Bugatti Veyron, This Is Your Life

We're not at all suggesting Volkswagen's brightest minds took to Shakespeare before embarking on the perilously fraught journey that is the Bugatti Veyron, but you can't help but detect more than a note of Twelfth Night about its conception.

"Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them." It's fair to say all three scenarios apply to the Big Bad Bug'.

In fact, we don't even need to pillage the Bard to attribute majesty to this thing; Jeremy summed it up on the show many moons ago when he proclaimed it to be "the greatest car ever made and the greatest car we will ever see in our lifetime".

Borne to a cynical world, packing physics-defying power and becoming the defining car for a generation of petrolheads, the Veyron is the ultimate in excess. It's got 16 cylinders, for goodness sake, and is capable of accelerating from 0-62mph in 2.5 seconds. Every day of the week.

So as the company announces the Grand Sport Venet, we thought it time to remind you of all the Veyron editions. And there's more than you might remember...

Words: Vijay Pattni & Rowan Horncastle
Photos: Bugatti