At this year’s Frankfurt Motor Show, Bugatti are displaying the answer to a question almost nobody was crazy enough to ask. Namely, what if you took the Veyron and turned the dial up to 11? The answer is the Bugatti Vision Gran Turismo, a full-size realisation of a car only ever intended to race in the virtual world.
Four menacing headlamps sit either side of the famous horseshoe grille, there are splitters, ducts and air scoops in abundance and the Vision is finished in the classic two-tone blue of the Type 57 G ‘Tank’ which won Le Mans in 1937. Essentially it’s a design and engineering vision of a Bugatti based around a W16 engine and four-wheel drive like the Veyron, but stripped of any requirement to be a civilised or comfortable tourer in favour of absolute performance on the long (virtual) straights of Le Mans.
There is a serious side to the exercise, of course. PlayStation has brought high performance cars to an audience of millions who dream, one day, of making the jump from virtual world to real-world ownership. The next generation of entrepreneurs are currently lapping Le Mans in Gran Turismo and the supercars they race are as embedded in their psyche as the model cars their fathers used to collect. So a Bugatti needs to be ‘top trumps’ in the digital world too.
So while you won’t be able to test drive the new Bugatti Vision Gran Turismo from our Berkeley Square showrooms – those low front splitters wouldn’t survive long on London’s uneven road surfaces – do feel free to try it out on Gran Turismo instead. And as a tantalising afterthought Bugatti revealed that ‘the virtual project also previews Bugatti’s future design language’. We can’t wait.
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