In what might be the most "rich people problems" story of the decade, Bugatti recently held a track day at Circuit Paul Ricard for owners of their ludicrous $4.3 million Bolide hypercar. But here's the bit that made me spit out my tea: before they were allowed to drive their own cars, Bugatti made them practice in a Porsche 911 GT3 RS. That's right. A Porsche 911 GT3 RS - a car that can lap the Nürburgring in under seven minutes, has 518 horsepower, active aerodynamics, and costs a quarter of a million dollars - was deemed the "easy mode" trainer car for the day. To put this in perspective, it's like saying, "Before we let you fly this fighter jet, why don't you practice with this merely supersonic civilian aircraft?" It's utterly, gloriously absurd. The Bolide, for those who haven't been keeping up with their hypercar spreadsheets, is Bugatti's track-only masterpiece of excess. It has a quad-turbocharged 8.0-liter W16 engine producing 1,578 horsepower - roughly the same as a small nuclear power station. It weighs just 1,450 kg, giving it a power-to-weight ratio that would make a Saturn V rocket blush. And it has a top speed of 311 mph, which is faster than many small aircraft. The event at Paul Ricard was the first official track outing for Bolide owners, though one impatient American named Bret Curtis had already jumped the queue by taking his to Circuit of the Americas a few months earlier. But he's apparently a racing driver who's competed at Le Mans, so he presumably didn't need the automotive equivalent of water wings that Bugatti provided for the others. The training program was actually quite comprehensive. Each Bolide owner was assigned a dedicated instructor for the morning session in the GT3 RS, where they learned the racing line and how not to bin a multi-million dollar car into the barriers. They even had professional racing drivers Andy Wallace and Bruno Spengler on hand - men who have collectively won more races than most people have had hot dinners. Only after lunch, when the owners had proven they weren't complete liabilities, were they allowed to unleash their own Bolides on the track. And even then, only four cars were allowed out at once, presumably to minimize the chance of the world's most expensive demolition derby breaking out. What's particularly fascinating is the different specifications these cars had. One was finished in "Black Carbon and Ruby" with gold wheels, which sounds like the name of a particularly pretentious cocktail. Another mixed "Black Carbon and Blue Carbon," which is a bit like ordering a flat white with an extra shot of flat white. A third was simply "Nocturne," which I think is French for "really, really black." And the fourth combined "Black Carbon and Argent," because when you've spent $4.3 million on a car, you might as well spend another small fortune making it look different from the other three identical ones. Bugatti, of course, didn't reveal who these owners were or how fast they went around the track. This is probably for the best, as I imagine there's nothing more ego-bruising for the super-rich than discovering that despite owning one of the world's fastest cars, they're still several seconds per lap slower than the professional test driver. The whole event raises an interesting philosophical question: at what point does a car become too fast for its owner? The Bolide is so extreme that even Bugatti - a company not known for restraint - felt the need to ease its customers into the experience with something less intimidating. It's like they're admitting, "We've built something so insane that you need a supercar as training wheels." And there's something oddly humbling about that. No matter how much money you have, no matter how many hypercars you own, physics doesn't care. A 1,578 horsepower car driven poorly will crash just as spectacularly as a 100 horsepower one. Perhaps more so. So next time you feel inadequate because your car doesn't have a W16 engine or can't reach 300 mph, remember this: somewhere out there is a Bugatti Bolide owner who had to be given lessons in a "mere" Porsche 911 GT3 RS because their own car was deemed too terrifying for them to handle right away. And if that's not the definition of a first-world problem, I don't know what is.
