Fast and refined: inside Bugatti's factory as the motoring specialist partners with Parmigiani
You would not expect the world’s fastest car to come from such a beautifully sedate place. The Bugatti factory is in Molsheim, a small town near Strasbourg on the eastern edge of France. Through a large a medieval stone gate you arrive at a beautiful chateau with fields on one side and stables on the other. Next door is a small modern workshop where they assemble the Bugatti Chiron, a car that accelerates so quickly you genuinely feel your eyeballs being pushed back into their sockets.
This is a chance to try out the Chiron in its home environment, and also to witness the unveiling of the latest Bugatti-inspired watch from Parmigiani, the Swiss watch company that has been in partnership with the supercar maker since 2004.
It's here at this chateau that Ettore Bugatti, who founded the car company in 1909, entertained potential customers. Bugattis won countless races in the 1920s and 1930s, and Ettore prided himself on selling his private clients the exact same cars that were being driven to victory in those early Grand Prix races.
Ettore was a genius engineer, as well as an eccentric perfectionist who would ride through the immaculate factory on horseback, making sure none of his workers dared put a wrench out of place.
He was also a shrewd marketing man who subtly massaged racing statistics to make his already dominant cars seem unbeatable. He had little time for anyone who fell below his required standards – he was known to refuse to sell his cars to people he deemed unworthy of representing the brand.
His son Jean was a designer that transformed the look of Bugattis from functionally handsome machines into art deco masterpieces. His Type 57 Atlantic is still considered by many people to be the most beautiful car ever made – not bad for something designed more than 80 years ago by a man in his early twenties.
Like his father, Jean was not a man given to compromise. On his roadsters, for example, the windscreens could not go beyond a certain height if it offended his aesthetic sensibilities – if that meant his clients got flies in the face, this was a price worth paying.
In 1939 Jean was test driving a Type 57 close to the factory in Molsheim when a cyclist emerged suddenly from a field. Swerving to avoid him, Jean Bugatti hit a tree and was killed, at just 30 years old. The following year invading German forces compelled Ettore Bugatti to sell the factory and it was converted to produce amphibious vehicles.
After the war Ettore tried to get the company going again, but with lack of funds the business began to fail in tandem with the boss’s health. Ettore died in 1947 at the age of 66 and without his chosen heir to continue it, the company followed its founder to the grave.
There was a short-lived attempt to revive Bugatti in the early 1990s, then in 1998 the name was acquired by VW, which bought back the chateau and built a new modern facility next to it. A few years later the modern Bugatti announced that it would be making the Veyron, a 1,000 horsepower, 250mph four-wheel-drive monster that rewrote the rules on how fast a road car could go.
Now Bugatti has made the successor, the Chiron, which in turn makes the Veyron seem a touch pedestrian. It is half as powerful again, with 1,500 horsepower, and is electronically limited to 261mph, but is estimated to be capable of close to 290mph.
With all that power it should be an unmanageable beast, but any idiot can drive it. This one did, and I can confirm that it is so dynamically capable that you can put your foot flat to the floor in first gear and it launches forward like a rocket with barely a chirrup of wheel-spin. As long as you are not insane and know when to stop pushing, you always feel in complete control.
There will be just 500 Chirons made, and 300 of those are already spoken for by eager customers with €2.5million to spare. Each car takes several months to assemble by hand, and with orders backed up and only 70 cars made a year, if you decide to buy one now, you will have to wait until 2020 for delivery.
Half of all Bugatti customers come to Molsheim, just like many of them did in Ettore’s day. There they are shown where their cars will be built, and offered a virtually endless range of colours for the bodywork, and different types of leather or alcantara for the interior.
Every car is bespoke, and on display in the workshop are scale models of each Bugatti made since 1998 – all 450 Veyrons along with the first few Chirons, which began delivery this summer.
The personalisation programme may make it seem like the customer is always right. But just as the founder was not averse to saying no to customers, the modern Bugatti has a point it will not go beyond.
You are not allowed, of course, to change anything that will affect the Chiron’s mechanical integrity. And you can’t have it painted pink. Because Bugatti needs to think about its reputation. The internet is full of pink Veyrons, but that particular crime was not committed inside the Bugatti factory.
The company always does its best to gently guide its customers back into the neighbourhood of good taste. This is in contrast to certain other luxury auto makers, who will happily make your car look like Liberace’s Halloween costume if you are prepared to hand over enough money.
Whilst not many people will be able to get their hands on a Chiron, there will be far more Bugatti cars than Bugatti watches. Fifty times more to be exact – Parmigiani is making just 10 examples of the equally skilfully crafted Bugatti Type 390, which has a skeletonised dial and a unique cylindrical flying tourbillon movement housed within a case inspired by the Chiron’s curves.
Both the car and the watch share a purposeful, precision-engineered elegance. The Chiron, for all the headline figures about how quick it is, is also a beautiful object that looks perfectly at home in the peaceful grounds of the historical chateau. Then you take it out on the road, and it is in a entirely different league to any car ever built.
