It was a rough weekend for Bugatti as the Guinness World Records folks announced that the Veyron Super Sport is no longer the world's fastest production car after they discovered it used a deactivated speed limiter not present on the cars sold to the public. The record reverted to the SSC Ultimate Aero, and so SSC took to the Internet today to do a bit of humblebragging.
Here's the news release from SSC after the Veyron's 267.8 mph record was taken away:
SSC Founder Jerod Shelby says, "This wasn't how we planned to reclaim the record. But it will do until the Tuatara takes a run at several records that exist out there. Although, it was still a nice surprise."
Yeah, it was all a nice surprise, he says. As in, "We were planning on kicking your asses all along anyway, so NBD whatever. Until then, this will do."
Another revelation in the release? SSC was fine with losing the record because it's better for the customer this way. See, they have our best interests in mind, people!
"After we held the record for 3 years, I was happy to hand over the crown to Bugatti back in 2010. I think it's good for the supercar industry to have competition. It keeps the enthusiast hungry. We've also always felt that it would be better to break someone else's record next time, instead of just re-breaking our own record."
Translation: We know we're the best already, but it's just so goshdarn cute when someone else comes along and tries to do what we do.
Finally, we learn that SSC never really wanted that record anyway because it takes away from how great the Ultimate Aero is in other areas!
The "top speed" record came with a stigma... Enthusiasts felt that the whole engineering focus must have been directed at achieving that one top speed feat. We found it difficult to get people to see around our top speed record and recognize all the other engineering feats produced by the SSC team, such as ride quality, passenger comfort, record braking handling, braking, and driver predictability. SSC has its sights set on the one-lap record at Nurburgring to showcase the engineering prowess of the SSC Tuatara.
See? SSC is happy to have the record back but they never really cared all that much because the car is so insanely awesome anyway, duh. They were more concerned with the Nurburgring all along, you know.
I can only imagine how the folks at VW Group are fuming over this. Picture a bunch of German engineers with steam shooting out of their ears and I think you'll have an accurate idea of what it's like on their end. You know they won't take this lying down, and they'll drop some new insanely overpowered and overpriced Veyron soon with the goal of taking it back.
I'll get started on the popcorn.