A car of this performance potential is usually not going to be easy to drive well unless you have a lot of experience with very fast cars. The Veyron offers a counterpoint to its towering high speed abilities though. Whether tooling around in town or cruising on the motorway, it is relatively easy to drive.
The power-steering is medium-weighted and responsive enough to give the car crisp and direct turn-in without nervousness at speed. The ride is on the firm side of comfortable, and like all good high performance set-ups, improves with speed.
And herein lies another of the Veyron's strengths. While enthusiasts love the heroic scream of an Enzo or Carrera GT in full battle cry near 8,000rpm, and their frenetic race-car persona at idle, such highly strung cars soon induce sensory fatigue and are not good companions over distance.
By comparison, the Veyron's larger capacity, turbocharged W16 motor has a more normal 6,750rpm red-line and its calmer idle can arguably be measured more in beats than revs.
Thundering with power when given its head, then settling back to a distant murmur at motorway speed, the Veyron plays the latent rather than overt power game. In this respect, it is the quintessential mailed fist in a velvet glove.
As formidable as the Veyron's mighty heart is, its all-wheel-drive chassis and ESP stability system are not overwhelmed. Rather, the over-riding trait woven through the fabric of its make-up is balance.
The Veyron simply annihilates the distance between corners with very little pressure from your right foot, while bends are eaten up just as effectively. Speed piles on so rapidly that the ratio of corner to straight, normally measured in seconds, ends up being quite different from almost any other car. I am a torque junkie and the Veyron is the first road car to really satisfy my maxim, "too much power is just enough."
While the car has a central carbon-fiber tub and is otherwise constructed from other exotic lightweight materials including aluminium, titanium, magnesium and carbon ceramic, it is no lightweight. Because the Veyron is designed to be used everyday and not just as a 'toy' for high days and holidays, it has been over-engineered.
In anyone's books, 1,900kg is considerable weight for a supercar and I approached the Veyron with some concern that this would seriously compromise its response to the helm. I need not have worried however, as the on-paper numbers seem to bear little relationship to how the car feels and responds on the road.
While weight does help a car ride better, it does not help acceleration, transient response to steering inputs and braking. Yet the Veyron responds as rapidly as you want in all these aspects, feeling much lighter on its feet than the scales would indicate. Had I not known its kerb weight and was asked to guess based on my drive, I would have said 1,500kg, which is around the weight of a Porsche Turbo.
Equally impressive is the carbon-ceramic brake system. It is no mean feat to stop a heavy car from 400km/h in 10 seconds, and Bugatti says these brakes have the staying power to match their bite. Easy to modulate in normal driving, they give tremendous confidence when you use them hard and often from high speeds.
