The carmakers are winding down their development of internal combustion engines and switching to hybrid and electric power to propel their most extreme models. So there’s a good chance that the Chiron Super Sport I tested at the Paul Ricard circuit in the south of France will be the most powerful combustion-engined production car from a major manufacturer, ever. It costs $3.8m and will do 273mph if you can find a road long and straight enough: I only managed 217mph in this piece for Car & Driver in the US.
In a wholly unscientific test, I exited turn 7 at broadly similar speeds in both a Pur Sport and a Super Sport and went flat down the Mistral straight, braking early but in approximately the same place. The Chiron's configurable tell-tale displays in the middle of the rotary air con controls showed that I'd used all of the power and all of the revs in each car. Neither was remotely done after less than a mile, but the Pur Sport showed 331km/h (206mph) at the braking point to the Super Sport's 349km/h (217mph).
And there it is: for a few fleeting seconds you actually feel that marginal, usually academic difference that manufacturers fight over and geeks obsess over and customers pay for but seldom witness. The quicker car's speed swells noticeably faster as it heads into the stratosphere of road car speed and the exhaust note - a little muted in normal use - bellows like God in anguish. The animal fear at what is being done to you is counteracted by the conscious knowledge that your car is tracking utterly straight and true and that the stuffy old Volkswagen Group has approved this seeming insanity. When you want it to stop, the wing springs up into its 39-degree air brake stance, shifts the centre of pressure back and lets you hoof the impassive mechanical brakes, knowing you've experienced something few if any purely petrol-powered road cars will ever be able to equal.
