Jeremy Clarkson described the Bugatti Veyron as the 21st Century’s Concorde moment. And the comparison absolutely tallies. Here was a car that took the rulebook and shredded it to pieces. It had more cylinders, more power, more torque and covered more ground than anything else. And it was built to a standard of quality most supercar manufacturers could only dream about.

As though Bugatti had anything further to prove, five years after it introduced the Veyron and with production nearing an end, it took the game on one step further and introduced the Super Sport. The Super Sport took everything that was great about the ‘garden-variety’ Veyron and amplified it. The goliath W16 was massaged to produce 1,183bhp, almost 100bhp more. And torque was raised by an even greater 200 lb-ft – that’s an earth-shattering 1,106 lb-ft in total.

In order to handle the extra power, the carbon-fibre monocoque was made 10 percent stiffer – and, miraculously, 25kg lighter. And in a bid to cheat the wind, the carbon-fibre body was made slipperier. The ‘standard’ Veyron’s protruding snorkel intakes were replaced by flat NACA ducts, enabling the roofline to be essentially flattened, dramatically increasing the drag coefficient.

To seal its place in the annals of automotive history, Bugatti took the Super Sport to Ehra-Lessien in Germany to determine just how fast its latest creation could go. The dizzying headline figures were as follows:  0–60mph in 2.5sec, 0–125mph in 6.7sec (0.6sec quicker than the ‘standard’ Veyron) and 0–186mph in 14.6 seconds (down from 16.7sec). Bugatti’s party trick was the top speed achieved: 268mph, a new production land-speed record.

Though an initial run of 30 cars was planned, overwhelming demand led Bugatti to build 48 Super Sports in total. To mark its record-breaking top speed feat, the first five cars were born as World Record Edition (WRE) Veyron Super Sports and configured in the same black-and-orange specification as the Ehra-Lessien car.