In 1998 it was clear that VW didn’t quite know what It wanted a modern Bugatti to be. Two of the concept cars were front-engined, one a two-door coupe and the other a sedan. Then came a mitt-engined sports car. All three had a radical 18-cylinder engine. Why 18? Piech told me at the time. Betraying his competitive spirit: “Anyone who makes a V12 can easily turn into aV16. An 18-cylinder is unique. We have put down a mark. The Bugatti was first. BMW and

Mercedes can only follow”. And indeed, the first Veyron in the VW bugatti concepts. in 1999, had the 18 cylinder engine By 2000 however it had the prosaic 16- cylinder. for reasons rooted in the astronomical horsepower number. When the 1000-hp figure was announced, bewilderment—why was VW, which already owned Lamborghini and Bentley, producing a supercar from a long dead marque?—turned to skepticism. Many believed that 1000 hp (the actual number was said to be 1,001) was simply too much. The car would be undrivable: wheelspin, sliding, instability at the extraordinary top speed. To be manageable by an ordinary driver, It would need so many electronic anti-skid systems that the driver wouldn’t really be in command at all , computers would, And their were other engineering challenges:  making a gearbox to handle all that torque, keeping the engine cool, and so on

And the VW connection is just too much for some critics, Tim Dutton, whose family has been at the forefront of restoring, racing, and dealing in vintage Bugatti’s In England For more Than two decades, spits : “It’s a faceless corporation that bought the name of a defunct company. They dont understand the old cars at all. No one can see the point. That. the politest way I can put it. He’s Incredulous about the name of the new car, after Pierre Veyron. the last man to win the La Mans 24-Hours race in a Bugatti: ‘Veyron and Ettore Bugatti hated each other. The old man would turn in his grave.

So it came to pass that VW had a PR problem on its hands:  The car, not the engineers, had to do the real talking, but the car was unavailable, In 2001 the company predicted mid-2003 for its launch Tongues began to wag. Customer launch was put back to April 2004. A group of journalists (including this one)

was finally invited to drive the car in late july 2003. Then disaster: Days before the appointed press drive. the invitation was withdrawn, Into the picture had walked the fourth engineer in our Bugatti quartet—Bernd Pischetsrieder. Pischetsrieder,former chief of BMW, is Piech’s successor as chairman of the VW group. he had driven the Veyron and rejected it.

Now the rumor mill went into overdrive. In mid-August a Veyron ran demo laps before the crowds at the Monterey festival at Laguna Seca, California. It spun out. On September 1, Pischetsrieder, rebutting a German newspaper report, declared the engine, transmission and cooling systems to be just fine The driving premiere had been postponed merely “because the steering does not function as well as it should. Well, hey, steering’s not that important in a 250-mph car. Things got worse the Following week at the Frankfurt International Auto Show. At Bugatti’s press conference, Pischetsrieder gave a terse introduction, then pushed the car’s chief engineer, Neumann, before the press like a lamb to the slaughter. Neumann committed PR suicide by attacking journalists and their miserably researched reports”. He fumed: ‘According to everything I’ve read (in the media) about the vehicle up to now, what we should be presenting here today is nothing more than a pile of junk’ He brandished a graph to show the cooling was OK, and said the tires had been tested at 275 mph. Maybe so but it must have been on a test rig:

in mid-October Neumann admitted to me the car still had not been tested at top speed because it had been damage when it grazed a barrier at the Nardo test track in Italy.