ZondaF VS Veyron
June 8th, 2009
ZondaF
VS
Veyron
The pagani sounds like an F1 car; the veryon makes a noise like a turboprop spooling up- either that or dodgy plumbung. And so on and so on. Any way – the race, Here’s where it starts to get a bit baffling. The zonda has its 7.3-litre mercedes V12 with 650 horsepower; the veryon has the 8.0-litre VW 16 with, famously,1,000 horsepower, but this is misleading. VW’s power tolerances – insignificant in a polo- mean that you will always get at least 1.001bhp, and could end up with 1,0150 if yo’re lucky. so desipte all the horses, it sounds like a non-horse race.
But the veryon is heavy car-1,890kh whereas the Zondaweighs in at just 1,280kg, giving power to weight ratios of 529bhp/tonne and 508bhp/tonne respectively. Not so fast,by 160kph, driver was definitely getting away that could be attributed to a mere 21bhp difference. At the end of the runway, where 300kph was indicated on my speedo, he was almost parked up and waiting for me with that anooying expression of disdian he waers.
Zonda top speed,342kphlveryon,406. Despite a 54 % advantage in power & exhaust to a tiny peugot and expect it to do 180.
But that’s not the end of it, because that was just a drag race. In the real race, when The stig took them both round the track, the zonda came back and gave the posh people’s car a right good kicking, being half a second faster at 1min 17.8. To put that another way, in a 20-lap race the zonda would be 10 seconds ahead, or considerably more than half a lap in the lead.
So the Zonda turns out to be agile, while the veryon has to be seen as more of an extreme GT car. I’d rather drive to Italy in the Bugatti, but if I was going to have a go at a track day I’d rather be in the … actually , in a caterham R500. It is only one tenth of a second off the Aonda, costs 35,000(Rs 30 lakh). So the real lesson a bit rubbish at the one thing they should be good at, which is going genuinely fast.
