Bugatti Grand Sport (2009)

Good timing with the new Bugatti Grand Sport (2009) hypercar. The polar ice caps are melting and the world’s in the middle of the worst financial crisis since John Steinbeck was still scratching around in the dust bowl looking for a pencil, yet Bugatti manages to gauge the zeitgeist perfectly and unleash a £1.5m convertible supercar that emits 596g/km CO2.

Sleeping polar bears? One little Bugatti isn’t going to hurt, and anyway, there’ll always be sufficient disgustingly rich people to buy a truly outrageous car like the drop-top Veyron Grand Sport.

So how fast is the world’s fastest hair dryer?

As fast as the regular Veyron, at least with the roof in place when you can insert the second key to engage the top speed mode that drops the car closer to the ground and tweaks the angle of the spoilers. Do that, find enough road and you’ll hit 253mph. With the roof off, you can’t use the second key and are limited to a mere 224mph. Pah!

What about performance I can actually use? Will the Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport (2009) beat my neighbour’s Nissan GT-R away from the lights?

Bugatti claims the 53kg weight penalty knocks a couple of tenths off the coupe’s 2.5sec 0-62mph time, but unless you stray onto Santa Pod drag strip when the top fuellers are doing their stuff, you’re not going to come across much that can beat it. Don’t believe me? How about zero to 186mph (300km/h) in less than 17sec? You won’t find a Ferrari or Lamborghini that can get within the same time zone as the Bugatti when it’s delivering all 987bhp.

In fact it’s truly unsettling the first few times you give it the lot and hold it there in second gear and through third. I’ve been fortunate enough to have driven plenty of quick cars – including a Mclaren F1 – and I was still startled by the kick in the back. If you’ve never driven anything swifter than a hot hatch, there’s a good chance that you might feel genuinely scared, it’s that quick. As soon as the quad-turbo W16 passes 2200rpm all 922lb ft of torque is at your bidding, though even that much twist can’t trouble the four-wheel drive system or £5k-a-corner Michelins.

£5k a corner! So the Bugatti's not a car for drifting then?

You’d struggle to get the Grand Sport out of shape, at least in the dry and on the road. There’s simply not enough room. Push really hard on tighter corners and you might get a little understeer, but that’s your lot. Don’t go thinking that the Grand Sport is a blunt instrument though. Its steering is surprisingly delicate and precise and you soon find yourself nibbling verges in a way you never thought possible in a car this wide, this expensive.

Porsche 913

Forgetting the Panamera, Cayenne and Macan, Porsche offer a pretty well-rounded sports car range. Starting with the Boxster and Cayman, and moving up the multitude of variations of the Porsche 911, all the way up to the 918 Spyder supercar. But there is a HUGE price gap between the top of the range 911 Turbo ($250,000 will all the options ticked), to the 918 Spyder ($800,000). Somewhere in that range Porsche could surely offer something to compete with the likes of Ferrari and Lamborghini. Something like the 913 possibly? Conceived by the fertile mind of Rene Garcia, a professional 3D modeller who has created conceptual vehicles and highly detailed models for some of the biggest movies of the past decade, including the Matrix Trilogy, Transformers, the latest Star Trekthrillers and The Avengers, the Porsche 913 is an exquisitely rendered design in every detail. It has a bit of the 918 Spyder about it, but there’s also a lot of originality to the design. It looks like a Porsche, but a

Lamborghini Canto – What the Murcielago could have been?

Back in the late 1990s, when Lamborghini were starting to realise they needed a replacement for the ageing Diablo, they started reviewing design proposals from various automotive design firms. Zagato’s offering was the Zagato L147 SuperDiablo, or as it was to be later known, the Lamborghini Canto. The Lamborghini Canto first appeared in 1998, it arrived only two years after another Zagato designed Lamborghini concept had been unveiled, the Diablo-based Raptor. The cars shared a number of similar features, including the wraparound windows, triangular lateral air intakes, and trademark double-bubble roof. However of the two, the earlier Raptor was probably the better looking. Clearly Ferdinand Piech – head of the Volkswagen Group – thought so too. After VW bought Lamborghini in 1999, one of his first decisions was to review the Canto’s development and redesign the concept. The car was re-engineered and the rear extensively restyled to include smaller air intakes. The engine was also up

BMW GINA

The BMW GINA changes the design rulebook concept which features clever use of materials and technology. The GINA acronym stands for 'Geometry In "N" Adaptions'. The 'N' stands for infinite. Quite logical really... While at first glance the BMW GINA appears to be nothing more than a modified and stretched BMW Z4. As soon as the doors are opened it reveals its true nature. Covering the lightweight spaceframe of the BMW GINA are not conventional metal bodypanels, but instead an elastic, rubber-like material is stretched across the structural members and wire frame to form an attractive design which follows BMW's flame surfacing styling philosophy. This elastic material has given BMW's designers more options when designing various moving parts of the GINA concept. The doors for example have no shut line along their front edge as the material just moves with the door. At the rear the electro-hydraulic adjustable spoiler rises and lowers under the skin of

Road Strikers

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