The Bugatti Bolide Has Brembo’s Biggest Ever Brakes

Bringing the astonishingly fast Bugatti Bolide under control requires something a little more high-end than your average performance car brakes. As the £3.5 million, track-only hypercar undergoes its final testing phase ahead of its first customer deliveries later this year, Bugatti has gone into detail on its bespoke Brembo-developed braking system.

The Italian company has developed a carbon-carbon brake disc, rather than the carbon-ceramic items that tend to be found on high-performance road cars. Making these involves stitching together layers of carbon fibre before heating them at up to 2500ºC to carbonise them.

The technology was originally developed for use on Concorde and nowadays is found on Formula 1 cars and Le Mans Hypercars. The use of carbon fibre means they’re as light as possible, with each brake disc on the Bolide weighing just 3.2kg.

This is despite them being the biggest carbon-carbon automotive brakes Brembo has ever developed – they’re a massive 390mm in diameter, with a thickness of 37.5mm at the front and 34mm at the rear, bigger than anything Brembo has produced for motorsport.

These are each gripped by four 25mm high-performance pads at the front, and four 24.5mm items at the rear. The callipers, milled from a single block of aluminium, are eight-piston units on the front and six-piston on the rear.

Although carbon-carbon brakes need some work to get up to temperature, they can withstand much more heat than traditional brakes once they’re there. This should mean the Bolide’s 40 lucky owners can keep pounding round tracks for as long as possible without worrying about brake fade.

That’ll come as a relief because the Bolide is capable of serious performance. Using Bugatti’s famed 8.0-litre quad-turbocharged W16, in a 1,578bhp state of tune, it’s been developed for ultimate track performance rather than the usual Bugatti goal of top speed bragging rights.

Bugatti has run simulations that suggest it’s capable of Le Mans lap times that will comfortably outpace the current top-flight Hypercars that race there, and a Nurburgring time that will close in on the outright record held by the Porsche 919 Evo.

So far, though, Bugatti has no plans to actually race it anywhere - instead, it’s destined to remain a track toy for the ultra-wealthy, and one that’s likely capable of embarrassing Aston Valkyrie AMRs, Pagani Huayra Rs and pretty much anything else in the ultra-exclusive track car category. Well, maybe until the Red Bull RB17 comes along.