The rumours were true: Bugatti confirms 1,341bhp ‘MegaWatt’ Veyron was on the cards

‘Not enough power,’ you might have cried upon seeing the Veyron Super Sport. ‘Just whack up the turbo boost and stick a bigger wing on it,’ you lamented at Bugatti’s lack of ambition in turning up the wick on its Noughties hero.

Turns out, Bugatti was thinking the same thing. It has confirmed to Top Gear that the rumours of a much more powerful Veyron were indeed on the cards, in the plan, and about to be hatched.

“There was an in-between stage,” Bugatti’s Frank Heyl told Top Gear. “We were working on the Veyron Super Sport, this is in 2008/2009, and engineering had another thing up their sleeves.

“A ‘MegaWatt’ engine. So, 1,360PS (1,341bhp), and we were going to do another variant, another facelift, of the Veyron,” he added.

You will recall the Super Sport – the so-called ‘ultimate’ iteration of Ferdinand Piëch’s masterstroke of automotive – could only summon up a frankly paltry 1,200PS (1,183bhp) from its 8.0-litre quad-turbo leviathan to manage a pitiful 267mph top speed (or 258mph for regular mortals). Bugatti’s engineers clearly found – and wanted – more.

Alas, ‘twas not meant to be, because somebody at the top wanted to go even faster than a MegaWatt would allow. And because this somebody was Quite Important and very clever, he’d figured it out himself.

“It was [going to be] called the MegaWatt Veyron… until a certain Mr Ferdinand Piëch walked through the door with a set of charts. He was an engineer, so he actually drew the charts himself – power versus drag.

“And he said, ‘if we had 1,500PS (1,479bhp), I calculated we could go 450kmh, gentlemen’.

“So guess what we’re doing? Not a MegaWatt [Veyron], we’re doing 1,500PS. And the whole thing went boom, and we’re back to the drawing board with the engineers,” he added.

Couldn’t you have just stuck 1,500PS into a Veyron, we wondered? “It wouldn’t have worked,” Heyl countered. “To go for 450kmh (280mph), you would need the cut-off rear that we implemented in the Chiron, much bigger intakes… and so the whole ‘let’s upgrade the Veyron’ idea was a no go.

“It was fine,” he added.

As Top Gear recalls, it was all fine and seemed to have worked out in the end, no? Anyone ever hear of this so-called ‘Chiron’ and its 1,500PS?