What’s in a name?
WHISPER IT, BUT when the Bugatti Veyron steamrollered its way into the spotlight in 2005 I didn’t really approve. I thought that Ferdinand Piëch had blundered big-time, applying the wrong one of the many brands at his fingertips to this blunderbuss of a car.
Was this behemoth really a Bugatti? Not to me; conceptually, this modern-day version of the fastest lorry in the world should have had Bentley written all over it. Bugatti, after all, should be all about words such as lithe, agile and nimble, while Bentley is your go-to marque for brute force and pummelling power defeating weight. And what says power better than an 8.0-litre quad-turbo W16 punching out a thousand horsepower to shift two tonnes from standstill to a top speed of 253mph?
I’ve grown up a little since then, of course, and am a little less strident and more accommodating in my views about, well, everything. I am also a lot more knowledgeable about Bugatti and the company’s entire canon rather than just its racing stock, even if Bugatti
did lead you down that alley by naming it after Type 37 and T51 pilot Pierre Veyron.
You could argue that the Veyron was akin to the 12.7-litre Royale (Type 41), which tipped the scales at over three tonnes, but the 57 series is where the origins of this car lie for me. Not the Atalante, Aerolithe, Atlantic or even the more ‘normal’ blown C (for compresseur) versions, but in the racer known fondly as the
Tank, a supercharged version of which was piloted to victory at Le Mans in 1939 by soonto-be war hero J-P Wimille and a fellow future resistance fighter, one Pierre Veyron. There was method in the madness, after all – or is it just me that sees the visual resemblance?
The Veyrons and Chirons also suffered an image problem because, for many enthusiasts, they became the wrong sort of status symbol for the wrong sort of people. Personally, I have never really subscribed to that sort of car snobbery, but there is no doubt that their reputation and appeal were tarnished by their gangsta connections. That seems to have passed now, of course, and dissipated in much the same way as my own prejudices about the cars not neatly fitting into my own perceptions. It is a grand irony that they are now finally being appreciated as they deserve to be at the precise point at which we are losing them… and what could be more Bugatti than that?