The Bugatti Veyron, once the world's fastest car, remains popular among the world's highest grossing celebrities. Jay-Z has one, and so do Tom Cruise, Chris Brown, and Xzibit, to name but a few. Tracy Morgan happily added himself to the list of Veyron owners just the other day but, 15 minutes into his Veyron experience, the pearl Grand Sport he'd just taken delivery of got sideswiped by a CR-V. The car lost $200,000 off its value that very second and Morgan lost his calm. And you thought your day was bad!
Remember when you last bought a new car last time? Not necessarily a brand new car, but one that was new for you and you were just ready to be its new custodian. Remember how you tentatively drove it home? And how you tried not to get the interior dirtied up and how you parked it away from everybody else so that there's no danger of any oblivious simpleton with a rust bucket to park near you and carelessly scratch your car when opening his door as wide as it goes. Well, you probably never bought a Bugatti Veyron so imagine how Morgan must've felt when an SUV driver who was, apparently, on her phone, attempted to make a right turn from the left lane, completely missing the low-slung Veyron right next to it. You can't? Well, I can't either, and maybe that's not a bad thing after all.
Who would have thought that damaging a Veyron won't increase its resale value?
I know you'll be looking now at stills of the accident and the damaged Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport and think to yourself, 'ah, it'll buff right out!' This may very much be the case but, remember, this isn't a run of the mill Volkswagen Golf or some mid-'00s Jetta that you could care less about, this is still one of the most expensive modern cars you can buy and one of the fastest, too. It's also one of the most expensive to maintain and, as such, one of the most expensive to repair, so it's not a surprise to see that Tracy Morgan lost his cool and forgot for a minute that he's a comedian and didn't take things lightly.
First off, though, if you aren't interested in showbiz, you may be wondering who Tracy Morgan is, to begin with. Well, he's a 50-year-old American actor, voice actor, and comedian best known as a cast member on the popular satire and comedy show 'Saturday Night Live' between 1996 and 2003 and, as well, on the satirical sitcom '30 Rock'. For his part in 30 Rock, Morgan was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2009, but he's also starred in some rather successful motion pictures on the big screen. He appeared alongside Bruce Willis in 2010's 'Copout' and also voiced Mr. Gristle in the 2014 animation film 'The Boxtrolls.' His 25-year-plus career in the limelight afforded him the luxury of driving about in some pretty lavish cars as he owns, among others, an Azzuro Thetis Blu Lamborghini Aventador Roadster.
Madulid claims she's not at fault for the otherwise minor fender-bender. "We are both turning right — people are still crossing,” she said. “So what happened is we’re both turning right. But I know he hit me because I was already . I was there, he was the one who hit me!" Madulid now fears that her insurance will go up after being involved in a crash with a car that reportedly cost Morgan some $2 million to purchase.
Witnesses said they heard the actor shouting that he'd just bought the car, which is why he got aggravated. "He just bought it, dude, and it’s pretty scraped up. It still had a dealer tag," a witness said. Morgan reportedly proceeded to shout at Madulid to get out of the car, despite the fact that the incident only resulted in cosmetic damage to both vehicles and nobody was injured. Minutes after the accident, Morgan phoned back to the dealership. "When I got the phone call, I said, ‘That’s Tracy’s car?’ I couldn’t believe it. That was its maiden voyage,” said Frank Pica, a sales consultant at the dealership." As you'd expect, while all this was going on, a crowd of onlookers with their phones at the ready started gathering around the stranded Bugatti which made the actor "anxious" before a white Lamborghini Urus arrived at the scene.
Morgan, though, must've felt relieved after the incident since five years ago he was involved in a much heavier collision that almost cost his life. The actor was traveling in a Mercedes-Benz MPV when the vehicle was rammed from behind by a Walmart truck whose driver had fallen asleep at the wheel. While Morgan and most of the members of his entourage escaped with their lives, comedian James MacNair, known professionally as Jimmy Mack, was fatally injured in the crash.
As you'd expect, Morgan is one of many celebrities to have damaged their supercars, although his incident is minor in comparison to others. British actor Rowan Atkinson, known for playing the role of 'Mr. Bean', crashed his McLaren F1 not once but twice and let us not forget the bizarre crash involving Eddie Griffin and an (at the time) $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo owned by a man from Texas who promptly repaired the car and put it up for sale.
The Blast also reported that, if the Honda driver is found to be responsible for the collision, "her insurance will cover a portion of the damage, but the value of the car is way outside of the limits of most commercial insurance plans. Even if Morgan wants to go through his own insurance, sources in the industry tell us he will get a lot of pushback because of the high price," the article noted. On top of that, getting the car to look pristine again will probably cost Morgan in excess of $50,000 or about $10,000 more than the base price of a 2019 Mercedes-Benz C Class or about $2,000 more than the MSRP of a 2019 Porsche Macan with no options on it.
This will come as no surprise to you since the maintenance costs of a Bugatti Veyron have been the subject of many stories in the past few years and this, obviously, isn't a usual job like an oil change or swapping of filters of any kind. If you've missed those stories, I'm going to break it down for you here in short.
For starters, if you have the money to buy a Veyron (doesn't matter which one, there are countless versions out there, some rarer than others but all super-expensive) you're only touching the tip of the iceberg really, because keeping it on the road is what's going to painfully add up throughout the years of ownership. Road & Track wrote in a December 2018 piece that, thanks to a recently uncovered EPA certification application, we now know how much certain Veyron parts cost (before adding the price of all the man-hours needed to change them). Let's take the intake manifold, for instance. On a Ford Focus, changing it out completely (which is something you rarely need to do, you'd usually only bother with the gasket) would probably cost you somewhere in the region of $150 (just the parts, labor adds roughly $300). Now, in case of the Bugatti, the manifold comes in three separate elements, "with the upper portions for each bank coming in at $4,000 apiece, while the lower intake manifold costs $2,000." Add to that as much as $2,000 for the labor. An intake manifold for a Huracan costs "just $1,200 in comparison.
Moving on, replacing each turbocharger costs $6,400 and that's before adding the $9,000 labor bill for a pair of turbos (the Veyron has four of them in total). The air coolers for the turbos each cost $9,000, and labor comes in at $2,000 per cooler. Road & Track also lists the exhaust manifolds that are $2,000 per side which may not seem like much until you find out that to get the old exhaust manifolds out and put the new one in is pretty hard since you'll have to pay nearly $22,000 in labor per unit.
But don't despair! There are cheaper bits on the Veyron too. The car is, at the end of the day, a product of the VAG Group and, mercifully, not everything is bespoke for it as some parts can be found on other, far lesser, cars. The prime example, in my view, is the camshaft position sensor that is shared with the fourth-generation Jetta and Golf. There are four of these and each cost just $9. Also, the throttle body costs just $300 while the mass air flow sensor, shared with the W-12-engined Phaeton, is a mere $250.
After all is said and done, though, you must take into account that, at the time of its release, there was no other roofless car that could go as fast as the Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport and you can't have that for cheap. Unveiled at the 2008 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, the Grand Sport was, effectively, the Targa version of the Veyron since you still had those humps behind your head that gave way to two scoops that fed air into the massive 16-cylinder engine. That engine was identical to what could be found in a fixed-head Veyron, namely the 8.0-liter, quad-turbocharged, 64-valve, W-16 unit punching out 987 horsepower and 922 pound-feet of torque. All that oomph is sent to all four wheels via a dual-clutch, direct-shift, computer-controlled, seven-speed automatic transmission that propelled the 4,387-pound car from naught to 62 mph in 2.46 seconds.
The top speed of the Grand Sport - of which just 150 units were ever made - with the fixed soft top in place (there's a secondary soft top in the form of an oversized umbrella that's more for style than go) is the same as in the case of the Veyron Coupe, 213 mph when not in Top Speed Mode. I
To put it into perspective, a Porsche 918 Sypder won't go over 214 mph while a Lamborghini SV Roadster can't surpass 217 mph with the top down. The Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport is faster than the ultra-exclusive Mercedes-McLaren SLR Stirling Moss Edition that is said to reach 220 mph. Sure, you can go faster with a fixed roof over your head, but you'd have to go for a Grand Sport Vitesse to go slightly faster (or a Hennesey Venom).
Further reading
Read our full review on the 2012 Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse.
Read our full review on the 2009-2012 Bugatti 16.4 Veyron Grand Sport