While the fastest street legal cars in the world never get a chance to test their limits, some owners do everything they can to see how fast their monster vehicle can go. We all know the Bugatti Chiron is one of the fastest production cars in the world but we never saw any owner trying its limited top speed of 261 mph. Well, we just saw it happened at the Johnny Bohmer Proving Grounds in Merritt Island, Florida. This is a 2.3-mile straight road, which was once used as a landing strip for space shuttles.
The site occasionally opens for aerodynamic testing allowing around 30 car owners to test the limits of their cars in a safe way.
As you can see in the video the 2018 Bugatti Chiron had no issue hitting 261 mph with its 8.0-liter quad-turbocharged W-16 engine. Of course, with the power of 1,480 horses, it can even go faster than this. The automaker intentionally limited its speed for safety reasons and mentioned they are not satisfied with the tire integrity and their car requires enough land to apply full brakes.
A few months back, Bugatti CEO Stefan Winkelmann said the Chiron can hit 280 mph, which could be adequate to break land speed record of Koenigsegg’s Agera RS (277.9 mph). Nonetheless, recently Winkelmann said that they have no plan to attempt the top speed record. “For me, performance has a lot of facets, and the Chiron besides being a hypercar is a car covering a lot more than other Maybe cars,” he said in an interview.