beige bugatti veron 16.4

At this point, it almost seems as if the Bugatti Veyron has existed forever, a de facto exemplar of mind-warping engineering that just simply is and always has been, rather than an engineering moonshot taken at the behest of one Ferdinand Piëch, a man who’s no stranger to moon-age daydreams made metal. After the Veyron, he commissioned the equally uncompromising Volkswagen XL1 . Before it, he’d helmed Porsche’s 917 program, earning Zuffenhausen its first overall Le Mans win and eventual utter dominance over the North American Can-Am series. Out of the gate, the Veyron laid claim to a 253-mph top speed. The most powerful version of the 917, the all- conquering 917/30, managed 240.6 on the straightaway at Talladega with the late Mark Donohue at the helm. Our own Csaba Csere went to VW’s Ehra-Lessien test facility and managed to hit Vmax in the Bugatti. If Csere had been so inclined, afterward, the Bug could’ve been driven to 7- Eleven for a Slurpee. Try that in a Can-Am car. And while Veyrons will surely exist until this planet is swallowed up by the sun, there will be no more of them after this one, the 450th and final car in the series. Set to go on display alongside Veyron chassis number 001 at this week’s Geneva motor show, this Grand Sport Vitesse is simply called “La.. Finale.” For the final car, the French VW unit wanted to pay homage to the first Veyron. La Finale’s owner had a few ideas of his own. The most blatant visual trick was flipping the color scheme from the original. While car number 1 featured a predominantly black body with red fenders and doors, La Finale is awash in red carbon fiber. Bugatti points out that this is the first time this color has ever been used on a vehicle. Because garishness often counts when it comes to Veyrons— the semi-psychedelic, porcelain-accented L’Or Blanc comes to mind—La Finale has its name scrawled in Italian Red cursive below the passenger-side headlamp.