Bugatti

Ettore Bugatti was an Italian who lived his life in France among Frenchmen, and he was, they said, un type, or as we say, a character, an exotic, one of a kind, greatly gifted, proud, unswervingly independent, indifferent to any opinion but his own, amused, aristocratic, impractical, profligate, a connoisseur, a gourmet, a bon vivant.

He died in 1947 after 66 years of life full of frenzy and creation. There are many photographs of him. He is in one of his racing cars in 1925, his two sons crowded into the cockpit with him, one 14, one three, Bugatti is smiling at the photographer and waving, his hand gloved in what looks to be immaculate chamois. Another, he is sitting, six feet off the ground, in a car he built for the Paris -- Madrid race of 1903. Another, he is wearing goggles and a helmet. The helmet is odd-looking. M. Bugatti has been amusing himself. He has taken a knife or a scissors to the brim of a bowler, and made a helmet of it. He didn't cut it all off: he made a neat little bill in front, to shade his eyes. Another, he is 25 or so, and apparently about to go riding. He's wearing a cap, a flaring short coat, pipestem breeches he must have put on barefoot, a hard collar four inches high, on his left wrist a watch and a massive bracelet showing under an inch and a half of cuff, altogether a figure of shattering elegance and sang-froid.

Bugatti made about 60 different models of automobile. One that he liked particularly was the Type 46. It wasn't his most inspired design, and nagging little things often went wrong with it. A Parisian brought his 46 back to the factory time after time. One day M. Bugatti, Le Patron as he was known in deference, came upon the fellow in a corridor.

"You, monsieur, I think," he said, "are the one who has brought his Type 46 back three times?"

The man admitted it, full of hope.

Bugatti stared at him. "Do not," he said, "let it happen again."

King Zog of Albania, visiting in France, wanted to buy a Bugatti Royale, a ducal motor-carriage priced at $20,000 -- for the bare chassis. The body came separately, and expensively. Bugatti did not, ever, care to sell a Royale, a Type 41, to anyone who merely happened to have $30,000 or so, even if he was a reigning monarch. The aspirant customer was always invited to spend a little time at the Bugatti chateâu in Molsheim, in Alsace, so that Le Patron might, covertly, estimate his character. Zog came, saw, was seen, and heard, in due course, that there was not, alas, a Royale available, nor could one say, unfortunately, when the factory would be able to make one.

"Never!" Bugatti told one of his assistants. "The man's table manners are beyond belief!"

"My dear fellow," Bugatti told a customer who complained that his car was hard to start in cold weather, "if you can afford a Type 55 Bugatti, surely you can afford a heated garage!"

Ettore Bugatti had earned the right to be arrogant. The Type 55 might not start first push on a January morning, but it was the fastest two-seater on the world market in 1932, and the most beautiful, and while its 115 miles an hour is no great figure today, half-a-life-time later, it's not slow, and its fender line is still the loveliest ever put on a motorcar. No one else ever attempted anything like the mammoth Royale, its engine nearly three times as big as a Cadillac's, its dashboard fittings of solid ivory, a Jaeger stopwatch in the center of the steering wheel, where men of lesser imagination put a horn button. (The Royale had four horn buttons, on the underside of the steering wheel, one at each spoke.)

Bugatti's Type 35 Grand Prix car appeared in 1924. In 1925 and 1926 it won the incredible number of 1045 races. Some time in the future, some other single model may do as well -- but the Bugatti record has been on the books for 35 years now. In 1936 a Type 57S ran 135.42 miles in 60 minutes, and it was 20 years before any other stock passenger car went faster. And then there's the Type 50, and the 44, the 37, the 51, the 57SC ... there have been 5000 makes of automobiles, and of them all, is the Bugatti the most intriguing, the most enchanting, the farthest ahead of its time in its own day, and the most venerated now? Very probably.

Enter the devotees:

The man whose note paper carries, not his name or his monogram, but the scarlet oval Bugatti radiator badge, engraved in miniature.

The man who wears the Bugatti Owners Club tie seven days a week.

The man who was suddenly presented, in 1957, with an opportunity to buy a brand-new Type 46, miraculously preserved through World War II, 75 kilometers on the odometer. The only way he could raise the money was to sell his house, so he promptly sold his house.

The young lady of Paris, whose boyfriend swore he'd go out of his mind if he didn't have a Bugatti. The year was 1934, and money was tight. Her father had it, though, and in cash. She killed him, took it, and bought the car. Her name was Violette.

It's just a car, surely?

No, it isn't, in the sense that it is very like other cars. The Bugatti was so unlike most other cars of its day as to become, almost, a different kind of object. This is true almost in equal measure of the Ferrari today. It's no use trying to convey to a man who has been driving a new Cadillac for six months, the experience of driving a 250 GT Ferrari. He won't understand because he doesn't have the frame of reference. Even people who did have the frame of reference were startled by exposure to some Bugattis, as Mr. C. W. P. Hampton, a British connoisseur, writing in 1937:

"I had a trial run up the Barnet bypass with Williams, the Bugatti works demonstrator, who had brought over a Type 57S electron coupe Atlantic. It was simply terrific: 112 mph still accelerating over the crossroads past the Barn -- and the roads cluttering up with the usual Friday evening traffic. Along the next stretch we did 122 mph, and I thought, under the circumstances, that was enough ... thereafter we cruised along at a mere 90-95 mph, once doing just over 100 in third gear ... the speed constantly maintained was prodigious ... along almost every yard of the crowded thoroughfare..."

("Williams" was never called anything else during the years he spent with Bugatti as a demonstrator and a teamdriver. No one knew anything about him except that he was young, British, seemed to have spent all his life in France and could pass as French. When World War II broke out he dropped into the Resistance, worked successfully for a long time, then disappeared at the hands of the Germans. It is now known that his name was William Grover and that he held the rank of captain in a branch of the British armed forces, presumably Intelligence.)

The truly creative make their own worlds and populate them with people of their own choosing. Ettore Bugatti did that, and most of the people around him were, like "Williams," anything but ordinary.

Says René Dreyfus, champion of France and Bugatti team-driver in the 1930s, "It was easy to believe, in those golden years, that we were not living in France at all, but in a little enclave, a little duchy, Molsheim, quite independent..."

Bugatti came to Molsheim, now the department of Bas-Rhin, then in Alsace-Lorraine, in 1906. Thereafter he worked in France, and thought of himself as French to the bone -- he called his Italian birth "that accident" -- but he did not take French citizenship until the year he died. He had been born in Milan, in 1881, son of one artist, Carlo, brother of another, Rembrandt. He first intended to be an artist as well, but he judged his brother's talent superior to his own, and it was not in Bugatti's nature willingly to be second to anybody in anything. In the years just before the turn of the century, the automobile was as exciting as the missile is today, perhaps even more exciting. Bugatti was apprenticed to the firm of Prinetti & Stucchi of Milan, and in 1898 he built a motor-vehicle of his own, and raced it, probably a modification of a Prinetti & Stucchi motor-tricycle. In the same year he made a four-wheel car from the ground up, and then another, which won an award given by the Automobile Club of France and a gold medal at an international exhibition in Milan in 1901.

Bugatti's gold-medal car so impressed the French firm of De Dietrich that they hired him as a designer. He was still a minor, so his father had to sign the contract in his stead. For the next few years Bugatti designed for De Dietrich, for Mathis, for Deutz, for Isotta-Fraschini and, later, for Peugeot. While he was working for Deutz, in Cologne, Bugatti designed and built, in the basement of his home, the small car which he called the Type 13. He left Deutz in 1909 and on Christmas of that year he came to Molsheim, with Ernest Friderich, a mechanic who had been his friend and associate since 1904. He rented an abandoned dye works, Friderich installed the machinery and staffed the place and in that year five cars were made. By 1911 there were 65 employees, and Friderich, driving a tiny 1.4-liter Bugatti, won his (continued on page 100) Bugatti (continued from page 76) class in the Grand Prix du Mans and was second overall, just behind a mammoth 6-liter Fiat. The disparity in size between the two cars made the victory most impressive, and Bugatti was famous from that day onward. His cars were to win so many races, rallies, sprints, hill climbs that no one now remembers them in their thousands, but this was the first one and it mattered the most.

(Fantastically, Bugattis are still winning races, although the last of Le Patron's own designs was built in 1939. Of course, 20-year-old cars can't compete with brand-new ones, but there are many races for old cars today. For instance, the famous circuit at Bridgehampton on Long Island schedules such an event every year. There were seven Bugattis entered in the last Bridgehampton, among many other makes contemporary with them. They completely dominated the event, coming in first, second, third and fourth. Indeed, when the winning Bugatti, D. H. Mallalien's Type 51 Grand Prix car, came down the straight, the very first turn around, there was nothing else in sight behind it.

In July 1961, Mickey Thompson, who has driven faster than anyone else living today, broke six international records in a series of runs at March Air Force Base. One of them was a mile record that had stood for 31 years. It had been made by a Bugatti.)

When the First World War broke out in 1914 Bugatti had to leave Alsace, of course. He designed a straight-eight aircraft engine which was built in France and in the United States, under license, by Duesenberg. The Duesenberg engine, heart of the most luxurious automobile we have made, was clearly derivative from this Bugatti design. Bugatti was interested in airplanes, as he was in everything that moved by mechanical means. He built at least one airplane, and Roland Garros, one of the great French aces of World War I, was his close friend, indeed he named his second son for Garros. Garros was a pioneer in development of the machine-gun synchronizer which allowed firing through the propeller arc.

(The first American soldier to die in line of duty in World War I was an aircraft mechanic, part of a crew sent to France to assay Bugatti's airplane engine. The man stepped into the propeller while the engine was running on a test bed, hélas!)

After the war had been won, Bugatti went back to Molsheim and settled into a pattern of life extraordinary for an industrialist, indeed extraordinary for anyone. Ettore Bugatti made a small world for himself, and he lived at the peak and center of it. It was a world of many parts which he arranged to fit neatly together. There was the factory, first. It was a model factory. The cleanliness of the place was startling. Bugatti bought soap and scouring powders and cleaning rags in such quantity that his accountant swore the firm was supplying every home in Molsheim.

"It doesn't matter," Bugatti would say. "Things must be kept clean, very clean."

He probably did come near to employing someone from every family in Molsheim, when the payroll ran 1000 individuals. Out of 3000 families he knew a great many of these individuals by name. Indeed, for a long time he knew by name every man who worked for him, and thus could deliver compliment or reprimand with proper force. He was severe with people who mistreated tools. Every machine tool in the place, vise, lathe, shaper, whatever, was polished and engine-turned, like the inside of a cigarette case, and Le Patron's choler would spiral at the sight of a hammer scar or file mark on one of them.

He toured the factory on a bicycle or in an electric cart, both of his own design and manufacture. The French, among whom he lived, and the Italians, among whom he was born, prided themselves on their production of the world's lightest and finest bicycles, but Bugatti thought them all heavy and graceless, and so made his own. When he made his morning tour of the establishment he would often be in riding habit. His stables were extensive, and he had a covered riding hall. (The graceful lines of the Bugatti radiator, the most beautiful ever put on an automobile, are thought by some to derive from the horseshoe.)

He alone carried the master key that opened all the doors of the factory, all identical doors of brass-bound varnished oak.

There was one formal title on the Bugatti table of organization, and that was Bugatti's own. His subordinates had no titles. One man was in charge of purchase, another was chief accountant, another was head of the racing department, and so on, but no one had a title. M. Bugatti was chief and the rest were little French Indians. Such a system will work under one condition: the chief must be able to command devotion by reason of innate dignity, ability, force of personality, not merely by the fact of his being boss. This Ettore Bugatti could do. The soaring range of the man's imagination, his power of creativity, his sheer drive were clearly evident.

The Bugatti château was a stone's throw from the factory, and between these two places were the rest of the units that made up the establishment: the stables, the riding hall, the kennels housing 30 or 40 fox terriers, the dovecots; the museum for the works in sculpture of Rembrandt Bugatti, and the museum housing historic horse-drawn carriages; the distillery in which Bugatti produced his own liqueurs, the powerhouse in which his own electricity was made. Farther away, but still definitely a part of the establishment, Bugatti's hotel, Le Hostellerie du Pur Sang, where clients of the house would find food, drink and lodging fit for the gentry, and where one's standing with Le Patron could be gauged: some clients were given bills on departure, some were not, and some bills were more than others.

Each of these buildings reflected M. Bugatti's iron-hard view of the properties. The powerhouse, for example ... Living as he did, Bugatti did not always have a great deal of cash on hand. He was not, after all, Henry Ford. His lifetime production of automobiles was a week's work for a Detroit assembly plant, and not a big week's work, at that: 9500 cars. So his bills sometimes ran on. He shared the attitude of the Edwardian aristocrat: he considered reminder of indebtedness to be an affront. The Strasbourg utility company once made this gaffe. Bugatti paid the bill and simultaneously drew up plans for a powerhouse of his own. When it was completed, beautiful in white tile, mechanically le dernier cri in every way, he summoned the representative of the Strasbourg company and gave him a conducted tour. When he had finished he said, "So you see, m'sieur, I shall no longer have need of your firm's services." So saying, we must presume, he strode to the master board and pulled the main switch. Bugatti's life was full of such gestures. Indeed, his whole life was a gesture, a sweeping, magnificent gesture.

Even Bugatti's failures were notable. In 1922 he produced a team of round-bodied, tublike racing cars that were so ugly they were unreal. The next year he rolled out a team of motorcars notable only because they were uglier than the 1922s: they were slab-sided, slope-topped monstrosities of such short wheelbase that the back of the engine protruded into the cockpit, and of course they would not handle, besides being revolting to look upon. But in 1924 came the first of the Type 35s, then, and now, the most beautiful racing automobiles ever built, and, at least until the post -- World War II Alfa-Romeo and Ferrari machines came along, the most successful.

The type 35s made Bugatti and it was of their time, and the time immediately following them that René Dreyfus and others of the entourage think when they talk of the golden times. Every weekend during the season the little blue cars would leave Molsheim for a circuit in France or England or Italy or Germany or Spain, where they would probably win. On Monday or Tuesday they would be back, dusty and oil-stained, and the mechanics would tear them down and make them as new again. Meanwhile, the drivers, the aristocrats of the establishment, could amuse themselves as they pleased, eating well, drinking well in the company of pleasant people. Of course, there were times when there was no money, but in Molsheim one did not, if one were a driver, need money in order to live well, and if an imperative necessity did come up ... René Dreyfus once wrote, in the magazine Sports Cars Illustrated, "When I had not been paid for a while, and needed money, it would not occur to me to ask for it, and of course it would be unthinkable to approach M. Bugatti. If one were not paid, it meant only one thing: there wasn't any money just then. So I would go to see M. Pracht, the treasurer, and we would have a bright little conversation, moving around the subject for a while and then getting down to cases. In the courses of the next day or two I would pick up a chassis, or two chassis, and take them to Robert Benoist, a former team-driver who had a Bugatti agency in Paris. I would sell them to Benoist and be in funds again.

"If M. Bugatti did not often reward his employees with money, he had other means. Like the head of any state, he instituted a supreme decoration, a sort of Bugatti Victoria Cross. This he conferred rarely, and it was much coveted: a wristwatch made by Mido to Bugatti's own design. It was very thin, very elegant, and the case was formed in the familiar horseshoe shape of the Bugatti radiator. When a driver had made a notable win against heavy odds he might be given a Bugatti wristwatch. Even a customer might be given one, if he were a notably good customer, say one who had bought eight or nine cars and made no complaint if some little thing went wrong with a couple of them. One was summoned to Le Patron's presence, perhaps in his château on the grounds, and there, with all due ceremony, the plush-lined box would be presented. It was a great honor, and no one would have conceivably equated a watch from M. Bugatti's own hands with mere money..."

Dreyfus tells, too, of a typical Bugatti beau geste which arose when he built his first automotrice, or rail car. He had conceived this idea when he found he had 23 huge 300-horsepower engines on hand, and the Depression of 1929 just getting under way. Why not make fast, self-powered railway cars? Why not, indeed? Bugatti ordered a big shed built on the factory grounds and began to draw up plans (the cars to have two engines, or four, to have speeds up to 120 miles an hour, running on rubber-mounted wheels, and stopped by cable brakes; the chauffeur to sit, not in front, incongruous among the passengers, but in a little cupola on the roof, alone, undistracted, and with a proper view). But when the first automotrice was finished, it was evident that Le Patron had, as it were, made an oversight. The railway station was a mile distant, and there was no track. Indeed, M. Bugatti had not even had the automotrice built on track. It had been built on the floor. And it would by no means go through the gate in the wall that solidly surrounded the factory.

Bugatti was not disturbed. He spoke to one of his supervisors. "Knock down the wall, if you please," he said, "and ask 800 or 900 of the men if they would be good enough to push the car down to the station for me tomorrow night."

It was done, the car riding on rollers so that the flanged wheels would not destroy the road, hundreds of men pushing, dozens carrying torches, the women bringing the wine. The automotrices were a great success. They really did run 120 miles an hour, their strange cable brakes did stop them, and the records they set -- Strasbourg-Paris, Paris-Nice -- stood for years after World War II. To this day, the repair of automotrice engines is important in Molsheim.

They were Type 41 engines, made for the Royales, the kings' coaches. When the Depression came down on France, Bugatti had built only seven Type 41s, his answer to the soft challenge of a British dowager at dinner: "Ah, M. Bugatti, everyone knows you build the greatest racing cars in the world, the best sports cars. But for a town-carriage of real elegance, one must go to Rolls-Royce or Daimler, isn't that so?"

He went from dinner to the drawing board, the story goes, and laid down the first line then and there: a huge automobile, long as a London bus, seven feet from windshield to radiator cap, the engine running in nine individually water-cooled bearings, all working parts machined to zero tolerance, plus or minus nothing. Daimler, indeed!

Even at a ferocious $20,000 without a body, the Type 41 was in a seller's market, until the Depression broke, and certainly two or three of the most spectacular motorcars ever set on the road were 41s. There was a two-seater roadster, for example, a thing to dwarf every other roadster ever built. Bugatti himself used a coupe de ville, or coupe Napoleon, a tiny cabin for two, an open cockpit for chauffeur and footman, and all that engine out in front. He had as well a berliner de voyage, or double berline, looking something like two medieval coaches put together; there was a convertible with German coachwork, a straight limousine, a sedan, a touring car ... there are four 41s in the United States today. The most accessible is the convertible given to the Ford Museum in Dearborn by Charles Chayne of General Motors. It is one of the notable attractions of the Detroit environs.

The Type 46 was a smaller version of the 41. It was usually offered as a sedan or a big coupe, but for that usage I think the Type 50, which has a detuned racing engine, double overhead cam, supercharged, and producing more than 200 horsepower, is to be preferred. A listing and description of all 60-odd Bugatti models is not for this place, but the most interesting, aside from the Royale and the children's racing car he built first for his son Roland and then in limited series for the get of the very rich, are Grand Prix cars, the various 35s, the intermediate 51, the Type 59, a 170-mph car with which Bugatti attempted singlehanded to stem the tide of the Nazi-backed German race cars of the late 1930s and the 185-mph 4.7-liter; the "Brescia" and "Brescia Modifie" cars of the early 1920s; among the passenger cars, the Types 40, 43, 44 (considered by J. Lemon Burton, an eminent British Bugattiste, to be one of the best of all), 50, 55, 57, 57C, 57S, 57SC.

Wide variation exists even in this truncated catalog. The 44 is supposed to have come about because Mme. Bugatti taxed her husband with the noisiness and harsh springing of his sports models. Accordingly he designed the 44 as a lady's car. A good one will do 80 miles an hour, it's reasonably quiet, starts easily, is pleasant to shift, and has the softest clutch I, at least, have ever laid foot to. The 43, on the other hand, is a detuned version of the racing 35B given, usually, an open four-seater body. It's a harsh, brutal, fast automobile. The 55 was race-bred, too, a Grand Prix Type 51 engine in a Type 54 chassis, while all the 57s were smooth passenger cars of varying speed capabilities up to 130 miles an hour, rare today, fantastic in the 1930s. Bugatti made something for everyone -- almost. Some authorities have held that he should have put out a four-cylinder, double overhead camshaft, supercharged passenger model. To demonstrate the worth of this thesis, C. W. P. Hampton, previously mentioned, spent an unmentionable sum in pounds sterling to create such a car, putting together a Type 40A engine, a Type 55 body with various bits from 37, 39, 49, 51 and 57 models. The result was a pretty little coupe, living in Detroit the last I heard of it.

Most members of the international Bugatti Owners Club, the oldest and biggest club of its kind in the world -- there are more than 1000 members -- would take a fairly distant view of this kind of cobbling if it were committed by just anyone, but Hampton's devotion to the make goes back very far, and he is an authority of eminence, learned in Bugatti lore. This is not an easy position to achieve, for the history of the Bugatti is much more extensive than that of most other automobiles, many tens of thousands of words have been published about it in many languages, and even the basic text, The Bugatti Book, runs to 375 pages. The Bugatti Owners Club has been publishing a magazine treating of Bugatti matters for nearly a quarter of a century.

The BOC itself is unique if for no other reason than its possession of a 17th Century manor house as headquarters. This is Prescott, near Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, 90 miles from London. The house is a big one, built of Cotswold stone. It was, until 1871, the seat of the Earl of Ellenborough. The driveway leading up from the public road is more than 1000 yards long and has been made into one of the most famous hill-climb courses in the world. In 1949 a wroughtiron gate was installed in the garden wall at Prescott as a memorial to Ettore Bugatti and his son Jean. Jean, who showed signs of great brilliance as a designer, died in 1939, at 27, in avoiding a drunken postman who had come, on a bicycle, onto the Molsheim circuit. Bugatti came around a corner at high speed and elected to go off the road rather than hit the man. Ettore Bugatti died, in 1947, at the end of a victorious struggle to retain control of the factory in the upheaval of postwar France. Because he was still an Italian citizen during World War II, he had been able to bluff the German occupying authorities to a certain extent, but still he was technically an enemy alien when peace came. And there had been, even before the war, grave labor difficulties at Molsheim. During the war the Germans made torpedoes in the factory. The Canadians seized it from the Germans and burnt much of it in an accidental fire. The Americans took it over, hid away all the machine tools and equipment before the Battle of the Bulge -- and lost the papers. Pierre Marco, one of Ettore Bugatti's oldest collaborators, traveled tens of thousands of miles through France, much of it in a creaking, charcoal-burning automobile, searching for the red-monogrammed Bugatti tools. He found most of them, too, took them back to Molsheim, rounded up many of the old workers, and put the factory back to work. At first he did anything. He would make stove lids if the price was right. Ultimately a few cars were produced, Type 101s, which were not really new, and a racing car, the Type 251, again not really new, in 1955 and a competitive failure. Today the factory is flourishing, making industrial and marine engines and so on, but no automobiles. Roland Bugatti survives, his sisters survive, the second Mme. Bugatti survives, but without Ettore Bugatti, nothing marches as before.

He was a man of parts. He was marked in many ways, by his determination to live like a duke, his belief that a mechanical device should be artistically beautiful as well as technically correct -- he wouldn't employ a draftsman who couldn't draw in perspective, in the round -- by his ability to project himself 20 years ahead of his time. He was imperious, stubborn, supremely creative -- he died holding hundreds of patents covering such things as razors, fishing reels, sail rigs, Venetian blinds -- and fallible. Some details on his cars were outrageously impractical. Bugatti water pumps, for example, are hard to lubricate and keep in service, and some, indeed most of his engines are so complex that even experienced Bugatti mechanics must quote figures like $1500 as overhaul cost.

But, taken all in all, good with bad, his cars have magic. This is not to say that there is nothing as good as a Bugatti on the world market today. That's nonsense. There are dozens of cars as good as a Bugatti, and better, cars faster, more roadworthy, more reliable, cheaper, more comfortable, and so on down a long list. But they are not the same. There is an indefinable, impalpable quality of life in a good Bugatti that does not exist in lesser machines. Of course, much of the charm of the Bugatti automobile lies in the aura of splendor that lay around its creation: Le Patron stalking the factory corridors in pongee and yellow corduroy, a brown bowler on his head and a Malacca stick in his hand; a champagne gala at the château; the little blue cars screaming across a finish line in one-two-three order; Benoist flying down a country road away from the pursuing Nazis in a Type 57, a reigning beauty of the Paris stage posing beside her Type 46 at a Deauville concours d'élégance...

Within the week just past as I write this, I have driven, and for some little distance, two great contemporary high-performance automobiles: a 3500 gran turismo Maserati coupe, $13,500 worth of Italian mácchina, and a Bentley Continental "Flying Spur," at just under $27,000 one of the most expensive motorcars ever built, and at the moment the fastest luxury car, or the most luxurious fast car in the world. I've also driven a Type 50 Bugatti a hundred miles or so. The Maserati will run away and hide from the Bugatti, and the Bentley makes it sound like a cement mixer in full cry. Maserati and Bentley performances peak, like a needle on an instrument, and that is that. The Bugatti never seems to peak. There's nothing imperturbable about a Bugatti, it may exceed every expectation, or it may inexplicably goof off, but whatever it does, the impression that more is possible, more is available, remains with the driver. The car seems to be willing to try, and try again, and keep on trying forever.

This may be the essence of the quality that Ettore Bugatti tried to put into his cars. Thoroughbred -- pur sang -- was a phrase he liked. He believed that his cars had breeding. He said, and it was true, that from 1909 to 1939 no driver was killed or even seriously injured through material failure of a Bugatti automobile. Perhaps this was because he knew how to design an automobile to endure great stress, or because he used only the best materials on the market -- special Sheffield steel, for example -- but Bugatti did not think so. He thought it was an indefinable thing, really breeding. He may have been right. Who is to say he was not?