Alt text for cover image: Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ at F1rst Motors Dubai, showcasing the record-breaking hypercar with a 1600-horsepower W16 engine
There’s a moment when you walk into our showroom at F1rst Motors and your brain stops working properly.
It’s when you see the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+.
This is the machine that broke 300mph.
Actually broke it.
The development story is almost out of Hollywood.
Stephan Winkelmann took over Bugatti in 2018 and decided he wanted to build the world’s first 300mph production car. The engineers probably thought he’d lost his mind, and they were right, but that’s what made it brilliant.
Wolfgang Dürheimer had already laid the groundwork with the regular Chiron’s engineering, but making it go 300mph required ripping apart everything they thought they knew about high-speed aerodynamics. Stefan Ellrott, Bugatti’s technical boss, basically had to reinvent physics by reworking the quad-turbo W16 engine, giving it stronger pistons, modified turbos, and cooling systems that could handle thermal loads most houses would struggle with.
The end result was sixteen hundred horsepower or roughly 15 Vauxhall Astras’ worth.
From an 8.0-liter W16 that sounds like automotive Armageddon when you start it.
But that’s just the beginning.
Then we come to the aerodynamic modifications. Those aggressive diffusers aren’t styling exercises. Every single curve was designed using computational fluid dynamics that would make NASA engineers weep. The whole car is basically a 440km/h missile that happens to have leather seats and air conditioning.
Then they gave it to Andy Wallace, former Le Mans winner and part-time professional lunatic. He took the prototype to Ehra-Lessien and did something that shouldn’t be physically possible, clocking 304.773mph on the banked oval.
Reminder, this was on a very, very closed-to-the-public track.
In a car, you could theoretically drive to the shops, assuming your local shop happens to be in another dimension.
Wallace described it as “surreal.” That’s professional racing driver speak for “bloody hell, this thing actually works.” The car stayed composed at speeds where the landscape becomes abstract art, and what’s more is that the production version is limited to 440km/h for customer safety, which is adorable really. Only thirty were built, making them rarer than common sense in government and considerably more valuable.
The development cost?
Probably north of 100 million euros for thirty cars, but that’s only our estimation.
But here’s the really special bit.
We’ve got a couple here at First Motors Dubai, available to buy.
Not in some museum.
Not locked away in a collector’s garage. Here. In Dubai. Where you can actually see it, smell it, and possibly convince yourself you need to own a piece of automotive history.
The W16 engine is engineering poetry written in German and assembled by people who clearly don’t believe in the word “impossible.” Four banks of four cylinders. Quad turbocharging. A 7-speed dual-clutch that handles all that fury like it’s perfectly normal to manage 1600 horsepower on a Tuesday afternoon. Ettore Bugatti called his cars “works of art that happened to move.” He’d have approved of the 300+. It’s simultaneously the most beautiful and most violent machine you can legally drive on public roads.
Assuming you can find public roads rated for 300mph, which is another conversation entirely.
Whether you view it as an investment, art, or the ultimate expression of automotive excess, the Super Sport 300+ represents everything compelling about what becomes possible when engineering excellence meets unlimited ambition.
Some things are worth preserving. This is definitely one of them.