Germany’s autobahn network – or the circa 25 to 50 per cent of it that’s unrestricted, depending on who you ask – is hallowed ground for the car enthusiast. It’s one of the few places in the world where you can legally explore the upper reaches of a car’s speed without needing to be a factory test driver with a proving ground at your disposal, and it’s the sort of place the Bugatti Chiron was made for.
German luxury car dealer and YouTuber Omid Mouazzen, who owns a Chiron Sport, recently set out to prove this. Though the Sport’s meant as the more handling-focused, track-biased version of the regular Chiron, it still does the whole top speed thing pretty well, with a quoted V-max of 261mph.
Of course, it’s not like you can just hop on the autobahn and achieve this kind of speed whenever you like. They’re still real roads, with real cars on them, and can get pretty choked up with traffic. As a result, Mouazzen elects to hit the road nice and early, around 6:30 in the morning.
As he builds up speed, we hear the Chiron’s mighty 8.0-litre quad-turbocharged W16 bellowing and grumbling and its turbos whistling while the numbers on the speed readout get bigger at an alarming rate. Eventually, on this remarkably quiet stretch of road, Mouazzen tops out with 413kph displayed on the screen – 256.6mph, if you do things the old fashioned way.
Bugatti Chiron hits 186mph on the autobahn
It’s runs like this that remind us just what impressive pieces of engineering modern Bugattis are: it’s one thing to hit 250mph, but it’s another achievement entirely for the car to stay as composed and remarkably quiet as the Chiron is in this video.
With all that said, the last time someone did this in a Chiron on the autobahn, Germany wasn’t too happy about it. Given that, as far as we can tell, no laws have been broken whatsoever, we’ll have to wait and see if the same thing happens again here. It’s nevertheless a good send-off for Bugatti’s long-serving W16, soon to be replaced by an arguably even more mad, naturally aspirated V16.
