Mazda has always been the oddball kid in the field of automobile manufacturers, so imagine how balls to the wall insane and dysfunctional you'd have to be to out–weird them. And yet somehow, Bugatti seems to have understeered face first into succeeding at just that, in what I can only hope is an unintentional, but undeniably embarrassing nonetheless display.
What, you thought I was going to review the ND Roadster? Joke's on you! You know what we call that in the industry? JEBAITED! HA!
So what's bonkers Bugatti gone and done? Well, someone at VAG wanted to make a Bugatti racecar. Now, that all sounds fine, dandy, and perhaps even a little ho–hum. Eyebrows start to raise however, when one realises that they wanted to enter said racecar in Gr.4. Now, Gr.4 is this game's rough equivalent of real life's GT4 category, populated by cars driven by nice guys that ask before hugging on dates, can only drink beer when diluted with water, reach home before eight, and signal before changing lanes even when nobody is around, such as the such as the Renault Mégane and the Mazda Atenza. To attempt to circumcise, neuter, castrate, and then slap a carbon fibre chasity belt onto the quad–turbocharged, 8L W16 engine of the 1,888kg (4,162lbs) Veyron then, is an asinine an ask as trying to fit Gran Turismo 7 onto a home console that debuted nearly ten years ago, meek spec wise even by the standards of the time of its debut. In other words, it's utterly imp-
Oh, um... yeah. I guess... yeah, the- there you have it, I uh... guess? (How in the actual bloody HELL did... oh nevermind...)
So uh... *hastily flips through a clipboard's worth of papers* the Gr.4 Veyron... makes... 433HP! That's... *discreetly fumbles an abacus behind my back* 323kW, which is still stupendously powerful for Gr.4, but you'd certainly hope for at least that when helming the single heaviest car in its class, and by quite some margin too. The second most powerful and heaviest car in Gr.4, the GT-R, weighs in at a whopping 157 kilos (347lbs) lighter than the Veyron, and that's even when the former is saddled with BoP! Needless to say, the Veyron makes the brick missile that is the GT-R feel like an 86 in comparison, and an 86 a 172.
It's almost like VAG knew their car will be a straight line beast and specifically set it up to be just that and nothing else, because there appears to be little to no effort made to get the car to turn corners at all—All that visually differentiates the road car from the racecar are a pair of tow hooks, a set of kill and extinguisher switches, racing slick tyres, dropped ride height, a gutted interior, and unpainted carbon fibre for its body. Here's the really cool part: because the Veyron Gr.4 borrows colour schemes from the Bugatti VGT, the blue Veyron Gr.4 actually comes with the VGT's dark blue carbon fibre! The other colour variants of the Veyron all get regular black carbon, making the blue car the undisputed best one to get, and I am so ridiculously thankful for the Daily Workout Gods for gifting me my only Veyron Gr.4 in blue. It's just such a shame that the carbon weaves are lost when painting the car, and the two–tone body isn't separated into different categories in the livery editor, making selectively recolouring the light blue parts of the car a very difficult task.
As you are probably already shocked by from looking at the photo above, the built to spec Veyron Gr.4 doesn't even come with its own FIA spec fuel inlet, instead retaining the road car's fuel cap! Good luck refueling it every other lap in a race! So lacking and ostensibly low effort is the Gr.4 Veyron that it doesn't even sport any off the shelf splitters, skirts, or a rear wing that is seemingly mandated for all Gr.4 cars, and even the spoiled, pampered child of the fiercely protective Karen, the 458 Gr.4, doesn't escape that trend. The Veyron Gr.4 instead uses the stock car's rear wing in a fixed position, either because Gr.4 has an unspoken rule about active aero, or the chap that was responsible for gutting the interior of the Veyron forgot to leave an opening for the second key that allows the Veyron to activate its "Top Speed" mode... which is just as well, seeing that the 7 speed gearbox of the racecar has similarly lost its record setting mojo, topping out at a drag limited top speed of 277km/h (172mph).
Predictably, all that makes for a car that requires more effort to turn than some celestial bodies. Despite having its 8L W16 engine prominently on display aft the cockpit, the Veyron feels so incredibly front heavy and lethargic when negotiating bends that even Vipers with their own 8L engines up front are more effortless to turn. Its... stability, is such that rotating the car into the apex of a corner feels as laborious and time consuming a task as trying handbrake turn a cargo ship into a parallel lot under its own power. The undisclosed centre torque split is so unnecessarily front biased that the Veyron power understeers like an FF hatch on corner exits. Under any circumstance or situation, it is simply impossible to get the rear tyres of the Veyron to even squeal without the aid of parking brakes, grass, or someone T–Boning you in another Veyron. Don't ask me how I found that out.
Also, while I'm complaining, the car's flywheel of all things feels incredibly suspect. Revs bounce and stutter like crazy even on mirror smooth surfaces, let alone when you shift the car or when you go over rumble strips. I know it probably isn't a big deal for most, but I find it irritating as the low engine note isn't very distinct through its rev range, and so I'm more reliant on the HUD more in the Veyron than I am in most cars, especially because I've little to no experience with it prior this week.
Still, the torque curve in the car does trivialise shift points somewhat, being more akin to a torque table than a curve. One might think that this artificially limited torque curve is a direct result of more than halving the power output of the Veyron to shoehorn it into Gr.4, but very surprisingly, it's a direct copy and paste from that of the road car's, making me wonder if the record setting road car was itself held back by other hardware issues.
Speaking of hardware, the Gr.4 Veyron has the single coolest rear camera in all of Gr.4, and perhaps of the entire car list of Gran Turismo Sport! It looks to have been lifted as–is from the Bugatti VGT, and it is the closest thing cockpit view users will have to ever seeing their opponents when they're in front in this game. Why don't all fictional cars made for Gran Turismo come with a rear view camera as easy to use as the Bugattis? Won't anyone think of the poor wheel users in the game that haven't analog sticks to look around their cars? It looks ultra fancy and badass with a distance gauge on the left, and even a time difference gauge on the right, until you actually drive the car and realise that the two gauges are just for show and don't adjust with speed, making them completely useless aside from looking cool.
The brakes on the Veyron Gr.4 on the other hand, are excellent! The Veyron Gr.4 race car may weigh well over many road cars saddled with air con and airbags, but it never feels it in a straight line, be it when you're accelerating or, shockingly, braking. I personally find that the car stops the best at full front bias, -5, but I've had to pare it back to -3 to strike a balance between stopping and attempting to turn.
Okay, so it understeers. So it's fast in a straight line. So it has a super cool rear camera, really stunning blue carbon shell, and no racing spec fuel inlet. But do any of those really make a Veyron Gr.4 so weird? No, what makes a Veyron Gr.4 the weirdest car in Gr.4 isn't even on the car itself—it's the fact that someone at VAG wanted to make A Bugatti racecar, and therein lies the problem: the Veyron Gr.4 doesn't have a Gr.3 compatriot that together would have made Bugatti an eligible manufacturer to be represented in the game's FIA Manufacturers' races. After all, aren't these fictional Gr.3 and Gr.4 cars built for those FIA races? I mean, they went through all that (little) effort to make a Gr.4 car, why not a Gr.3? That's like going through the effort of buying a cup of ice cream, adding the chocolate sprinkles on top, and then not bothering with a scoop of ice cream. Or like making a carbon fibre Veyron that still weighs more than many passenger cars and then not giving it any aero parts. Whatever the reasons may have been, the Veyron Gr.4 stands out as the single weirdest Gr.4 car simply because it's the only Gr.4 car that can't represent its manufacturer in an FIA race. I can only imagine some VAG executive had a stroke when they learned that Gr.3 doesn't allow for AWD, and canned the Bugatti VGT Gr.3 after they recovered.
The Veyron Gr.4 may be a curious oddball of a car that might be fun to take a look at for its sheer oddity, but there isn't any enjoyment to be gained from the car after you're done gawking at the blue carbon fibre of its body, which... might take a while, b-but...
......
sweet baby blue Buddha...
...but if you want a car that has strong acceleration in Gr.4, the GT-R has most of the speed of the Veyron and much better cornering feel, and it's not even that good. They Veyron Gr.4 is, at the end of the day, just like the distance and time delta gauges on its rear camera: it's supremely cool, but completely useless. It's so awful that it might as well not exist like its Gr.3 cousin.
(I'm sorry Baron I know you really love this car.)
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