Quick! Go to TimesOnline before this goes away

[F1 monster]

I don't know what I clicked on to end up here, but I stumbled upon this article comparing the McLaren F1 and the Bugatti Veyron. Happy viewing.

http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/sec...,12389,00.html

For me, it seemed to end abruptly, as if it did not download the whole video. Anyone else feel the same?

Also, does anyone know how to grab the video? I would love to get a copy for the website, or to have one accessible at any time through putfile or google video. If you can, please put it up there and give us the link here. Thanks!

Direct link to full article:
http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/art...056987,00.html

[F1 monster]

Text of the full article, in case original link stops working.

Head-to-head
Times Online February 26, 2006
World title fight

Is the new pretender to Best Car on the Planet really better than the old champion? Nicholas Rufford and Andrew Frankel of The Sunday Times duelled it out View exclusive video footage of the Bugatti and McLaren F1


BUGATTI VEYRON It was to be the face-off the world has been waiting for; the duel between the two greatest road cars, the like of which will almost certainly never be seen again in an oil-hungry, emissions-regulated, eco-friendly world.

Not since Ben Johnson took on Carl Lewis in the 1987 Rome world championships, or Muhammad Ali rumbled George Foreman in the sweltering heat of the Zairean jungle in 1974, would two such evenly matched heavyweights contest the right to be the greatest. And where better for the Bugatti Veyron to meet the McLaren F1 than the Nürburgring in Germany, scene of some of the most awe-inspiring races in history.

That, at least, was the plan. Things started well: Bugatti would make the Veyron available. But the F1 proved more difficult. McLaren at first said it would be delighted to help. Then it had second thoughts and a PR lady called Ellen wanted to know what the F1 was going to be tested against. When she heard it was a Veyron an iron curtain suddenly descended.

“I have checked with our customer care department and I’m afraid that we are unable to help on this occasion,” said a final frosty e-mail. This is the effect the Veyron has on people. It is feared like a mythical creature.

The contest would have to take place in absentia. We would test the Veyron near the Bugatti factory in Molsheim, France, then fly back to Britain and drive a privately owned F1 on an airfield in Wiltshire.

McLaren’s concern was understandable (though it would have been braver to accept the challenge). The statistics for the Veyron are fearsome. Its 1001bhp engine delivers 922 lb ft of torque — three times as much as a Land Rover Discovery and yet it weighs a third less. At top speed it covers the length of a football field every second; truly it is a monster.

It has been claimed that the Veyron, named after a 1930s racing driver, is so quick that it could allow the F1 to start first and reach 120mph and would still reach 200mph first. In fact this claim is unfair to the McLaren — but not by much. You can let the McLaren reach 65mph and the Veyron will still beat it to 190mph before leaving it for dust.


That is not the only advantage the Veyron has in a straight fight with the McLaren. In every way — performance, build quality, ingenuity of design — it is the better car. It will fool you with just how well behaved it is, cruising quietly on B roads or nosing through the traffic. But it is cuddly in the same way as a polar bear. Put your foot down and it sprouts teeth and claws. It’s like being in a Ferrari F430 going through an Incredible Hulk metamorphosis. Being pushed back in your seat on the way to 60mph is one thing, but experiencing the same acceleration passing 160mph is a new sensation. The landscape becomes speed-blurred like a cartoon. Other cars appear to be going backwards. You expect to look in your mirror and see you’ve blown their doors off and sucked out their radiator grilles.

Flipping between gears with the steering wheel paddles takes just 0.015sec. The power delivery is seamless, the engine note rising from a deep burble like a powerboat tethered to a jetty to a howl like a Formula One car.

It’s hardly surprising the Veyron is the stuff of myth. Europe’s richest car company poured tens of millions of pounds into developing it in a fit of extravagance. Exactly how much, Volkswagen won’t say, but it was a lot more than poor old Gordon Murray had to spend when he was knocking up a prototype F1 back in 1992. In 1998, the year that McLaren stopped production of the F1, VW bought the Bugatti marque. Quietly, it started going around Europe like Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven, recruiting the best component suppliers. What it was asking for was as far-fetched as using only seven men to defend a Mexican town from a small army: a transmission that didn’t disintegrate; tyres that didn’t explode; brakes that didn’t melt. Furthermore, every part of the Veyron had to be tested to engineering tolerances closer to those applied by Nasa than in car manufacture. Not too ambitious, then.

Remarkably, Bugatti got almost all it wanted. The seven-speed double-clutch gearbox is produced by Ricardo in Leamington Spa. The carbon-fibre monocoque chassis is from ATR, which also makes the chassis for the Porsche Carrera GT and the Ferrari Enzo. The body shell is spray-painted by Weiss, which has the contract for Maybach. The leather interior is stitched by Boxman, supplier to Bentley; the seats are by Sparco, which also supplies Ferrari and the World Rally Championship, and the brakes are made by AP Racing of Coventry, one of the most renowned suppliers of racing brakes.

The alloy fascia with analogue instruments has the feel of old-fashioned, burnished quality. You can choose your colour or combination of colours for the interior for the basic price of £810,345 (if you want safety belts to match it’s an extra £24,000). Compare that with the F1, which is more like an overgrown go-kart with no comforts, just a big carbon-fibre baby seat for the driver, a three-point harness and a smell of petrol.

Thomas Bscher, the suave former banker who is now Bugatti’s president, used to own an F1. He drove it to work every day for two years from his home in Cologne to his office in Frankfurt before selling it in 2003 to an American collector Miles Collier. He doesn’t like comparing the two cars but says the Veyron is better in every respect bar one: the McLaren was lighter (“. . . although it didn’t feel it. It felt much heavier than it was”).

Bscher won’t reveal who his customers are but confirms 60 Veyrons have been ordered by discreetly wealthy buyers — “old money” car enthusiasts as opposed to internet entrepreneurs or gangsta rappers. One of the first cars, an all-black model, has been bought by Ralph Lauren, a man who already owns an F1 and, according to some accounts, two of them. You can understand why every billionaire wants a Veyron; only 300 will be made and there will probably never be anything like it again. When it was conceived by Ferdinand Piëch, former boss of VW, it was nicknamed Piëch’s folly. The rumour goes that as a youngster Piëch was never satisfied with his hand in Top Trumps and wanted a car that could beat all rivals.

The Veyron is that car. VW’s chances of recouping Piëch’s huge investment are the same as seeing Jeremy Clarkson in a tutu. Already the car’s days are numbered. Within five years Bugatti will have tamed the mighty engine and gearbox and put them in a more practical and slower four-seater car. The Veyron will remain unsurpassed.

We eventually borrowed an F1 from Nick Mason, the drummer from Pink Floyd and author of Into the Red, a book about the world’s best cars. Mason is rich enough not to care whether his McLaren F1 isn’t the fastest road car any more. Indeed, he’s so rich he wants a Veyron.

Nicholas Rufford

VITAL STATISTICS
Model Bugatti Veyron
Engine 7993cc, 16 cylinders
Power 1001bhp @ 6000rpm
Torque 922 lb ft @ 2200rpm
Transmission Seven-speed DSG, manual and auto
Performance 0-62mph: 2.5sec
Top speed: 253mph
Price £810,345
Verdict Masterpiece that gives everything a good spanking
Rating Five stars


Page two: Andrew Frankel on the McLaren F1


The first two days of May 1994 are unlikely to slip my mind. On May 1 Ayrton Senna, the only hero I’ve ever had, was killed, and on May 2 I became the first journalist to test the McLaren F1, a car created by Gordon Murray, who had also designed Senna’s Formula One cars. I drove the F1 to 211mph on an airfield runway and then predicted that the twin pressures of budgetary constraint and political correctness meant that there would never be a faster road car than this.

Well, I got that wrong. It’s taken more than a decade but as Nick Rufford will doubtless delight in telling you, the Bugatti Veyron is indeed faster than a McLaren F1. It will do 253mph, while the fastest a McLaren has gone is a mere 240.1mph.

But this is meaningless to all bar the statistically obsessed. Achieving the maximum possible speed was so far off Murray’s and McLaren’s agenda when he made the F1 that it was four years before they bothered to find out. The brief, in Murray’s own words, was to produce “the best sports car in the world”. Not the fastest, just the best.

What he wanted was much more subtle. He wanted a car small enough to thread through city streets, yet big enough to take three people and their luggage. He wanted it to have a 6.1 litre V12 engine — the most powerful then seen in a road car — yet weigh less than a small family shopping car. All he had on his side was vision, determination and technical brilliance.

The car he designed was made from carbon fibre and was so strong it could drive away from its front-impact crash test because the damage was so light. To save weight and keep the driving experience pure there are no airbags, ABS or power steering. You sat in the middle of the car just as you would in an F1 car, with your passengers to the side and slightly behind.

The V12 produced 627bhp, which may seem a far cry from the Veyron’s 1001bhp, but when you factor in weight a different picture emerges. The Bugatti provides 513bhp for every ton of car, the McLaren a touch more than 550bhp per ton. The Bugatti accelerates faster because it has four-wheel-drive traction.

The F1 was so fast that when customers told McLaren they wanted to race theirs at Le Mans, Murray created a stripped-out racing version that promptly went out and destroyed all-comers at its first attempt.

The car you’re looking at is more powerful than the standard road car. It is a racing F1 modified for road use by its owner Nick Mason, the drummer with Pink Floyd. More than 220lb lighter than the road F1, and with those tiresome engine race restrictors removed, it has 53bhp more than the road car. In short this is a car like no other you’ll find wearing a tax disc.

I’ve never known another road car that, even on a dry, straight runway, requires courage just to press your foot to the floor. Wheelspin renders first and second gear useless, and even in third you can light up the gargantuan rear tyres at speeds under 100mph. The forces on your body are so strong you struggle to accept that it is a mere car rather than an aircraft. On the two-mile runway, and being mindful of the trust Mason had placed in me, I ran it up to about 180mph seemingly in an instant.

But this is not what distinguishes it from the Veyron. The Bugatti is not only apocalyptically quick, it’s also comfortable, quiet and refined.

Which is good for those who like long-distance cruising, but not for those who want to be reminded what it’s like to be alive. The Veyron has a sense of remoteness, a result of its weight and electronic complexity, that removes you from the driving experience.

By contrast, nothing puts you closer to the action than this F1. The steering provides feel comparable to running your fingers over the road. Think about turning and it turns, tread just a smidgeon too hard in a tight corner and you’ll be facing the way you came before the first expletive forms in your head. Get it right, however, and it will corner at a speed that beggars belief.
The V12’s sound is mesmeric not simply for its race-bred purity but also the jack-hammer volume. This is a car that will reward good driving like no other and punish even slight mistakes with unparalleled severity.

The truth is, apart from being the two fastest cars to set foot on the public road, there is little common ground between the Bugatti and the McLaren. Which is preferable depends on who you are. Would you rather sit in supersonic luxury in seat 1C on Concorde, or be deafened, frightened and thrilled beyond description flying an F-22 fighter? Me too.

Andrew Frankel

VITAL STATISTICS
Model McLaren F1 GTR
Engine 6064cc, 12 cylinders
Power 680bhp @ 7500rpm
Torque 525 lb ft @ 4700rpm
Transmission Six-speed manual
Performance 0-60mph: 3.2sec
Top speed: 240mph
Price £627,000 in 1994; about £1m now
Verdict No longer the fastest supercar, but still the best
Rating Five stars

[hurstg01]

Top find!!!

[MalkaJB]

Nice find Monster. Ditto on the whole video ending too abruptly. Did anyone else recognize the line "if you've got £800,000 or more to spend on a car you don’t shop at supermarkets, and you get around by helicopter, but you could always hire a test track." It's almost a carbon copy of something Tiff said in the old Top Gear video where he reviewed the F1.

[Jimmyc]

hmmm! I posted the article two days ago on the Gordon Murray Veyron thread...

[zx4000]

Exactly how much, Volkswagen won’t say, but it was a lot more than poor old Gordon Murray had to spend when he was knocking up a prototype F1 back in 1992.

When i see this guy use a negative word of "old poor GM", am very afraid if this writer were figuring it is more better way that a lot investment of Veyron is further more valuable compared to Mclaren F1, which have ended up in almost same performance.

you guys aren't thinking that it is more worthy of having brought the almost same performance with less money?

[amanichen]

Originally Posted by zx4000

When i see this guy use a negative word of "old poor GM", am very afraid if this writer were figuring it is more better way that a lot investment of Veyron is further more valuable compared to Mclaren F1, which have ended up in almost same performance.

Well, the F1 and Veyron don't actually have the same performance. While the Veyron is only ~10mph faster, the midrange acceleration it is capable of is much higher than the F1. However, you'd you'd hope that by adding 400 more horsepower, 2000lb of weight, four wheel drive, electronic stability control, and 10+ years of engineering advancements, and a limitless budget, that the finished product comes out to be a better performer than the F1 is. With all due respect to McLaren, even today they probably don't have the budget that VW has. I think that the F1 project finally broke even, after 10 years, while the Veyron project probably never will, but that's not an issue for VW.

On a side note: some automotive journalists are simply older versions of teenage fanboys lurking on car forums. Don't take what they say too seriously. If your favorite car is the F1, then let it be the F1. Don't worry about if the Veyron has bigger numbers.

[F1 monster]

zx400, I agree with you that spending more is not something to be proud of. The writers might be impressed by the large numbers, but the measurement of benefit/dollar (value) is far more important. And with technological advancements over time, that benefit should be greater, not lesser. So, by that standard, GM and the McLaren F1 are ahead.

The Veyron is impressive, but not because of how much it cost. That's a very stupid way to look at it.

[ArchangelGTR]

Originally Posted by amanichen

If your favorite car is the F1, then let it be the F1. Don't worry about if the Veyron has bigger numbers.

Well said amanichen.