Quite good...

Wow - is that the Veyron?

Great car perhaps but what a dreadful colour! The claret 911 and cherry red Bentley are not great choices either IMHO.

Bruce

Having loads of money does not always mean you have good taste or sense.
On the other hand like a house,with a car it's what goes on when you are inside.

PS I'd only want the porker and I wouldn't care what colour it was.

quote:

PS I'd only want the porker and I wouldn't care what colour it was.

Me too!

Hmm, I'm not too sure about the colour either, but those are his racing colours (he has a brace of Maserati 250s and a number of other things). The Bugatti deal is that you can have precisely the colours you want.

The Bentley is his wife's and neither of them is sure about the colour now. You can just glimpse the elegant titanium grey of my jalopy, but below (if I can work out this attachment thing) are a couple of other pics. The two Bentleys are 70 years apart to the month. The Alfa Romeo ("Swoopy" he calls it) is the only one in existence. The Veyron engine (16.4L for lord's sake) is a significant percentage of the car (which itself was somehow smaller than I imagined).

It was, however, just as loud as anticipated, and the car didn't seem to accelerate so much as just "be faster" instantaneously. I couldn't myself live with having a gigantic "EB" staring at me wherever I looked, but then £860k is - by fortunate coincidence - precisely the amount of money I don't have to spend on a car. This particular BV is the one with the highest mileage, as his attitude is "why buy such a thing and then not drive it?" which I respect wholly. Especially if on the roads around here in which southern French and Italians have a running competition to see who can drive the worst - or so it seems.

The beautiful - but dwarfed in this line up I fear I must admit - grey XK8 is MINE(!)

However the star of the show to me was the Aston DB4 Zagato, which, being one of only 19, is the most valuable of the lot and probably the prettiest car ever made. But as I said most of the cars were stored in air tent thingies, and he wasn't opening everything up just for me. There was also a sixties Cobra and an original BMW 328 (the beautiful one you have seen in films) The Porsche, of course, is a 997 turbo and has been tweaked to 600BHP.

I have to say I had only gone to do a wine tasting for them, so to get to see his cars and be driven in the Veyron was an unexpected delight about which I am still smiling, but I'm just a little boy at heart I guess.

Cheers

Rod

Unique Alfa

titchy engine

glad I didn't take a company van...

No, he makes money. Fortunately (for me) he spends some of it on wine.

Not a great percentage of it though. Apart from the above he has just ordered yacht number 4 and their plane is a 727.

I don't know how they cope. However he is quite the philanthropist and has apparently pledged to give the lot (£740m) away before they die (I don't think they have children), which is a work in progress.

Genuinely nice people though - really - and very good customers!

Christ that Alfa! Maserati 250's!

Jesus Christ, I'm a loser.

My son says that the Bugatti has 16 cylinders and it's a 7993ccm engine, which is 3ccm more than the Dodge Viper. And he should know.
He also says the way to beat the Bugatti is with RPM, a mere 6500. But the Viper only has 5000 something RPM(he told me the exact number, but I forgot).

Thanks for the fantastic pictures and info. Now if you had a pic of his Swan 60 I'd be even more envious....

Cheers
Jim

What's his system?

CD5i, Nait5i and n-sats?

Alexander - I'm sure your son knows more about these things. I saw the "16.4" on the engine and assumed it meant litres, it being difficult to have 0.4 of a cylinder. Maybe I'm wrong. Wasn't there talk of it actually being - in effect - two 8Lt engines stuck together though?

Joe - breathe a sigh of superiority - his system is pure Bang and Olafson, although the piano is a Steinway.

Jim - I haven't seen his sailing yacht(s), but to rub it all in I did recently get a chance to go on board The Maltese Falcon - nothing to do with this chap - but which is the most staggering private yacht ever constructed. Picture below. Quite a treat I must say.

Good grief what a magnificent vessel. Is she as sumpuous inside as she is gorgeous externally? How many crew does it take to operate her I wonder.

Sumptuous even.

It is a very sumptuous thing indeed, tastefully done and stuffed full of its owner's art collection. You can download/see the brochure here, and if you have a spare half a million you can charter it all to yourself. Good news - that's dollars, bad news - it's per week.

I think the crew numbers around 18 - 20, and that includes two chefs and a personal trainer. Mind you, it probably needs an extra person to help you use the new submarine. It can be sailed by one person singlehandedly, but it will never be allowed to be controlled only by the computers (although they could). The sails can be unfurled completely in six minutes, and the revamped square rigging arrangement is of the unique could-never-be-done type.

Plenty of pics on that website link in the post above. Even round here it turns heads wherever it goes, and it has broken lots of records, some even more mind boggling than the construction cost ($130million).

Rod
Thanks for that link.
My goodness, she is truly amazing. Looks tremendous under way.
Makes a 27 footer on the Thames seem just a tad modest!

Is that the tender for the real boat?

Re:Veyron 16:4 = 16 cylinders 4 turbos.

Howard

I'm afraid the trading card game of my son doesn't mention such advanced things as turbos.

There is only one colour for the 997 Turbo: Basalt Black. Although, now I would probably prefer the GT2.

I don't like the Veyron in two-tone, I'm sure it would look far better in just black or red.
John

I agree re the two-tone. I did see a two shades of (darkish) grey Veyron in Monaco that worked better than the two completely different colours - to my mind, but like Smart cars no-one seems able to bring themselves to have an all-over colour scheme - I can't believe the manufacturers would try to stop someone.

The Porsche 911 is - I think - one of the very few cars that can get away with a sunflower yellow livery - I don't think Lamborghinis even manage this quite as well.

Still it's all personal I suppose. And maybe a bit national - France seems to have a much much higher amount of white cars than the UK. If I recall correctly police cars in Britain are now silver because it was proving too hard to sell white ones after they were 'decommisioned' (or whatever happens to an ex-police car).

quote:

The Porsche 911 is - I think - one of the very few cars that can get away with a sunflower yellow livery - I don't think Lamborghinis even manage this quite as well

Oh, I don't know, looks ok when I am behind the wheel.:-)

Fantastic stuff.

Thanks again for posting.

Jim