We’ve seen plenty of races that pitted the Bugatti Veyron, in its various iterations, against uber-fast machines with much less blue blood. However, while most of these took place on airport runways, today we want to show you what happens when the battlefield is a high speed oval track.
The track in question is the Papenburg Oval in Germany, which is one of the industry’s leading test tracks. From mainstream cars to hypercars, the 75 km (121 miles) of asphalt here have seen them all since 1998 when the facility was inaugurated.
The track has hosted a duel between a Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse and the speeding world’s favorite underdog, a pumped-up Nissan GT-R. This comes courtesy of GTBoard.
The Godzilla in question was tuned by US-based AMS Performance, using the Alpha 12 package. This means the Nissan had 1,200 hp, just like they Bugatti, while also featuring a longer sixth gear.
The Veyron and the GT-R have one special thing in common
But we’re not here to discuss the specs of these machines. You can find that in the video and it’s all too easy to see how the numbers set these cars apart. Instead, we want to discuss what these two performance icons have in common.
Both are at the end of their life cycle, with the Veyron having already exited the stage and its Chiron successor approaching fast. The point is that both have come extremely far from their starting point.
When the VW Group released the original Veyron, it was hard to imagine a world where a “warmly-tuned” Nissan GT-R would be able to fight it. Why do we call a GT-R with double the factory output “warmly-tuned”?
Well, the GT-R has its own special story. At first, Nissan thought it could prevent tuners from around the world from touching their supercar. Nowadays, AMS delivers GT-Rs with 2,000 hp to customers, while its own Alpha Omega development car produces even more than that.
The race itself
We have to explain this is far from the perfect race many have expected it to be. First of all, the two decided to skip the standing start, which would’ve been a delicious moment.
More importantly, you’ll notice the GT-R lets go soon after it passes the Veyron. Yes, the US-tuned JDM machine is faster than Ferdinand Piech’s hypercar ambition, but things would be entirely different if the two raced all the way. The GT-R experienced issues with its hood, which caused it to refrain from hitting its top speed.
Then again, it’s not every day that you get to see such an extreme race. So you might as well skip to the one-minute mark (going past the cheesy intro) and enjoy five minutes of pure speed filmed in 4K resolution.
In his quest to bring you the most impressive automotive creations, Andrei relies on learning as a superpower. There's quite a bit of room in the garage that is this aficionado's heart, so factory-condition classics and widebody contraptions with turbos poking through the hood can peacefully coexist. Full profile
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