The fastest is the Bugatti Veyron 16.4, which has a monster of an engine. This W-16 unit has a capacity of 8.0 liters, and four turbochargers boost the power to 1001 bhp. The maximum torque is enough to accelerate a big truck fast – it is 920 lb ft (1250 Nm) at the diesel-like speed of 2,200 rpm.

This huge engine produces a terrific amount of speed at almost any speed. It drives through a seven-speed gearbox. Seven speeds are too many to handle in a manual box, so this is a semi-automatic gearbox using the same principal as that in the Volkswagen Golf. But this one was made specially for Bugatti by Ricardo in the UK, and has been designed to give very fast shifts.

The driver can shift by pressing a couple of paddles behind the steering wheel – one for upward shifts, and one for down. Paddles of this i type are used in Grand Prix and Rally cars.

Timed at 248 mph

Bugatti estimated that the car would do 248 mph (400 km/h), and sure enough, it became the fastest production car, timed at 248 mph on a Volkswagen test track – about the only place that you can reach that speed in Europe.

The car has massive brakes, with carbon composite discs and eight-pot calipers with titanium pistons. When you brake at high speed, the rear spoiler becomes an air brake, capable of generating 0.6 g. Normally, the spoiler creates downforce to improve stability. But here's a thing: with the spoiler – really a wing – raised, the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 is capable of only 231 mph, or so they say, not 248 mph. And they say the wing is needed at high speeds. Sounds a bit odd to me.

Interested? Well, if you are, you're not just thinking of the fastest car in the world, but the most expensive in production at a cool $1.3 million.

Just a mite slower at 242 mph

A few months before Bugatti broke the record, Koenigsegg, the small Swedish firm, also had a go at raising the official speed record for a production car that then stood at 231 mph. It was held by the McLaren F1, although this car had hit 240 mph, but not in official trials.

The Koenigegg CCR hit 240.9 mph (388 km/h) at the Nardo track, in the south of Italy, where the Ford GT was timed at 205 mph.

Supercharged Ford V-8

The CCR is powered by a heavily supercharged version of the 4.7 liter Ford V-8 engine you can find in a lot of ordinary cars built in the USA. But just about every part of the engine is modified or replaced, and the twin-superchargers boost power output to 806 bhp. That's a huge amount of power from such a small engine.

That seems a lot of power, compared with the 627 bhp of the McLaren, especially since the CCR has a claimed drag coefficient of only 0.297 – anything under 0.30 is very good for a car needing as much air to cool the engine as this does. Also, of course, the amount of power needed goes up at a prodigious rate once you get over 200 mph.

For example, 500 bhp is good for about 200 mph, but over 600 bhp is needed for 215 mph – and the McLaren was exceptional to get to the speed it did with just 627 bhp.

The question is whether this sort of speed matters. Well, it does to buyers of these cars – and there are only a few dozen a year – because they would like to be able to say:
'My car is the fastest production car in the world'.

In a real world, it is difficult to reach 150 mph even on quite a few race tracks with production supercars. Any car that will do over 200 mph has precious little chance to reach that speed, and must be a supercar extraordinaire, especially if it has the handling to match.