Super-Secret Volkswagen Test Track
Wednesday, 21st March 2007 by Alex Turnbull
The BBC's Top Gear program recently took the Bugatti Veyron for a quick test drive -- a very quick test drive1. James May was asked to test the car's top speed, and there was apparently only one place in the world it could be done -- Volkswagen's super-secret test facility in Germany, Ehra-Lessien.
Why? Because Ehra-Lessien has an unbroken straight 9 kilometres in length, which you can see running along the top of our thumbnails. It's so long, that if you stood on one side of the straight, you wouldn't be able to see the other end due to the curvature of the Earth. Seriously, this straight is enormous. One or two thumbnails just couldn't do it justice, so we'll do it in two parts. Here's the northern end...
...and then we have to skip a couple of thumbnails before we get to the southern end!
There's several cars visible on the straight, including one that seems to be going really very fast.
There's also a small blob -- which is either some kind of bug on the image, or a very strange new kind of concept-tractor.
Anyway, while May couldn't get the Veyron up to its theoretical top speed, he did manage to equal the fastest speed of any production road car, reaching an almost incomprehensible 253 miles, or 407 kilometres per hour2 on this very straight. You can watch the clip on Google Video to really get a feel for how fast that is.
Thanks to Top Gear.
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For those of you may not have heard of Bugatti's supercar, all you need to know is that it's currently the fastest, most powerful, and most expensive street-legal production car in the world, and that it has a theoretical top speed of 257 miles, or 414 kilometres per hour. ↩︎
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That's 113 metres per second! ↩︎
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
Why not use the Bonneville Salt Flats? Isn’t that bigger? Or was it that they needed a Europe Location?
You cant go fast on the salt flats. Its because the salt increases the resistance on the tyres
It’s a british show – so the German location is more suitable. Furthermore Bugatti is a VW brand.
Come on out to New Mexico for your test drives, boys — the freeway’s straight most of the way to Texas, and it’s all downhill. Even the semis easily get up to 130 km/h or more.
Steve: True, true. Although legality might be an issue when doing 250+ mph on a public highway, any public highway. Even I-40, in the middle of nowhere. Those “safety corridors” will get you every time. 🙂
That is a great find! Dugg.
I have visions of all the big cheeses at Volkswagen hurriedly rushing to VW HQ right now for a crisis meeting. “Scheisse! Those bloody Google SightSeeing swines have discovered our secret test track! We must find a new one immediately!” I suppose if they wanted to keep it a secret they perhaps should not have built it so bloomin big!
That track was built waaaay before Google SightSeeing or even Internet were thought of, so VW obviously didn’t consider your “visions” when they decided to make it “so bloomin big”
oddly enough, I can’t think of a VW car fast enough to require such a long straight.
Loz, Bugatti is a VW brand these days.
C’mon, Loz, howabout the Bus? 0-60 in 11 minutes? 😀
Do they have fences around this place? I’m just wondering what would happen if you encountered a deer at 253 mph.
Not just fences, barbed wire and such.
Been there, seen that, got a ride (on the passengers seat, and not in a Veyron).
It is a very strange feeling to see a rather sharp curve coming at you at 200kph – and driving through it without slowing down.
Brady – I don’t think deer generally move that quickly…
The Bugatti Veyron is sex on wheels.
@ Patrick: That’s the best sentence I heard today!
@ cookie monster: that would be “Scheiße! Diese verdammten Google-Sightseeing-Schweine haben unsere geheime Teststrecke entdeckt! Wir müssen sofort eine neue finden!” in German. But don’t mention the war!
By the way, isn’t that the test track you can drive on in the PS2 games Gran Turismo 3 and 4?
@cookie monster & KickerOfAss: LOL! If we had a quotes page, it would definitely feature that one 😀
“Scheiße! Diese verdammten Google-Sightseeing-Schweine haben unsere geheime… [insert previously secret thing here]!!”
I have to agree with Steve there. Plenty of room in Albuquerque to hold it WFO!!!All the way till the cows come home.
>Do they have fences around this place? I’m just wondering what would happen if you encountered a deer at 253 mph.
Quck-minced venison. And a 1 million Euro pile of scrap carbon fibre, decoratively spread across the test site.
I used to work at a similar test track in Arizona – and yes, they do have good fences around to keep out big critters. The fences didn’t keep out the rattlesnakes, scorpions, and tarantulas, but I doubt they have that trouble in Germany.
While I was working there, someone on an off-site test hit a black bear on a mountain road with a test vehicle – the next generation Corvette – and it did total a very expensive test car. The bear was unhurt, apparently.
Otter
This BBC link contains photos of a crashed Veyron – rather expensive insurance job I should think. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/6423241.stm
Thanks for the video link chris, it was AWESOME!!!
oops sorry I meant the Google video mentioned in the beginning is awesome. Sorry chris, I know yours isn’t a video link!!!
I’m in the airline industry and fly to Germany often, I have seen this place from the sky making our approach in Leipzig Germany, which is in the former East Germany, I would love to see it someday, but I hear from locals that it’s pretty secure much like CIA headquarters or NSA facility. I guess you really need to know somebody to get close.
The only reason it’s called top secret is because it used to be in the middle of a no-fly zone during the cold war so no-one knew what it was
well if u think about how much harder it would be to send a million dollar car to the salt flats then to just take it to germany thats why they did it there
I lived 5 km away from the track for 14 years. Everybody knew of it and it’s a nice shortcut – not directly on the track of course, but there is a public road right next to it, which is only known amongst the people living there and as such a bigger secret than this track 😀
I would like to take my car to that track and see how fast mine can go plus, testing out the new fastest production car in the world, the SSC Ultmate Aero TT