Bugatti’s other boats
Around 1925, Ettore Bugatti came up with a proposal for an extraordinary eightpassenger, wave-piercing powerboat (above middle) that could cross the Atlantic in two days. With a submarine-like conning tower, the semi-submersible was to be propelled by six 15-litre, 8-cylinder engines. Although that project never left the drawing board, he had equally radical thoughts about sail.
As you could imagine, when Bugatti commissioned what would be his last sailing yacht from renowned American naval architect John G Alden (1884-1962), ‘le patron’ was not merely a customer, but intimately involved with the project, specifying and designing key features such as anchors, windlasses and bilge pumps, and filing a flurry of patents, as well as using it as a testbed for his ideas.
In 1940, shortly after its launch, the unfinished twin-engined twin-screw 90ft (27.4m) ketch Barbara III (above left) was towed to England for safekeeping, returning after the war. An extraordinary post-war picture taken at Bugatti’s Maisons-Laffitte yard shows the teak-hulled Barbara III with an A-frame of two wire trusses supporting the mast. A contemporary 1948 article – published just after Bugatti’s death – explains that these had been part of Bugatti’s experiments with an electric rotating mast-furling system. Now more conventionally rigged, Orphee III is the largest Alden-designed yacht surviving.
There were two earlier Barbaras: Barbara I was a curious 21ft 4in (6.5m) centre-cockpit motor boat built in 1931; the later Barbara II (above right) was also an oddity, a motorised day boat with large, open cockpit, cabin forward and a mast close to the bow.
By way of extreme contrast was a series of Bugatti-engined hydroplanes all named Niniette, the nickname of his daughter Lydia. In 1933, Niniette III (left) powered by a supercharged 1,493cc Bugatti straight-eight, raised the 1.5-litre World Water Speed record to 57.9mph (93.3kmh) on Lake Como. This only known surviving Niniette hydroplane has just emerged from a five-year restoration. Her owner is ‘Greg from New York,’ the gentleman who commissioned Jack Livesey to build the new You-Yous.