Part 5 - A Bugatti in your garage? Some good reasons to having one The Racing Parabola

The sons of great men have a weighty heritage to shoulder. This is especially so if the scion is only 24 and intends to breathe new life into a great marque following the devastation of the war by seeking to recover the precious machine tools created to produce excellence. Such was the steadfast aim of Roland, Ettore’s second son, when the Molsheim factory was returned to his father. by that time, Ettore’s health was so bad that he couldn’t even be informed of the change in circumstances, and Roland had to handle everything alone. He could not have foreseen that in 1966, following the collapse of an audacious effort at relaunching the marque, his step-mother, Geneviève Delcuze, Ettore’s second wife and the mother of Thérèse and Michel, would sell what remained of Bugatti, trademark and all, to Hispano Suiza, the company that during the war years had commissioned Bugatti to produce mechanical parts for its engines.

Jean Bugatti proposed a more modest, four-cylinder Bugatti for road and track, the Type 73. Unfortunately his death in 1939 and a few years later that of his father Ettore put an end to this project.

All this was still to come, however, when Roland and Pierre Marco, the loyal factory director and driver, began to think about new projects. Jean Pierre Wimille’s victory at the wheel of the Type 50 at the 1946 Grand Prix de la Libération in Paris suggested that designing road vehicles to bring the famous marque back to life could be a valid project. Yet the Type 73, presented in 1947, and the Type 101, based on the Type 57 and launched in 1951, turned out to be utter failures, despite the fact that a few models, including Geneviève’s with its Antem bodywork, were indisputably magnificent. Times had changed, and with them technology as well, and the world was heading toward mass motorization and production.

The Bugatti Type 101 presented in 1951 didn’t have the expected success. Only 8 examples were made.

Wishing to prevail in terms of technology, Roland played his last card with racing, the activity that had brought Bugatti such widespread fame. There was a new Formula 1 rule for the World Championship that involved 2500 cc engines. It was an audacious decision: in 1954 Mercedes had entered its W 198 coupé, a car that was technologically so highly advanced that it practically obscured all the other teams, including Ferrari, as well as Maserati, BRM and Vanwall. Bugatti went for an interesting solution: instead of the models with front-mounted engines entered by its competitors, it opted for a single-seater with a centrally mounted rear transverse engine. In true Bugatti style, it had an 8-cylinder engine, but in V configuration. The quality of this engine, designed by the acclaimed Italian engineer Gioacchino Colombo, was later to be ratified by the 1500 cc 4-cylinder version (cut in half, longitudinally), mounted on the last Bugatti to be built, the Sport Type 252.

The Formula 1 Bugatti Type 151 at the 1956 French Grand Prix, the only one it ever took part in.

Clearly, the engine is not everything in a single-seater. The car appeared only once on the racetrack, as number 28 in the French Grand Prix of 1956, driven by Maurice Trintignant, and it did not come up to expectation. It was third-last in departure position, 18” from pole position, and it withdrew after 18 rounds because of a problem with the accelerator. It was a pity, because the car seemed to have potential for from sales. Alas, this was no longer the case, and this sealed its fate.

Developed between 1957 and 1962, the Bugatti Type 252 was the last car offered by the Bugatti brand before it was sold to Hispano-Suiza in 1963.