The world's fastest car? This time I'm really struggling to care

Its Bugatti-busting stunt feels a little artless. My hunch is that conjuring 1578bhp from a quad-turbo W16 and using it to propel a car 300mph while retaining valet-friendly manners is harder than doing the same with four electric motors and twice the power output. Both cars have frightening levels of brute force, of course, but the Yangwang is Nikolai Valuev to the Chiron’s Lennox Lewis. 

All of which is horribly unfair of me. Surely the casualness of Yangwang’s achievement makes it more impressive, not less? Given the preposterous U8 can float like a boat in a  flood, there’s also a counterargument to be made that Yangwang is doing a host of crazy stuff simply because it can is very cool. A Chinese Rinspeed. 

In truth, part of my antipathy stems from the fact these speeds are now unrelatable data points. In the past, if you had ever been 120mph, with great concentration you could wrap your mind around what 230mph in a McLaren F1 might be like. It was the same for the Veyron’s 254mph – for me, peak ‘good God that is wild’. 

The genius of the Veyron was that it had an incongruously opulent cabin. In a strange way, this normalised a highly abnormal car. And it had the mythology. At V-max its Michelins would delaminate after 12 minutes, but that was okay because the fuel tank emptied after eight. Every few tyre changes, Bugatti would impose a €50k wheel change, because huge speeds might have compromised the molecular structure of the metal. It was precarious stuff with real-world implications. Some of it was even true. 

Can we agree 300mph feels meaningless in a way 200mph doesn’t? The lesser figure remains a potent sales pitch: in the right conditions, a civilian can hit speeds usually reserved for Le Mans prototypes. The same just about applies to 250mph, and I say this as someone who has driven at 220mph on the road.  Unhinged as it sounds, I can imagine maxing out a Veyron, having ritually muted the radio for a moment. I can’t imagine even wanting to hit 300mph in anything other than racing overalls and in a controlled space. This kills the romance, like observing a silverback in the zoo, not the jungle. 

And now, sorry folks, the big cliché. Look, I’m sure the U9X gets the adrenal gland pumping. But colossal speeds courtesy of a great engine give a unique kind of endorphin rush that emotionally bonds you to the machine. That suspended wail as the oncoming air becomes treacle and as the revs grapple upwards? The car is animalistic, head down, fists clenched. It’s massively evocative.