If you had to choose just one car to get a ride around Nürburgring in this year, you could make a very strong argument for the Chiron — Bugatti's absolutely outrageous follow-up to the Veyron. The $2.6 million hypercar is Bugatti's latest, greatest effort to tighten its grip on the "world's fastest production car" title — but that record attempt isn't happening until 2018, it looks like. So in the meantime, a ride around the 'Ring with Bugatti boss Wolfgang Dürheimer in the driver's seat seems like a decent consolation prize.

Car Throttle had the pleasure of riding shotgun in the Chiron — and judging from the facial expressions throughout the lap, the car is every bit as exhilarating as you might expect. Even with mediocre in-car audio, you can almost feel the 1,500-horsepower, quad-turbo W-16 engine at full tilt. Oh, and did we mention that it seems to be extremely fast? Dürheimer's carbon fiber, Bugatti-branded helmet might even add a few miles per hour.

Can't wait for 2018.

Correction: Wolfgang Dürheimer is the president of Bugatti; the article headline originally referred to him as the CEO. We apologize for the error.