Bugatti Chiron May Soon Be Able to Hit 300 MPH

Despite having a speedometer that goes all the way up to 310 mph, no one really knows how fast the Bugatti Chiron can really go. One thing is for sure, or at least has been until now. Bugatti won’t try to go 300 mph because road tires just can’t handle it.

Michelin now says, though, that the time for a 300 mph hypercar is nigh. Eric Schmedding, the company’s product manager for original equipment, speaking to Bloomberg, said that Michelin tires are “knocking on the door of 300 mph.”

Tires may seem simple, but there’s an enormous amount of force acting on them at any given moment. Being a car’s only link to the road, there’s perhaps no more important piece of a car, so making sure that the tires don’t fly apart really matters.

But just about everything happening at 300 mph is trying to tear tires apart. As an example, the dust cap on the Chiron’s wheels only weighs about 2.5 grams. Despite that, when it’s spinning at 261 mph, it has 3,000 G acting on it making it weigh 11 lbs.

Still, Bugatti has designed its Chiron to be extremely fast. Faster, in fact, than 261 mph, a speed its test driver, Andy Wallace, says the car hits rather easily.

Even if the tires come out, though, there may be some other hypercars that hit the triple century before Bugatti. “It’s not on the top of my agenda,” says Stephan Winkelmann, Bugatti’s CEO. “It’s something [my engineers] ask me about internally, but I think Bugatti is much more than this.”

[source: Bloomberg]

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