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Bugging out in Jonesboro
Published: 10/12/2009 10:19 AM
Last Modified: 10/12/2009 10:25 AM


The Bugatti Veyron. The world's fastest car. So what is one doing in Arkansas?

It might come as a surprise to those who know the sort of car I drive and the way I drive it, but one of my favorite TV shows is "Top Gear," the BBC show about three blokes who get to drive and talk about very expensive, very fast cars when they're not engaged in borderline ludicrous experiments and loony races across various countries and continents.

It's wonderfully entertaining, even for those of us who know we will never own one of the dazzling vehicles that Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammon and James May rabbit on about so gushingly – and even if we did own one, we'd never feel comfortable driving as fast as it was meant to be driven.

One particular automobile that gets talked about as much as any on the show is the Bugatti Veyron – hands down one of the more extraordinary examples of automotive engineering ever, and the fastest production car ever made.

This is a car capable of reaching a top speed of 254 miles per hour.

Think about that – 254 miles per hour. To put that in perspective, the Concorde, the plane capable of flying faster than the speed of sound, had an average take-off speed of 225 miles per hour.

As Clarkson said in a "Top Gear" episode in which he drove a Bugatti Veyron from the south of France to England (and in the process beating his two colleagues who tried to cover the same distance via private plane and public transportation), the car literally changes shape as it speeds up in order to stay on the ground.

Not that it would get airborne for long – at top speed, one would drain the car's 26.4 gallon fuel tank in 12 minutes. The tires would start to disintegrate at that speed about 3 minutes later.

All that to say this: One of these cars is for sale. For $1.2 million. In Jonesboro, Arkansas.

My parents used to live in Jonesboro, which is also home to Arkansas State University. It's a very pleasant town, if perhaps a touch squirrelly in the way some of it has been laid out, but every town has some bizarre street configurations.

But you don't think of Jonesboro as a place where someone would have in his or her garage a 254-mph, 1,000-horsepower, $1 million-plus super car.

I suppose that there really are fortunes to be made in rice (which is one of the region's main industries). Or something.

In the meantime, my wife can rest assured that I'm not planning to sneak off to Jonesboro and see if the owner of the Bugatti would be willing to swap this little number for a low-mileage Toyota RAV 4 – after, of course, I clean out the back seat.

However, if the new owner wants to stop by Tulsa and give a fan a ride some afternoon……



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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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