All engines make some kind of noise. Mostly though they only make one or two which, if you’re lucky, are pleasant. In the Mistral’s case I think I counted at least six distinctly different sounds.
And if you time it just right, or get your throttle position just-so, you can actually pick and choose the ones you want to hear.
You can lightly accelerate to get a significant turbo whistle; at around 2000rpm on a steady throttle there’s a really pleasing offbeat induction gurgle; and on lift- off from heavy acceleration there are some very amusing whooshes, like you’ve just catastrophically punctured a bouncy castle.
But the most spectacular thing happens when all of these accelerative sounds are playing together – a W16 tutti, if you will – as you accelerate from 3000rpm and the pathways to the second pair of this engine’s four turbochargers are finally allowed to crack open (they remain off limits at lower revs in order to reduce turbo lag).
Do you see those two inlets, above and behind the driver’s and passenger’s heads? Those are the engine’s air intakes. This 8.0-litre, 1578bhp engine ingests so much air on full throttle that you can feel the pressure change in your ears.
It’s not loud in the wailing sense; it just feels whoppingly powerful. Sure, you’re aware that fuel is being burnt behind you. But you’re more aware of the amount of the Earth’s atmosphere the engine is wolfing down around your head as the car sucks in whatever is closest to it.
Apparently the roof – an emergency fabric job that they don’t recommend for use above 100mph – sits above these air inlets. With it in place, I wouldn’t be surprised if the W16 ingested receipts and jelly babies from the cabin as it gulped air on full throttle.
The Mistral, having no roof, won’t do the 300mph-plus of the Super Sport, and given that Bugatti is now part of Bugatti Rimac, it no longer has access to VW’s Ehra-Lessien for its high-speed runs either – which is a bit confusing given that Porsche’s stake in Bugatti’s ownership structure still seems relatively Volkswagen-adjacent. But at Papenburg test track last year Bugatti’s long-time test driver and Le Mans winner Andy Wallace took a Mistral to 282mph, as fast as an open-topped production car has gone.
