YouTube clips visiting ritual humiliation on ‘the world’s fastest car’ in roll-on drag races achingly played out on wobbly smartphone videos usually, to the Veyron’s credit, in the Troy Corser 3-5kmph differential zone.
In Top Trumps terms, even the mighty Chiron is already stuck between a rock and a hard place, pegged to a statssheet dead heat in a race to 100kmph with an all-electric, five-seater Tesla P100D saloon but also fixed in the crosshairs of the new, circa-465kmph Hennessey Venom F5. And it simply wouldn’t be considered a bait worth rising to for any self-respecting 2000bhp-plus road-legal drag specialist in a straight-line tussle. A modified but outwardly standard 2006 Ford GT, for example, recently accelerated to 473kmph in the space of a mile.
The future will be about packaging performance and efficiency in a tightly defined yet meaningful way. Led by the example of today’s hybrid hypercars – most pertinently the Porsche 918 Spyder – electricity will provide both the environmental sweetness and light and the supplementary muscle to hit hard where it really counts, on real-world roads and not some fantasy land-speed-record venue. ⌧
‘A 480kmph seriesproduction hypercar emerging in the next few years isn’t a possibility but a stone-cold certainty’