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Accommodating all these has meant that there is now virtually no luggage space in the front, but then, as Ettore Bugatti himself might once have said, this car was made to go, not to shop.

Here's another interesting conundrum for purveyors of 1,000hp cars. The 'power tolerance' of a VW engine is five per cent, which is all but irrelevant in a 1.2 Polo but in a Veyron gives a variation of some 50bhp, or the total output of the basic one-litre Lupo.

So it's been designed such that the least you will get is 1,001 horses. You might be lucky and get 1,050. Wahey!

But it's a bit academic, to be honest. Power is merely the rate of doing work, and 1,000bhp is the maximum power available.

As well as a rev counter, the Veyron has a horsepower meter, graduated in hundreds, and the most I saw in a day of driving was just under 900 and for about half-a-second at that.

The ability to do work comes from torque, and power is merely the product of torque and engine speed.

The more impressive figure is 922lb ft or 680Nm, but that's not so satisfying to a culture that craves round figures - despite having stormed to pop success with 99 Red Balloons.

No, the really impressive bit is the claimed 400kmh. In fact the Veyron is electronically limited (I kid you not) to 407.5kmh, since that is the speed its makers have been confident of achieving in testing.

If you want to go faster than that, you'll just have to resort to the Demon Tweaks catalogue. 407.5kmh, that's 253.20827 of our British miles per hour.

Consider that our one-litre Lupo will do 94mph with just 50bhp, and that the new Porsche 911S needs 355bhp to do slightly less than twice that, and you will begin to understand the magnitude of VW's achievement.

The problem is that aerodynamic drag increases as the square of the car's speed and, more significantly, that the power needed to overcome it increases as the cube of the speed.

To put it in simple terms, the Bugatti engineers reckon that every kmh over the target 400 required, in effect, another 8bhp. So the extra 7.5kmh required the power found in a small hatchback. And that had to be found in the existing engine. They weren't allowed to put another one in.