Bugatti has smashed the open-roof road car record with a 282mph top speed

Bugatti’s 8.0-litre quad-turbo W16 engine has added one more record to its mighty collection before it’s retired: the open-top road car top speed.

A Mistral in one-off ‘World Record Edition’ spec has just clocked an independently verified top speed of 453.9kph at the Papenburg test track in northern Germany. Prefer old-school units? That’s 282.04mph. With no roof.

The Mistral was driven by British top speed specialist and Le Mans winner Andy Wallace, who set the closed-car top speed record of 304.7mph in the Chiron Super Sport 300+ back in 2019.

Named after a southerly French wind, the Mistral is a one of-99 limited run of open-top Bugattis which use the same 1,578bhp underpinnings as the Chiron Super Sport, clothed in a bespoke roadster body. The vertical headlights are inspired by the one-off La Voiture Noire, the rear X-bar light by the track-only Bolide, and the classic Bugatti C-shaped intakes in the flanks are smaller than the Chiron’s because the W16 breathes through twin ram air intakes just behind the seats.

So why Papenburg, not Ehra-Lessien – the home of previous Bugatti speed records? Awkwardly, Bugatti doesn’t have the keys since departing Volkswagen control to become a joint venture with Rimac.

Its alternative venue is by no means ideal for v-max runs. The banked high-speed circuit’s 4km straights are only around half as long as the ones Bugatti has been used to – meaning Andy had to carry a lot more speed off the banked corners to guarantee clinching the 282mph peak.

In case you’re keeping score, the Mistral wrenches the open-top record from the Hennessey Venom GT Spyder, which clocked 265.6mph way back in 2016... which wrenched it from the 1,183bhp Veyron Vitesse, which recorded a 254mph run before that.

Previously the Mistral’s top speed had been quoted as ‘over 261mph’. Yeah, and a bit…

But while former world record-setting Bugattis were celebrated with a rare run of World Record Edition cars… this Mistral is a one-off. The owner – who also owns a Veyron Super Sport, Vitesse and Chiron 300+ in matching colours – commissioned Bugatti to build a single carbon-with-orange example and use it to set the record. Mission accomplished, it will remain unique. And a member of a rather valuable set, we’d venture.

Top Gear had exclusive access to the record attempt, so stay locked to TopGear.com over the next week as we bring you behind the scenes looks at how the record was set, how it was filmed (using the world’s fastest camera car) and review the Mistral itself from the driver’s seat.