You see there was a problem. The car's design had been shown and signed off by would be purchasers, so the car's looks and shape had to remain fairly close to the concept. Purchasers had also been told that the car would be the fastest, most powerful car ever created. Unfortunately for the Veyron team, these two factors struggled to sit nicely together, and the resulting Veyron is a testament to all of the team involved in making it work.

Late in 2001 the Veyron was promoted from concept to advanced concept, and VAG announced that the car would go on sale in 2003. However, all did not go well.

Reliability and top speed stability were causing issues, so much in fact that one of the prototype cars was destroyed in a high speed accident, and another spun out and crashed at an event at Laguna Seca during a public demonstration.

This rather public demonstration of the handling issues slowed the development process down. Not only was the construction of more prototypes needed, but the motoring press grabbed hold of the Veyron's issues and it started to become a running joke that the car would never make it to market.

Bernd Pischetsrieder took over the running of VAG, and it was thought that he would kill the Veyron project. It had already developed new technologies that could be used in the rest of the VAG range of cars, and many believed that Bernd would drop the project while VAG could still save face. He did something that any other engineer junkie would have: he sent the car back to the drawing board for major overhauls in key areas.

There is a much used quote from Gordon Murray, who designed the McLaren F1. It appeared in Evo magazine - "The most pointless exercise on the planet has got to be this four-wheel-drive 1000 horsepower Bugatti. I think it’s incredibly childish this thing people have about just one element — top speed or standing kilometre or 0-60. It’s about as narrow minded as you can get as a car designer to pick on one element. It’s like saying we’re going to beat the original Mini because we’re going to make a car 10 mph faster on its top speed—but it's two foot longer and 200 kilos heavier. That’s not car designing — that just reeks of a company who are paranoid."

There were the handling issues that had to be solved. There were also braking issues; testing had shown that the car's weight was an issue at 1890kg. The biggest problem though seemed to be cooling. The massive 8ltr engine with 16 cylinders, 64 valves and 4 turbo chargers - the engine is termed a W16, and is best thought of as two narrow opposing V8 engines - generated a massive amount of heat. It was proving difficult for the teams involved to keep the car cool enough to be reliable.