9 Astonishing Facts About The Bugatti Chiron

It has a ridiculous hunger for air

Naturally, having an 8.0-litre engine with no less than four turbochargers means that the Chiron does require quite a bit of air. According to Bugatti, 60,000 litres of oxygen is sent through the engine per minute of operation.

It has more radiators than your house

Like the Veyron, the Chiron packs a total of 10 radiators. Nothing new then, but where it gets interesting is when you look at the sheer amount of water that’s pumped through the cooling system.

The high-temperature cooling loop - which consists of one main and two auxiliary radiators - has 37 litres of water pumped through it every three seconds. In all, the coolant pump circulates 800 litres of water through the engine every minute.

The active surface area of the catalytic converters is massive

230,266 square metres, apparently. Or if you prefer to measure things in the classic unit of football pitches, we’re talking 30. That’s because the Chiron has six catalytic converters, and the two main ones are each six times as large as the cat you’d find on a regular “medium-sized” car. Much of the exhaust is made from titanium, because stainless steel is a bit too common.

It has the longest light conductor ever fitted to a car

See that fancy ‘C-bar’ light strip that starts at the top of the windscreen and loops back behind the passengers? Not only is it housed in a single piece of machined aluminium, it’s also the longest light conductor that’s ever been fitted to a car. Oh, and if you find it too bright, it’s dimmable too. Handy, no?

It has the biggest clutch ever fitted to a passenger car

1179lb ft is a hell of a lot of torque for the gearbox to take, so it’s no surprise that the seven-speed dual-clutch transmission is a bespoke, Bugatti-developed unit. And of course, it has its own superlative: it contains the largest clutch of any car.

The monocoque of the Chiron is a special bit of kit. It’s made entirely from carbonfibre and on its own takes four weeks to make. It’s 8kg lighter than the Veyron’s monocoque, and is exceptionally rigid. Bugatti says that the Chiron “reaches a torsional rigidity of 50,000 Nm per degree and a flexural rigidity of about 0.25 mm per tonne” - and if you’ve no idea what that means, all you need to know is that it’s apparently comparable to an LMP1 endurance racer in rigidity terms.

The airbags sit in a carbonfibre housing

If you smack your €2.4 million (£1.9 million) Chiron into a wall, you’re likely to be quite upset. But really, you should be intrigued by what the airbags have just done. That’s because the seat airbags and passenger side airbag on the Chiron are the first in the world that are designed to blast through carbonfibre housings.

It went through hella testing

During development, Chiron test cars have spent a combined 300 hours in the wind tunnel, clocked over 300,000 miles and munched through 200 sets of tyres. Bugatti says that it had to develop a new test bench for the 8.0-litre engine, as existing test equipment wasn’t able to apply big enough loads for the W16.

A radiator was tilted to make it more practical

You don’t expect something from Bugatti to be particularly practical, but in the Chiron you can actually stuff a suitcase that’s “the size of a cabin trolley approved for air travel” in the frunk, on the off chance you could ever bring yourself to trust an airport valet with your multi-million Euro Bugatti. The interesting part is how they’ve managed to do that. That extra frunk room is thanks to one of the Chiron’s 10 radiators being mounted at an inclined position, which as well as adding more luggage space, actually gives a larger cooling surface.

Click here to read more about the Chiron, and stay tuned for our walkaround video from the Geneva motor show