Ferrari has been the dominant exotic sports car manufacturer since shortly after the Second World War. But I have always felt the Ferrari company might never have gotten its start if not for the troubles at France's Bugatti.
Ettore Bugatti was a self-trained innovator who had a passion for racing and eccentric ideas about how automobiles should be designed. His first great success came in the 1920s with the introduction of the Brescia, a light sporting car, and more importantly the later Type 35 series race cars. The Type 35s came in various models that were both normally aspirated and supercharged and those little blue cars dominated the European racing scene for much of the twenties.
They were immensely popular among the upper classes, who could go into a Bugatti showroom and buy a Type 35 exactly the same as the cars that were winning at Grand Prix. Many drove the cars on the road during the week and at Grand Prix events on the weekends.
Ettore's success at sculpting Pur Sang (pure-blood) automobiles for the upper classes was so impressive that even today modern financiers and manufacturers try to bask in his reflected glory. The first attempt to recreate the Bugatti supercars, the EB 110 and 112 in the 1990s, was by an European financier who bought the rights to the Bugatti name. That collapsed in a financial morass.
Now Volkswagen is trying to capitalize on the name with new Veyron, a car that to date is proving anything but a Pur Sang car.
(Ettore must be rolling in his grave at the thought of a German company using his name. He locked horns with German cars on all the race courses of Europe throughout the 1930s; his emnity even extended to designing a high-performance fighter aircraft for the French when he saw the aircraft being developed by the Luftwaffe.)
The success of the Type 35 started a flood of radical high-performance cars pouring from the gates of the Bugatti factory in Molsheim. A supercharged four-seat variant, the T-43, was built a little longer and wider to better fit the company's more corpulent clients. While not originally intended for track use, the T-43 became the world's fastest sports car in 1927 and established a very respectable track reputation.
Such success allowed le Patron, as Ettore was known, to create even more refined automobiles. The largest car ever built, the Bugatti Royale, was built to be marketed to the crown heads of Europe. Unfortunately, no monarch bought one and production was stopped at just six cars. While the Royale was Ettore's first major failure, the engine that powered the Royale ended up powering a rail car that was still in use after the Second World War.
During his heyday Ettore maintained a hotel next to the factory in which could clients stay while discussing what they wanted and, legend has it, seeking le Patron's permission to purchase a car.
Ettore's son Jean was also a brilliant car designer and engineer and it was he who was responsible for the most successful road-going Bugatti, the Type 57. It had an in-line, twin-cam, eight-cylinder engine and featured the company's first four-speed transmission.
The T-57 was the first large-scale production car not originally designed as a racing car. Some of the most famous and beautiful of all custom coach-built cars sit on T-57 chassis such as the Atlantiques, cars so powerful in design and execution that they still dominate shows in which they appear and inspired the Chrysler Atlantic prototype a few years ago.
Bugatti's fortunes changed after it brought out the supercharged, twin-cam, eight-cylinder T-59 Grand Prix, his last factory team car, in 1934. While Ettore financed his own racing program with no help from the French government, the German Mercedes and Auto Union teams and Italy's Alfa Romeo received much aid from their countries' Fascist governments which sought the propaganda value of winning. Where Ettore could field only one or two blue French racing cars, European tracks were covered in German silver and Italian red.
Shortly after Jean Bugatti died in 1939 while testing a racecar, the outbreak of war put an end to production and the factory was taken over by the Nazis. After the war, the French government seized the factory, accusing Ettore Bugatti of collaboration, although he had spent the war years in a Paris apartment and had had nothing to do with the factory. The factory was returned to him, but the stress led to his death in 1947 of a heart attack. The company then limped along producing a few half-hearted attempts at race cars and a few re-bodied T-57s, but finally closed in 1959.
Had Jean not been killed, I believe Bugatti would have gone on after the war to even greater things. That could have stopped Enzo Ferrari from gaining a toehold in the niche so long dominated by Bugatti. That the name is still a grand marque is clear when one sees modern companies trying to capitalize on Bugatti's legacy.
David Grainger owns an automotive restoration company.
