The resurrection of Bugatti is one of the most notable automotive stories of the 21st century. Aristocratic, artistic and more than a little arcane, Bugatti was a pre-war brand that dominated luxury, design and motorsport, the creator of Grand Prix winners and, arguably, the most luxurious automobile ever made, in the shape of the early 1930s. Royal Type 41. Then she vanished.
It was the late Ferdinand Piëch, the monomaniacal boss of the Volkswagen Group, who bought the rights to the name and returned the brand to glory with the 2005 Veyron and its successor, the Chiron. The Super Sport version of the latter remains the fastest production car in the world, having reached a top speed of 304.773 mph in the hands of driver Andy Wallace on a German test track in 2019.
How can you follow that, especially in a world where 2,000-horsepower electric hypercars have completely reshaped expectations?
As fate would have it, Bugatti is now controlled by Croatian electric vehicle powerhouse Rimac, as a result of a complex counter-agreement of 2021 with VW and Porsche. So you’d be right to wonder what kind of encore wunderkind Mate Rimac would come up with for the 114-year-old French legend.
The result is the Tourbillon, an imperious hybrid super coupe that sees Bugatti looking a hundred years ahead while also invoking its storied past, but not in the way you might expect.
“Icons like the Type 57SC Atlanticknown as the most beautiful car in the world, the Type 35the most successful racing car of all time, and the Royal Type 41, one of the most ambitious luxury cars of all time, are our three pillars of inspiration,” says Rimac. “Beauty, performance and luxury formed the model of the Tourbillon; a car that was more elegant, more emotional and more luxurious than any before it. And like those icons of the past, it would not simply be for the present, nor even for the future, but for eternity-for eternity.”
Yes, it’s safe to say that Bugatti is very excited about its new creation and has one eye on the pristine meadows of Pebble Beach or Villa d’Este concours events a century from now, positioning its new hypercar as incredibly high-tech and as an ingenious response to built-in obsolescence.
Reskinning Rimac’s brilliant, all-electric Nevera hypercar was surely an option, but Rimac is respectful enough of Bugatti’s history to know that would never fly. “So I came up with the idea of making a completely new car,” he says. He has come a long way since he was the only employee of Rímac back in 2009.
Instruments of success
The name Tourbillon will be familiar to fans of haute horlogerie. Rather than honoring a former Bugatti racing driver, as in Pierre Veyron and Louis Chiron, the new car references watchmaking’s most elaborate mechanism, a wrist-worn machine whose complexity counteracts the effects of gravity to maintain the most accurate timing possible.
Bugatti’s designers and engineers were seduced by the idea of mechanical timelessness when conceiving the new car, and so the Tourbillon largely rejects the large digital touchscreens inside in favor of machined components and a group of Fully analog skeletonized instruments (another world reference in watchmaking). —although a small screen appears if you want, for Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.
The cluster consists of over 600 parts, uses titanium, sapphire and ruby in its construction and remains fixed in place allowing the balance to rotate. spin around him. Two needles on the central dial show the engine revolutions and speed. On the left are analog readouts for battery and oil temperatures; To the right is a screen showing the power drawn from the electric motors and engine.