Engineering Speed: Is 300 MPH Within Reach?
April 10, 2010 by William Maley
I was re-watching an old episode of Top Gear, the one where Jeremy Clarkson is in a Bugatti Veyron racing James May & Hammond in a Cessna 182 plane. If you haven’t seen this episode, here are the cliff’s notes: the three were tasked with getting a truffle from Alba, Italy to London. Spoiler alert: the Bugatti won the race.
The thing that struck me the most was what Jeremy Clarkson said after the race finished: “This is the Concorde. Not just the best car ever made, but very possibly the best car will ever see in our lifetime.” I paused the show and thought about it. At the time of the episode, the Bugatti Veyron was the world’s fastest car. It made me think, why isn’t anyone working on a 300 mph production supercar?
“. . . they did it only as a technical exercise to see if it could be done. . .”
To say that about the Veyron is an understatement. So many hours of engineering were put into the car that, for every one built, Volkswagen lost money. What kind of engineering challenges am I talking about?
For one thing, there’s the gearbox: the Veyron has a seven speed DSG gearbox that has to handle a thousand horsepower and be lightweight as well. The brakes were another challenge: how do you stop a car going two hundred fifty miles per hour? I guess you use brake rotors made out of carbon fiber and brake calipers with eight pistons in the front and six in the rear. If you’re wondering, going from 250 mph to 0 takes about ten seconds.
Which brings us to the question I asked earlier: why is no one working on breaking the three hundred mile per hour mark? Could it be the economy, or maybe the green movement? In my opinion, there aren’t enough automotive engineers capable of taking on the challenge. The Veyron took five years and a lot of hard work. I’m sure some are thinking about creating the car that can do it, but now isn’t the time to propose this; there just aren’t enough people convinced about the very idea. And, at the end of the day, it’s still just a technical exercise.
Oh, and before I forget, I pulled some quotes from the episode. Enjoy:
“I mean, it has two 4-liter V8 engines joined together to make an 8-liter W16 and then they gave it four turbochargers. The result is 1000 horsepower.”
“Sadly, they have had to limit the top speed to two hundred and um fifty two miles per hour. That’s three hundred seventy feet a second.”
“You don’t change into seventh gear in the Veyron till you’re going two hundred fifteen miles per hour. And at that speed the engine is sucking ten thousand gallons of air every minute.”
“It is an engineering hammer blow.”
“Even though there are these huge cooling ducts and the engine has no cover at all, that thing has ten radiators. Three to cool the engine, three for the intercoolers, one to do the axle oil, one to do the engine oil, and one to cool the hydraulic fluid used to raise that rear spoiler. It’s got more radiators than my house.”
“Flat-out, it’s got a 100-liter tank, that’s a hundred quid to fill it up. Flat-out, it’s all gone in twelve minutes.”
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Top Gear: Bugatti Veyron Vs. Plane [Video]:
