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Its 252-mph top speed makes it the fastest production car in the world. With 1,001 horsepower pumping from its W16 engine, it’s also the world’s most powerful production car. And with a price tag of about $1.5 million, it’s the world’s most expensive new car. For the Bugatti Veyron 16.4, everything is a superlative.

The Veyron is named in honor of a French racecar driver who won the 1939 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Bugatti — quite the honor. Although Monsieur Veyron’s namesake arrived in the world for the 2006 model year, as many car enthusiasts know, its gestation was anything but smooth. A couple years after purchasing the rights to the Bugatti marque in 1998, Volkswagen’s then-boss Ferdinand Piëch announced that a road-going sports car, the Veyron, would be in production and ready for sale by 2003. Oh, and of no small matter, it was promised to be the world’s fastest road-going production car ever, topping even the iconic McLaren F1.

As it later turned out, Piëch might have been dreaming a little too big for his lederhosen. The target date came and went with no car. Early Bugatti Veyron prototypes weren’t ready engineering-wise and subsequently suffered a number of embarrassing public delays and gaffes. Only with a major management shuffle at Bugatti and a refocused effort on engineering did the Veyron finally come on-line.

Bugatti has said that it will build just 300 Veyrons. (What it doesn’t say, and is only rumored, is that each one will be a money-loser despite the car’s not-so-insignificant price.) Due to this rarity, the Veyron will be seen by few people and driven by even fewer. For the rest of us, the car of ultimate superlatives lives solely through words, pictures and grainy Internet videos.