Tag Archives: Bugatti

Bugatti’s most realistic Formula 1 race car was designed by a talented intern

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The Bugatti Type 35 revival is a great example of two things – A designer’s ability to push boundaries and create concepts that capture their passions, and those concepts sometimes being powerful enough to actually pave the way forward for something bigger. Little did Andreis van Overbeeke know that his desire to see Bugatti compete in the Formula 1 series would result in him landing an internship at his dream company. The desire to actually see a Bugatti-branded F1 car pushed Andries to create a concept that he published on Reddit. The images ran their course, reaching Bugatti’s execs, who then went on to invite van Overbeeke to their headquarters in Molsheim, France, for an internship… resulting in a much more fleshed out concept car with the Type 35 revival. The image above shows the Type 35 revival in its glorious avatar standing right beside Bugatti’s own Vision GT vehicle – its spiritual predecessor.

The Type 35 Revival pays tribute to Bugatti’s eponymous winning racecar from the 1929 and 1930 Monaco circuit races. Styled with a similarly long nose and short tapered rear, the Revival echoes the iconic design cues of the 90-year old racecar, while carefully sticking to Bugatti’s signature details which include the horseshoe grille and that absolutely sweet blue and black paint-job. “The car has a powerful high revving internal combustion engine (see the exhausts on top) and was designed to be a fan car with a suckdown system (similar to the Chaparral 2J and Brabham BT46)”, says Overbeeke. He also pointed out that as a hat-tip to the company’s consecutive 3-year win at the Monaco circuits, the Type 35 Revival comes with a graphic of the Monaco racetrack on the side along with its laurels.

While the French automotive company isn’t planning on entering the F1 any time soon, the Type 35 Revival’s design isn’t just a concept for your eyes… You can actually take it for a spin in PlayStation’s Gran Turismo!

Designers: Andries van Overbeeke, Achim Anscheidt, Sasha Selipanov, Etienne Salomé & Frank Heyl.

The Bugatti Spartacus SUV gives the company its own ‘Lamborghini Urus’ moment

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When Lamborghini debuted the Urus, I was a part of the demographic that went “Wait, they did what?!” Never in my lifetime did I think Lamborghini would ever even want to pursue the SUV category, but given that the brand supplies some of the most elite police forces in the world with cop-cars, it probably makes sense to have an SUV that could overtake a roadster on a highway… the Spartacus SUV concept (with its fitting name) hopes to do the same for Bugatti.

The Spartacus hulking SUV concept that ticks the same boxes as the Urus. It feels a lot like its parent company’s design language was seamlessly adapted from sports cars to much larger vehicles, in a way that makes them a class apart. The Urus looks like a Lamborghini, but it doesn’t look the same as say an Aventador or Huracan… the Spartacus is the same way. It has every bit of Bugatti’s DNA in it, but it feels like the company branching out.

In its signature Blue and Black color combination, the Spartacus wears its Bugatti identity on its sleeve. The car sports the iconic horseshoe grille on the front, while the C-bar detail on the side doesn’t just exist, it defines the car’s rear, guiding the back and rounding it off in a complementary way. The car comes with a pretty voluminous body, but its razor-thin headlamps and taillamps help bring about sleekness.

Another interesting detail with the Spartacus is the fact that even though the horseshoe radiator detail remains present on the automobile, behind it lies just an extension of the car’s carbon-fiber bumper, hinting at the fact that this is a first for Bugatti in not one, but two categories – SUVs, and electric vehicles. Just imagine, though… If this thing were painted black and white and came with a shining beacon on top and the word “Police” painted on the side, would you really want to even attempt to mess with it??

Designer: Sajdin Osmancevic

What if Luigi Colani and Bugatti collaborated on a motorcycle concept?

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Indian industrial designer Anay Kshirsagar found himself asking pretty pertinent questions while sitting at home waiting for the lockdown to end. What if Bugatti’s modern automotive DNA could be carried to a motorcycle? What if the motorcycle could, with two wheels, evoke the kind of emotion you’d feel looking at any of Bugatti’s four-wheeled vehicles?

The Audacieux (which is French for Audacious) is a curvy, bold-looking beast that comes with an exaggerated cantilever headlight, a hubless front-wheel, and an overall form that feels like a German x French crossover collaboration between Luigi Colani and Bugatti. Where the Bugatti DNA makes itself explicitly visible is in the two-wheeler’s clear C-shaped design that is a direct reference to the symbolic C-bar in most of the company’s recent cars, as well as a detail beneath the headlamp which corresponds with the horseshoe radiator – an iconic detail that’s practically synonymous with the 111-year-old brand.

Just like its cars, the motorbike comes with the option of a two-tone paint-job. The Bugatti logo makes itself visible in chrome on the hubs of the rear wheel too, and given the conceptual nature of the motorbike, it’s safe to speculate that this tame beast comes with an electric heartbeat.

Designer: Anay Kshirsagar

The Bugatti Gangloff concept feels like an aesthetic blast-from-the-past!

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Designed as an aesthetic bridge between the Bugatti cars of the 30s (the Bugatti Type 57 in particular), and the Bugatti cars post its acquisition by Volkswagen, the Gangloff sort of feels like a combination of the styles set by Jean Bugatti (son of founder Ettore Bugatti) and Jozef Kabaň, the designer who gave us the iconic Veyron.

The Gangloff is all about retaining and highlighting Bugatti’s soul. Its incredibly curvaceous exterior is a sure-shot hat-tip to the Type 57 (especially in the side-view). The fenders on the front and rear quarter panels come with exaggerated curves, pretty emblematic of cars in the 30s, but the minute you switch to the front or rear view, the car’s modern design becomes pretty evident, especially with the LED lights, racecar-style seats, and the horseshoe radiator on the front that resembles the Veyron. In fact, the car even comes with the C-bar around the gate, a feature that’s practically synonymous with the Bugatti brand today.

Just like the exteriors that definitely feel like a fusion of classic and contemporary, the interiors follow suit too, with leather and metal seats that feel both organic and futuristic at the same time. The car features a pretty modern-looking dashboard that still retains a relatively analog design, with no hint of touchscreen displays and artificially intelligent computers… a feature (or lack thereof) that actually feels nice, given how the Gangloff manages to tap equally into one’s feelings of awe as well as of nostalgia… and it probably runs on gasoline too, because sometimes the classics just work!

Designer: Paweł Breshke Czyżewski (Paul Breshke)

The gorgeous Bugatti La Finale concept tributes and highlights its internal combustion engine

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We’re somewhere in the late 21st century. Electric cars aren’t just the norm, they’re sort of antiquated and mankind has moved onto the next step – hydrogen fuel cells. It’s been decades since any company’s launched a car with a gas-powered internal combustion engine, until the Bugatti La Finale surfaces… a car that pays homage to the ICE. The La Finale isn’t a car, it’s a vessel, a museum for the internal combustion engine. Rather than hiding this vintage technology under an opaque hood, the La Finale displays this antique technology like a crown jewel, with a transparent hood that lets you admire the engine and its pistons in all their glory.

The La Finale concept takes the design attributes of the La Voiture Noire and amps it up, with split surface bodywork that doesn’t feel completely like the modern-day Bugatti DNA, but rather pays tribute to Ettore Bugatti’s brother Rembrandt Bugatti, who was an artist and a sculptor who had a remarkable understanding of surfaces. The car comes with double-tone paneling, using metallic sheeting as well as carbon-fiber to create an interplay that makes the car look less blockish and more sculptural. The La Finale’s magnum opus, however, is its hood, which is made from a transparent glass that cascades upwards to turn into the windshield. This glass provides an exhibition-window into the car’s 6-cylinder engine, which designer Serkan Budur visualizes will be a vintage rarity in the future. This showcase gives the car’s engine the precious treatment it deserves, while right in front of it, visible through the gap between the two surfaces, are suspension-springs that further the car’s approach to showcasing its internals in an exhibitionist fashion. Inspired by the Bugatti designs of the yesteryear, during the era of its founder, Ettore Bugatti, the car retains the horseshoe radiator, an iconic element that ties all of the company’s cars together. There’s an absence of the C-bar design that is usually present in all of Bugatti’s more contemporary models, but for the sake of artistic expression, I’ll let that slide. After all, the point of the La Finale isn’t to look at the C bar – it’s to admire the car in its entirety, and its precious relic-like internal combustion engine!

Designer: Serkan Budur

How Bugatti built the Centodieci hypercar in six months

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During Monterey Car Week there's no shortage of nostalgia. Both the Pebble Beach and Quail gatherings are magnets for almost any vintage car you can imagine. So it made sense for Bugatti to unveil its new Centodieci hypercar, a nod to the iconic EB11...

The Bugatti Centodieci is a bold step away from Bugatti’s design DNA

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Over the past couple of years, and couple of cars, Bugatti’s built a rather strong visual language with its cars, ranging from the Veyron to the Chiron, Divo, and even the La Voiture Noire from last year… that’s until the surprise unveiling of their latest and boldest car ever, the Centodieci.

Unveiled to mark the company’s 110th year anniversary, the Centodieci is based on the Chiron, and is an incredibly limited-edition tribute to the EB110 from the 1990s. Limited to only 10 units, the Centodieci is a 1600 hp powerhouse with an 8-liter W16 engine and an acceleration of 0-62 miles in a staggering 2.4 seconds… all this while being 44 pounds lighter than the Chiron, owing to a heavy dependence on carbon-fiber components.

It isn’t the Centodieci’s performance (which is definitely worth writing home about) that really catches our eye here, but rather its design. Created as a tribute to the EB110, Bugatti’s first modern hypercar, the Centodieci is a very conscious deviation from the style Bugatti’s cultivated over the decades. Aside from the horseshoe-shaped grille on the front, there isn’t much that one would say is ‘innately Bugatti-esque’ about the car in the first place. The C-shaped pillar is so abstracted it’s barely there, and features an unusual cheese-grater detail on it (Are cheese-graters the new trend this year? What am I missing here?)

The car’s headlights still have the mean, discerning stare that you could see in the Chiron, but are a tad more devious and menacing. The car’s logo finds itself being placed on the hood too, instead of within the iconic horseshoe grille. The coupe comes with the absence of a traditional A-pillar too, as the windscreen sprawls all the way from the front across to the sides, providing a panoramic view for the driver and the passenger seated beside. The interiors are still under development, say the Centodieci’s design team, but will for most parts follow the design cues of the Chiron. Over all, the Centodieci, pretty consciously adopts a much more angular design language as a tribute to the Marcello Gandini-designed Bugatti EB110, as opposed to the organic styling of Bugatti’s design DNA developed over the Veyron, Chiron, Divo, and even the La Voiture Noire in the last few decades. The car, even as a matter of fact, chooses to be boldly different in its color too, making itself available exclusively in white!

Designer: Bugatti

The Bugatti Type 103 concept has a Bugatti front and a Batmobile rear

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The soul of a Bugatti definitely resides within this concept by Invisive. Its stylings are a lot like a modern-day Chiron, with the slick horizontal headlights and the signature C-cut on the car’s rear pillar. However, the Type 103 really turns things up a notch with its horse-shoe grill at the front. With a wider base, the grill goes from horse-shoe to practically a parabola shape, almost giving the car a discernible grumpy-face. I imagine if a magnificent car like the Bugatti Type 103 was stuck in traffic, it would have a grumpy-face too. The grille on the front is quite sloped too, resulting in an overhang on the front that’s relatively large, but makes the car look longer, along with a back that absolutely looks Batmobile-ish with surfaces trailing off backwards to make the car look like a motion-blur even when it’s standing still. It also has a centrally located vertical tail-light/aerowing better visible in the top-view that reinforces that Batmobile image, almost looking like the car has a tiny afterburner on its back like a jet.

The objective was to take Bugatti’s C-series and toy with the curves and surfaces, amping the design up while sticking to Bugatti’s design heritage as much as possible. Designed, modeled, and rendered over a week-long project timeline, the Type 103 could stand right beside the rest of Bugatti’s cars and nobody would be able to tell original from fan-made concept. In all ways, it captures the natural progression of the Bugatti series, down to the iconic design details and color choices, to even the surfacing and photo-realistic rendering. I’ll give the exaggerated rear a pass, just because it looks so incredible I want it to be true!

Designer: Invisive

Bugatti unveils a $33,000 EV for (rich) kids

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For its 110th birthday, Bugatti is going back to its roots. The French car manufacturer is digging up the Bugatti Type 35, the company's famous racing car also called the Bugatti Baby, and giving it a modern makeover. The limited-run Bugatti Baby II...