RACING LEGENDS
Bugatti Type 35
If the little T35 had never won a thing, it would still stand as one of the most beautiful motor cars ever built, even if prewar vintage cars aren’t your thing. But the fact is, it was almost comically successful in the Roaring Twenties, the decade in which GP racers really were heroes.
Ettore Bugatti turned his natural talent to the fast-evolving machine age, and its most thrilling manifestation: the racing car. By 1921, he had earned enough success with his Brescia competition model to establish the company as a full-blown constructor. The Type 35 duly arrived in 1924: lithe, purposeful and of course notable for its distinctive horseshoe-arched radiator.
The T35 debuted in August 1924 at the Grand Prix de L’ACF in Lyon, initially using a 2.0-litre straight-eight engine, with three valves per cylinder in a single overhead cam. The chassis was suspended on leaf springs at the front, with a live axle and quarter elliptics at the rear. The car also featured a unique hollow axle, which the springs were passed through, not simply bolted onto.
Despite running fve cars, seventh was the best the T35 could manage frst time out, a bad start for a car that could later legitimately claim to be the most storied and successful racing car of all time. Indeed, before winning the Grand Prix World Championship in 1926, the T35 racked up hundreds of race victories. Interestingly, Bugatti himself disliked forced induction (one wonders what he would have made of the Chiron), but the addition of a Roots supercharger in 1925 only increased its competitiveness. Alongside its numerous GP wins, the T35 also dominated the Targa Florio, winning every year from 1925 through to 1929.
Louis Chiron was perhaps the best known of all T35 pilots, winning the 1928 Italian and Spanish GPs in the more powerful Type 37A, and the 1929 German and Spanish GPs in the Type 35C.
The Type 35 is also remembered as the car in which Hellé Nice – known as the Bugatti Queen – competed squarely with some of the greatest drivers of all time. She became the third owner of chassis 4863, taking delivery in March 1930. Between 1931 and 1936, she raced in most of the principal GPs. She was left in a coma following a tragic crash at the 1936 São Paulo GP.
Her achievements are sullied by the fact that Chiron accused her in 1949 of being a Nazi collaborator, a claim rebutted by historians. Whatever the truth, the Bugatti Type 35 is the car that united the talents of many in a crucially important formative period of motorsport history.