“I never want to get out again.” – Around Bilster Berg with Sven Bohnhorst.
The rear end breaks out slightly into a controlled drift, the tires start to squeal. Sven Bohnhorst reacts with lightning speed, countersteers briefly and keeps his foot on the accelerator. Drifting with a smile on his face.
The engineer works at Bugatti as a chassis setup engineer and is testing the new Chiron Pur Sport1 at the limits of its handling dynamics. The aim is to improve the vehicle even further and to tune the chassis, steering and dampers even more precisely. His starting point is in the area of fine nuances and minute details. These are almost imperceptible individually, but will later convey the complete picture of a perfect driving experience to customers. After weeks of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he and his colleagues were finally able to return to testing the new Chiron Pur Sport on a race track at the beginning of May.
“The track at Bilster Berg with its very own topographic relief is challenging and demands a high level of concentration. It’s a technical circuit with varying radii, fast and slow sectors and severe elevation changes. A genuine challenge for us chassis developers,” explains Sven Bohnhorst. The track goes up and down, making the Chiron Pur Sport lighter in some places, and pressing it down into the dips with significant spring compression. These are ideal conditions for fine-tuning the running gear and safety systems. This is where engineers can test and take the Chiron Pur Sport to its limits. Particularly suitable for this purpose: the new ESC Sport+ driving mode. Experienced drivers can activate this mode when driving on race tracks in the Chiron Pur Sport. For this first time, this mode allows larger drift angle with much easier controlled drifting – the driver is able to stay on the throttle much longer to control the rear end before the ESC kicks in. This turns the Chiron Pur Sport into an extreme Chiron1 derivative at the other end of the performance spectrum, a model with very active driving characteristics that is made for cornering. A model that pushes the limits even further out, but where handling remains very easy to control and predict. Targeted and precise.
