Bugatti’s Chiron came second in the renewed automaker’s recent evolution of regular production models, following the Veyron. Although a series of limited-edition or one-off models have joined the lineup in the past few years — the list includes the Bolide, the Centodieci and the Divo — the Chiron has lingered on in Sport, Pur Sport and 1,600-horsepower Super Sport 300+ versions, the last of which held the fastest production car record back in 2019 when its speedometer tickled 305 MPH.

The Super Sport version of the Chiron is back for the 2022 model year; its appearance is both a reminder of the halcyon days of 2019, and a means of keeping the variant alive, and that’s just fine. The Chiron is one of the prettiest exotics to appear this century. Bugatti made it more consumer-friendly than the heavyweight Super Sport 300+, and will limit production to that number of examples.

Bugatti tinkered with its now-classic W16 engine, getting 1577 horsepower out of it; the new Super Sport may not be capable of 300+ MPH, but it can hit 273 before the limiter makes its presence known, so there’s plenty of potential here for racetrack envelope-pushers, suicidal amateurs with heavy feet, and just plain folks who fancy explaining themselves to gun-toting civil servants and sentence-delivering professionals who are not writers. Speed is not the main focus, however; the car was designed to be eminently drivable and enjoyable, the ultimate expression of luxury and comfort. Bugatti bills the entry as the ultimate Grand Tourisme. As such, the Super Sport triumphs as the creme de la creme of the Grand Tourer species.

The Chiron Super Sport isn’t nearly as expensive as the $12 million La Voiture Noire — a niftily mythological Bugatti if ever there was, and more interesting than the all-business Bolide — but its $3.9 million price tag makes it fully esoteric.