The Bugatti’s throttle is flattened at 30km/h and within a second I feel on the edge of greying out. A few more seconds and I am hanging by the seatbelts, trying to collect my thoughts – and body parts. What kind of ungodly performance has been unleashed here? There was a time not so long ago when a car with 100bhp per tonne was considered adequately powerful. So how should we look at a car with 1600bhp? That is not far short of what the 27-litre Spitfire Merlin engine delivered. But this thing has to stay on the ground, which it can cover at the rate of a mile every 12 seconds.
This, then, is the latest manifestation of Bugatti’s long pursuit of unsurpassable automotive design. Sure, in the heyday of Ettore Bugatti, things were different, more delicate, more race-bred. More personal to the founder, if you will. But the Centodieci (it translates as ‘110’) marks the latest chapter in the latest rebirth, and the timing is apposite: in 2021, ownership of Bugatti passed to a
