If you’re reading this site, you’re likely familiar with the Bugatti Chiron. It’s the ultra-powerful, ultra-expensive, top-shelf Bugatti — and one of the last of its kind, before the company merged with EV maker Rimac. But what many people don’t know are the true horsepower and torque figured for the car. Sure, Bugatti has released numbers, but those are just for advertising, right? What does the real car, in the real world, actually make?
Luckily, Cannonball Garage in Illinois got a bit sick of its own curiosity and decided to answer the question. With a Chiron in hand and a dyno bay at its disposal, the luxury tuner shop started on the path of actually measuring Bugatti’s beast.
As Cannonball Garage found out, however, there’s a bit more to dyno testing a Chiron than just strapping it down and mashing the gas. The Drive spoke to Arne Toman, Cannonball record holder and Cannonball Garage owner, and learned some of the difficulties in the process:
“What we found was maybe the world’s largest single-piece undertray under this car,” Cannonball Garage owner Arne Toman told The Drive. “We kinda sketched it out at first and thought ’holy cow!’” Toman estimated it to be two-thirds of the length of the car.
“We just started carefully disassembling the thing,” he continued. “After looking around, we saw it had solid control arms. We called our customer and told them we could strap it down and dyno it.”
Even after the undertray was removed, the car had to fit onto the rollers themselves. Which it did—barely. “We had to line it up so perfectly because the rollers on the dyno are 81 inches wide—the [Chiron] is 80 inches wide... It was a careful operation to make sure we could dyno this thing safely. Everything was taken very slowly and cautiously, more than usual.”
The result, after all that work? 1369 horsepower and 1163 lb-ft of torque, coming at 6,620 and 5,060 RPM respectively. Looks like those numbers from Bugatti were’t just for show — if anything, the company was underestimating how powerful the Chiron really is.