50 Fun Facts About Bugatti

A drivable full-size Bugatti Chiron replica was built from over a million pieces of which toy?

Lego Technic pieces made up the working 2018 replica, with 2,304 toy motors as its engine. It produced about 5 horsepower, against roughly 1,500 for the real car.

Which animal tops the Bugatti Royale's radiator, cast from a sculpture by Ettore Bugatti's brother?

An elephant tops the Royale's radiator, cast from a work by Ettore's brother, who had died in 1916. He was renowned for his bronzes of wild animals.

Which car group revived Bugatti and made the 1,001-horsepower Veyron its first production model?

Volkswagen set up Bugatti Automobiles in December 1998 and brought the marque home to Molsheim. The Veyron was due in 2003 but took until 2005 to reach production.

Which Formula One driver bought a yellow Bugatti EB 110 in 1994, then crashed it into a truck?

Michael Schumacher crashed the yellow EB 110 into a truck and blamed inadequate brakes. He had the car repaired anyway and kept it until 2003.

Ettore Bugatti founded his car company in 1909 at Molsheim, a town that then belonged to which country?

Germany had held Alsace since 1871, and the region returned to France only in 1919. So the famous French marque was founded by an Italian on what was then foreign soil.

With the Bugatti Royale unsold in the Depression, its spare 12.7-litre engines went on to power what?

Railcars for the French national railway took the unused engines, two or four apiece. They turned the Royale project from an economic failure into a commercial success.

Which British TV show named the Bugatti Veyron its Car of the Decade after driving one at 253 mph?

Top Gear named the Veyron its Car of the Decade for the 2000s. Presenter James May took one to 253 mph and reported that at that speed the engine swallows 45,000 litres of air a minute.

Which fashion designer bought a rare Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic in 1988 and had it restored in black?

Ralph Lauren bought his Atlantic in 1988 and had it restored to 1938 condition, though painted black at his request. Three of the four cars built are known to survive.

The Bugatti Tourbillon, the V16 hybrid that succeeded the Chiron, is named after a part found in what?

Mechanical watches use a tourbillon to improve their accuracy. The car's dials follow the theme: built like a watch movement and made in titanium by a Swiss watchmaker.

The Bugatti Veyron honours Pierre Veyron, a company test driver who co-won which endurance race in 1939?

The 24 Hours of Le Mans fell to Veyron and Jean-Pierre Wimille in a Type 57. It was Bugatti's last great racing win, achieved with just one car and meagre resources.

A Bugatti Type 35 won the very first running of which glamorous street race in 1929?

The Monaco Grand Prix began with a Bugatti win for William Grover-Williams. In World War II he became a British secret agent, running a resistance network near Paris.

Ettore Bugatti's younger brother, a sculptor famed for bronze animals, bore the name of which Dutch painter?

Rembrandt Bugatti spent long hours at the Antwerp Zoo studying exotic animals for his bronzes. His work even featured in the art competition at the 1912 Olympics.

Ettore Bugatti's father Carlo was a celebrated Art Nouveau designer, best known for creating what?

Furniture made Carlo Bugatti's name, and his work triumphed at the Turin decorative art exhibition of 1902. He also designed jewellery, and his own father was an architect and sculptor.

In which Italian city was Ettore Bugatti born, later building his first vehicle there as a teenager?

Milan was home to the artistic Bugatti family and to Prinetti & Stucchi, the tricycle maker where the teenage Ettore built his Type 1 in 1898.

What shape is the signature radiator grille that carries the oval Macaron badge on a Bugatti Chiron?

A horseshoe grille is Bugatti's signature, and the enamel Macaron badge mounted on it dates back to the Type 13 of 1909.

The enamel Macaron badge on a Bugatti's nose spells the name in white on an oval of which colour?

Red forms the background, an idea credited to Ettore Bugatti himself. His initials EB sit above the name, and 60 small dots run around the white border.

Bugatti's Grand Prix cars of the 1920s raced in which colour, the national racing colour of France?

Blue was assigned to France when national racing colours were first handed out in 1900. Yellow went to Belgium that year.

The Bugatti Veyron's engine arranges sixteen cylinders in four banks, a layout named after which letter?

W engines like this one are effectively two narrow-angle eight-cylinder units mated at 90 degrees on one crankshaft. The 8.0-litre Veyron unit adds four turbochargers.

Which tyre maker built the special run-flat tyres designed to survive the Bugatti Veyron's 253 mph top speed?

Michelin made the run-flat tyres specifically for the Veyron's top speed. A set cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the tyres had to be fitted to the wheels in France.

Which feature, now common on road cars, did the Bugatti Type 35 racer famously introduce in 1924?

Alloy wheels were a novelty when the Type 35 appeared, and it is remembered as the first car to use cast ones. It went on to win over 1,000 races.

Bugatti's Type 35 won which Sicilian road race five years running, from 1925 to 1929?

The Targa Florio went to Bugatti every year from 1925 through 1929. At its height the Type 35 was averaging 14 race wins a week.

The Bugatti Type 52 'Baby', a half-scale Type 35 made for children from 1927, was driven by what?

An electric motor drove the Baby, first built for Ettore Bugatti's four-year-old son Roland. About 500 were made, and children of Europe's elite raced them in earnest.

A 1925 Bugatti recovered in 2009 had spent about 75 years at the bottom of which Alpine lake?

Maggiore, on the Swiss-Italian border, gave up the rusted Bugatti in July 2009. A California museum then paid about $350,000 for it at a Paris auction.

Ettore Bugatti reputedly dismissed which British rival's heavy racing cars as the world's fastest lorries?

Bentley focused on durability, the opposite of Ettore Bugatti's obsession with lightness. His own engine blocks were hand-scraped so flat that they needed no gaskets.

The Bugatti Atlantic's raised dorsal seam began on a prototype whose magnesium-alloy panels could not be what?

Welded joints were ruled out by the fire risk, so engineers riveted the panels together on the outside. Production Atlantics used plain aluminium but kept the seam for style.

Jean Bugatti renamed the Type 57 Atlantic in tribute to his friend Jean Mermoz, who was famous as what?

A pioneering aviator, Mermoz was lost when his plane came down in the Atlantic in December 1936. The car had been called the Coupé Aero until then.

Jean Bugatti, heir to the company, died in 1939 when his Type 57 test car swerved to avoid what?

A cyclist was on the road near the factory, and the 30-year-old crashed into a tree avoiding him. Jean had designed the Atlantic, and the company's fortunes declined after his death.

Which nickname stuck to Bugatti's boxy streamlined racing cars, first the 1923 Type 32 and later the Type 57G?

Tank suited the Type 32, whose slab-sided body resembled the battle tanks of its day. The later 57G wore the name with far more success, winning the 1936 French Grand Prix.

Which country's king was promised a Bugatti Royale by Ettore Bugatti in 1928 but was deposed before delivery?

Spain's King Alfonso XIII lost his throne in April 1931 without ever taking delivery. The first Royale to find a paying customer was not handed over until 1932.

The Bugatti EB 110 supercar of the 1990s takes the number in its name from 110 years since what?

Its founder's birth in September 1881 gave the EB 110 its name: Ettore Bugatti's initials plus his 110th birthday. Just 139 were built before the company failed in 1995.

Which designer of the Lamborghini Miura and Countach drew the original wedge shape of the Bugatti EB 110?

Marcello Gandini styled the first prototypes, but Bugatti's president disliked the angular nose. The architect of the company's factory softened the shape before production.

Romano Artioli, who revived Bugatti in 1987, went on to buy which British sports-car maker from General Motors?

Lotus named its Elise after Artioli's granddaughter Elisa. He bought the company in August 1993, then sold a majority stake to Proton in 1996 to cover Bugatti's losses.

Bugatti was folded in 2021 into a joint venture with hypercar maker Rimac, a company from which country?

Croatia is home to Rimac, whose founder Mate Rimac became Bugatti's chief executive in the deal. Car assembly stayed at Molsheim.

Which British firm, famed for Formula One engines, developed the V16 of the Bugatti Tourbillon?

Cosworth built the sixteen-cylinder engine to rev to 9,000 rpm without any turbochargers. Three electric motors lift the car's total output to 1,800 PS.

Which former Formula One driver took a Bugatti Chiron from standstill to 400 km/h and back to zero in 42 seconds?

Juan Pablo Montoya needed 41.96 seconds and about two miles of track for the 2017 record. Reaching 400 km/h took 32.6 seconds; stopping again took under ten.

Which racing driver took a modified Bugatti Chiron to 304 mph in 2019, breaking the 300 mph barrier?

Andy Wallace reached 304.773 mph at the Ehra-Lessien test track. Two decades earlier he had set the McLaren F1's 240 mph record at the same site.

Which part of a Bugatti Veyron snaps to a 55-degree angle within 0.4 seconds under hard high-speed braking?

The rear wing doubles as an airbrake above 124 mph. On its own it adds 0.68 g of deceleration, about the stopping power of an ordinary hatchback.

The oval Macaron badge fitted to a modern Bugatti is handmade from 150 grams of which metal?

Silver, the 970 sterling grade, is stamped under pressures of up to 1,000 tonnes and then enamelled by hand. Bugatti chose the solid badge over a lighter one for its quality.

The Bugatti Model 100, dismantled and hidden on Ettore Bugatti's estate as Paris was about to fall, was what?

A racing aeroplane built for the 1939 Deutsch de la Meurthe Cup, the Model 100 never flew. The restored original is on display at the EAA Aviation Museum.

Ettore Bugatti designed the tiny Bébé, a light car of 1913 built in the thousands by which French manufacturer?

Peugeot built 3,095 of the Bugatti-designed Bébé, its first model to pass 3,000 units. Ettore had first drawn the little car for another firm, Wanderer.

Besides cars, Ettore Bugatti designed which items for a friend who was a professor at a nearby hospital?

Surgical instruments were one of Ettore Bugatti's many sidelines. During World War I he had also designed a 16-cylinder aero engine.

The world's largest Bugatti collection, built by the Schlumpf textile brothers, sits in which city in Alsace?

Mulhouse houses the Schlumpf Collection, including two of the six surviving Royales. Fritz Schlumpf bought 18 of Ettore Bugatti's personal cars in 1963.

Louis Chiron, the racing driver honoured by the Bugatti Chiron, was employed as what after World War I?

Dancer was his trade until a wealthy American friend bought him a second-hand Bugatti in 1923. At 55 he became the oldest driver ever to start a Formula One championship race.

Which engineer behind the Audi Quattro and Porsche 917 later championed the Bugatti Veyron as a chief executive?

Ferdinand Piëch, a grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, pushed the Veyron through although his company lost an estimated $6 million on every one sold.

Ettore Bugatti built his Type 10 prototype, forerunner of the first Bugatti, in which part of his Cologne home?

The basement was his workshop while he was still chief engineer at Deutz. When that contract ended he loaded his family into the little car and drove to Alsace to find a factory.

The original Bugatti company became part of Messier-Bugatti, whose successor grew into the largest maker of what?

Aircraft landing gear and brakes carried the Bugatti name until 2016, when Messier-Bugatti-Dowty was renamed Safran Landing Systems.

Ettore Bugatti's 16-cylinder aero engine of World War I was built under licence by which famous American car name?

Duesenberg built about 40 of the engines in New Jersey as the King-Bugatti. An American colonel had redesigned it for production, much to Ettore Bugatti's irritation.

Romano Artioli built the factory for his 1990s Bugatti revival at Campogalliano, in which Italian province?

Modena, not Alsace, was home to the reborn Bugatti. Its purpose-built plant was inaugurated in 1990 and left unoccupied after the company failed in 1995.

One Bugatti Royale, rescued from a New York scrap yard, was donated in 1957 to which American museum?

The Henry Ford in Dearborn was given the car by a future General Motors executive, who had bought it from the scrap yard for $75 in 1946.

A Bugatti Type 57S Atalante, untouched since 1960, turned up in 2008 in a lock-up garage in which English city?

Newcastle doctor Harold Carr locked the car in a garage in 1960 and left it there. Built for racing driver Earl Howe, it sold in Paris in 2009 for about £3 million.