The Bugatti T57C “tank” had won the 1939 24 Hours of Le Mans driven by Jean-Pierre Wimille/Pierre Veyron and had been back in Molsheim for several weeks. It was about to compete in the La Baule Grand Prix but its designer, 30-year-old Jean Bugatti, was a perfectionist and wanted to make sure the long-nosed racer was up to it. So, at about 10 p.m. on August 11, he blocked off his habitual test section of the Molsheim-Strasbourg road with factory personnel to stop local traffic and let rip. Somehow, a drunk on a bike managed to infiltrate the guarded road near Duppidheim just as the tank arrived. Jean braked and steered wildly, but the car slammed into a tree and the young Bugatti was killed.
Ironically, the La Baule race was cancelled soon afterward due to the international tension that eventually led to the Second World War.
Jean’s death has generated decades of speculation about what could have been. By 1936, his disenchanted father Ettore had retired to Paris and left the 27-year-old in complete charge of the Molsheim factory, sales offices and racing department. With his design competence well established and confirmed by the appearance of his all-new Bugatti Tipo 57 family of fabulous road and racing cars, which included the stupefyingly elegant Atlantic, he had the makings of a gifted car constructor with a highly sensitive finger on the pulse of the market. He could have taken Bugatti into a whole new world; instead, his death spelt a steady decline for the famous company.
Born in Cologne, Germany, on January 15, 1909, Gianoberto Maria Carlo Bugatti, Ettore’s eldest son, moved with his parents to Dorlisheim in the Alsace. That’s not far from Molsheim, where his father had established a sort of Bugatti Camelot, which included a family home, a hotel for special guests and a car production unit.
In France, Gianoberto soon became known as Jean and took a lively interest in the Bugatti business from an early age. He started to design car bodies well before his 20th birthday and soon became a master of the craft, giving them an all-pervading elegance that married so intimately with Ettore’s chassis. Central to his designs was the dual-tone paintwork he created, which not only helped single out the cars as the last word in style, but contributed visually to their very movement.
The cars Jean designed included two of the rare, hyper-impressive Bugatti Royales, alias the Tipo 41s. They were a massive 21 feet long, weighed 7,000 pounds and were powered by a 12.7-liter engine. Ettore intended them to be the most luxurious car ever divined, and they were aimed at the rich, royal and powerful. Even such exalted individuals, however, were suffering from the knock-on effects of the 1929 Wall Street crash, so he was only able to sell three of the six he had built.
After that came the Tipo 50 coupé, a melody of dual-tone paintwork and a luxury coupé that, in 1930, boasted a twin-overhead-camshaft, supercharged 4972-cc engine that put out a remarkable 225 hp. A Tipo 50B racing version was produced in the late ’30s, and that generated 470 hp, which was technically brilliant but didn’t tempt so many of the rich and famous as other Bugatti models.
The young Bugatti also had a hand in the design of the Tipo 51, which had the hard task of carrying on where the winners of the 1926 Grand Prix World Championship, the T35s and T39s, had left off. The T51 did well: Achille Varzi and Louis Chiron drove it to its first major success by winning the Grand Prix of France, William Grover-Williams and Caberto Conelli the Belgian; Chiron the 1931 and 1932 Czech GPs and Varzi the 1933 Monaco before the Alfa Romeo P3s took over.
Jean’s piece de resistance, however, was undoubtedly the 1934 Tipo 57, an innocent enough designation that hid a profusion of utterly gorgeous body designs, of which a total of 710 were built, most of them powered by a 3257-cc, twin-cam, inline-8 engine in two basic variants, the Tipo 57 itself and the 57S.
One was the Tipo 57G, a long, streamlined version built on the 57S chassis that soon earned its nickname “tank” because of its, long, barrel-chested hood, and was the early, none-too-successful racer that dipped the model range’s toe in racing to see how it went. Not great, was the answer. More work and time made all the difference, though, with Robert Benoist and Jean-Pierre Wimille winning a wet 1937 24 Hours of Le Mans in the “G” and Wimille/Veyron the 1939 race at the Sarthe in the Tipo 57C.
Jean’s design prowess continued with the Tipo 55 roadster, another dual-tone body that rightly exuded power with its long, elegant fenders revealing more or less the full wheel, as it was a road-going version of the Bugatti Tipo 51 Grand Prix car, its supercharged 2.3-liter, DOHC, straight-8 putting out 130 hp.
But the star of the “range” has to be the Atlantic Tipo 57SC, with its flowing, liquidus body, an outstanding example of the pinnacle of delicious Art Deco style, with its split windscreen, astoundingly beautiful doors, provocatively fashioned curved rear end and visible spine from its front to its back, a kind of leftover from a Grand Prix car design. Only four of these ultimate statements of Bugatti elegance were built in plain aluminum, their inline-8, DOHC engines jumped from an initial 175 hp without a supercharger to 200 hp with a blower.
The Atalante, which appeared after the Atlantic, was, inevitably, a bit of a letdown following the indescribable beauty of its predecessor. Imposing design though it was, the car had a flat screen which, together with its protruding headlights, was saved from grossness by the flat-bottomed Bugatti horseshoe radiator.
But Jean wasn’t content with just poring over designs and coming up with new ones. His father Ettore had established the marque and the factory, but the youngster was also an engineer, a product of the shop floor university instead of the usual seat of learning. To begin with, Ettore gave his son responsibility for testing his trains and encouraged his involvement in design. But father was not a happy man in 1936, riled by his workers’ strikes, so he part-retired to the French capital and left Jean in charge.
The youngster could look forward to a sparkling future, until it was cut in the quick just after 10 p.m. on August 11, 1939.
