Bugatti Veyron rear-wheel drive conversion

Bugatti engineers, look away now – the crew at Royalty Exotic Cars is back.

These are the folks that attempted to DIY service a Bugatti Veyron rather than pay the $25,000 bill. With the car – a rare Mansory Vivere edition – out of warranty for some time, REC has started doing all the maintenance itself, documenting the process along the way.

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Owner of REC, Houston Crosta, has some crazy ideas. His latest was: “What if we made the Veyron rear-wheel drive?” Having completed the conversion on a previous Lamborghini Gallardo, Crosta’s logic – if you could call it that – is that it would make the car lighter and also more exciting, akin to a McLaren 720S.

To achieve this, Crosta and his sidekick Jesse Tang disassemble the Veyron’s front-drive mechanism, including pull out the axles and removing the front differential. Incredibly, the car not only appears to work without hiccup, it apparently doesn’t even throw any fault codes.

It also vastly improves the turning circle and lightens the steering, which is unsurprising given the lock will no longer the restricted by the drive shafts and the front wheels are no longer driven.

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After a short shakedown, Crosta tests the Veyron RWD in a time-honoured Aussie tradition – donuts. Lots and lots of donuts. As you’d expect, it proves rather adept, with 736kW/1250Nm from its 8.0-litre quad-turbo W16 fed through just the rear tyres.

So adept, Crosta burns through a brand new set of 365mm rear tyres in moments, not good when they are $10,000 each. We’re not sure Bugatti will be too impressed, but then again the company has always been about pushing the limits.

The Veyron was often criticised for its somewhat inert handling, so pulling the front driveshafts out is one way to fix that.

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