BUGATTI’S MISSING LINK

Between Ettore Bugatti’s pre-war jewels and the modern-day hypercar came the EB110

BEING THE FASTEST, most advanced and most expensive production car in the world is nothing new. OK, so the Chiron, at £2.5m and with 1479bhp (it sounds better in metric-speak, at 1500PS), blows the old Veyron into the weeds: 1001bhp. Pah. Or a tiddly 987bhp. But although the company that developed the Veyron to the, shall we say, exacting requirements of one Ferdinand Piëch was new in all but name, it built on history that was much more recent than the folding of the original Automobiles Ettore Bugatti.

That company was founded in 1909 and built such legends as the Type 35 GP car and the Type 41 Royale, but it was dealt a killer blow when Ettore himself departed the world in 1947, and floundered on until it was absorbed (to the value of its aircraft parts) by Hispano-Suiza in 1963.

Yet we’ve missed a link. Between 1963 and the VW Group relaunch in 1998 (the Veyron arrived five years later), Bugatti Automobili surfaced for eight short but magnesium-flare-brilliant years in 1987 under the direction of European Ferrari distributor and Bugatti collector Romano Artioli.

Its genesis sounds like a Hollywood dream sequence. Artioli meets Ferruccio Lamborghini at the Turin motor show in 1986. They chat about creating a hypercar worthy of the hallowed name. Artioli persuades that name from the hands of French aeronautics giant SNECMA then, with Lamborghini off the scene, builds a state-of-the-art factory near Modena and develops the EB110. It’s unveiled in 1991, exactly 110 years since Ettore Bugatti’s birth.

It was styled by Marcello Gandini, of Miura and Countach fame, and engineered by Nicola Materazzi – a name that should be heard rather more than it seems to be, as his roll call includes the Lancia Stratos and Ferraris Testarossa, 288 GTO and F40. His recipe called for a carbonfibre tub, a 553bhp 60-valve V12 with four turbochargers (otherwise unheard of until the Veyron exploded into reality), and four-wheel drive via a six-speed transmission. To find anything remotely as exotic as that, you have to look to Woking and the McLaren F1, which appeared a year later. Until then, this was the world’s fastest production car with a top speed of 213mph. And its midmounted, many-cylindered, four-turbo engine, carbon construction and four-wheel drive will sound familiar to owners of the Veyron and Chiron.

The EB110 is almost as rare as the F1. While the European economy was flatlining, only 102 EB110 GTs and a further 38 SuperSports left Giampaolo Benedini’s architectural masterpiece. Some blamed the styling, which was more Sant’Agata than Alsace (Benedini had even turned his architect hand to the 110’s appearance, when Artioli fell out with Gandini just before launch), but the reality was that there simply weren’t enough sufficiently wealthy people in the world to buy one. And, a year later, 106 of those chose the lighter, purer McLaren instead.