Eoin recounts his experiences with Le Patron’s le pur-sang des automobiles.
Words Eoin Young Photos Terry Marshall
There will eventually come a time in a conversation among Bugatti fanciers when it gets asked around the assembled company which, if any, Bugattis they have driven. Bugattis are, after all, extremely rare and valuable motor cars. Always have been. Some of the people who own them also tend to be a trifle precious, so if ever the question is asked of me I will confess to only having driven a couple – one of the six Type 41 12.8-litre Royales ever built, and a 3.3-litre Type 59 Grand Prix car. Oh, and the first time I drove a vintage Bentley, Michelle Bugatti, Ettore’s youngest son by his second wife, was my passenger.
The more you inspect it, the better it becomes, like a superbly cut diamond
And now I have not driven a 1926 Type 37 Bugatti, having perfected the art of the static road test. Craig Pidgeon had loaned the family’s superb 1500cc supercharged car to Tony Haycock and I, to experience the very special thrill of driving one of these pedigree motor cars – but I fear Ettore did not have blokes like me with size-11 boots in mind, as I endeavoured without success to squeeze a foot in beside the brake pedal and the cockpit wall to get to the accelerator. The getting in and the getting out of the cockpit were challenge enough, a feat the more agile and younger Monsieur Haycock described as not so much getting in as putting on.
A superbly cut diamond
The Type 37 looks exquisite from any and every angle. The more you inspect it, the better it becomes, like a superbly cut diamond. The distinctive blade-spoke wheels have leather lacing at the knock-ons. The spare wheel is strapped beside and ahead of the passenger. There are cycle guards all round. The delicate slim horse-shoe radiator, a soft light blue, what else for a Bugatti? Legend has it that the first Madame Bugatti used to covertly check the hue of each new car against her ever-present pack of Gauloises.
A wooden-slatted luggage rack sits astride the elegant pointed tail. The instrument panel, in the familiar engine-turned aluminium that is the Bugatti trademark, is dominated by the round brass backside of the centrally-mounted SEV magneto. The clock in front of the passenger has roman numerals, somehow in keeping with the rest of the antique car. It is lettered on the face, 8 Jours – Fabrique en Suisse.
The gear lever is outside the body and looks like the hand brake. The hand brake is outside the body and looks like the gear lever. Wire lacing threads down the body fixing screws on the chassis rail sides. Un-strap and open the bonnet and the four-cylinder long-stroke motor looks tall, narrow and small, again with the polished engine-turned sides. The big finned supercharger is mounted alongside.
Exciting shriek
We take the car out for some period French gravel roadwork beyond Ruapuna circuit. It rains. The starter jams. Nothing much is going right but there is still the charm of the Type 37, sitting there looking quite perfect. Just that it won’t go. Owner Pidgeon is phoned for advice. Rock it in gear. We have been. When it all cools and pressure eases, suddenly it clicks into service and the engine fires with that exciting shriek. American writer Ken Purdy enjoyed a special on-going love affair with Bugattis, and described the engine noise as sounding “like a cement mixer in full cry.” I’m sure it was also Purdy who wrote about driving a Bugatti and “rasping down from Paris to Nice” in it, but though I’ve always remembered the quote, I can’t find it. [Eoin’s right, it was Ken Purdy – the quote is from the introduction to Kings of the Road. AGW]
A Bugatti is much more than just an old French motor car. It becomes a way of life
Haycock is a dedicated old-car person, and he delights in running the Bugatti up and down the shingle road for photographer, Terry Marshall. They say people grow to look like their dogs. Haycock is starting to look like one of Russell Brockbank’s cartoon Bugatti drivers. Come to think of it, my favourite Brockbank is of a Type 35 stopped at the end of long swerving tyre marks on a poplar-lined French road, and the driver running back to aid a French peasant who had been knocked from his bicycle while presumably endeavouring to apply his priorité a droite from a side road. The very English Bugatti driver’s wife is calling back, “Ask him if he knows a good restaurant for lunch…”
Bugattiste
A Bugatti is much more than just an old French motor car. It becomes a way of life. An English driver always known simply as ‘Williams’ won the first Monaco Grand Prix in a Bugatti in 1929. A year later the race was won by another Bugatti, this time driven by René Dreyfus, who I came to know quite well in his later years after he had sold his famous Le Chanteclair restaurant in New York, and he had time to visit back in Europe and come to the Monaco Grand Prix. When he wrote his autobiography My Two Lives with Beverly Rae Kimes in 1983, he invited me to New York for the book launch in the 21 Club, and the following day we went out to a book warehouse where René carefully signed and numbered 1000 copies! They have become valuable collectors’ items.
The big Type 41 Royale I drove was owned by Briggs Cunningham and on display in his marvellous museum at Costa Mesa. Denis Jenkinson and I would sneak time away from the Grand Prix at Long Beach, and visit Briggs each year to drive a different car from his collection under the watchful eye of his curator, John Burgess, an ex speedway driver. The six giant Royales were made on a typical Ettore whim after an English lady at his table asked why he wasn’t able to build cars with the quality of Rolls-Royce or Daimler.
“He went from dinner to the drawing board, so the story goes,” wrote Purdy, “and laid down the first line then and there: a huge automobile, long as a London bus, seven feet [2.1 metres] from windscreen to radiator cap, the engine running in nine individually water-cooled bearings, all working parts engineered to zero tolerance, plus or minus nothing. Daimler indeed!” My main memory of the brief drive in the Royale with Jenks as my passenger was the precise, almost feather-light feel of the steering through that huge wheel. That and the complete silence in the huge car as it wafted along the warm California streets.
The six Bugatti Royales were built between 1929 and 1930 as the world was tipping into the Depression. They had a 4300mm (169.3in) wheelbase, were 6.4m (21ft) in overall length and weighed around 3175kg (7000lb). The massive engine produced 205 to 223kW (275 to 300bhp). Its cylinders, bored to 125x130mm, each displaced more than the engine of the contemporary Type 40 touring car. It had three valves per cylinder driven by a single overhead camshaft, nine bearings and a single carburettor. The Cunningham car was reportedly made for Ettore’s daughter, L’Ebe – named after her father’s initials, EB – with a shapely, lengthy two-door Kellner Coach coupé body.
Sensational noise
The Type 59 Grand Prix car I drove, distinctive with its ‘piano wire’ wheels, aimed to provide brave, if ineffectual French opposition to Mercedes and Auto Union in the mid-1930s. Dreyfus was one of the works drivers with the Type 59, and they were all worried about the noise that emanated from the way the wires anchored to the wheel-rim. They feared it might spell mechanical disaster. Dreyfus was deputed to carry the driver worries to Ettore. He thanked them for their concern, and pointed out that he had a waiting list of top men waiting to race a factory Bugatti – if René and his mates wanted to quit, he would have to accept. They stayed.
Bugattis are noisy in every way a car can be noisy, plus a few ways peculiar to themselves
Peter Giddings loaned me his Type 59 three years ago for a gentle motorised rumble around the paddock at the Levels circuit, near Timaru, in the Southern Festival of Speed. It was the first time anyone else had driven the car and Giddings was amazed at the sensational noise it made, a combination of mechanical music, the high register of the supercharger shriek, an orchestra of meshing gears in the long 3.3-litre straight-eight engine that looks as though it had been hewn from solid metal.
Purdy, from Kings of the Road, “…most Bugattis are noisy in every way a car can be noisy, plus a few ways peculiar to themselves… The Bugatti water pump is something to make strong men weep, and some of the racing models fling oil about like a gusher gone berserk. It comes out of everywhere but the tyre valves, and gets into everything including your hair…”
Purdy definitely had a thing about the special song of a Bugatti. Again from Kings of the Road, “The sound of a 35C being fired up is a mad symphony. One advanced Bugattiste made a 10-minute recording of it. ‘Let this be the last thing I hear before I die,’ he said. It is not a simple sound to describe. No hollow, motor-boat burble marks the cranking of a Bug. The discerning ear can pick out three distinct themes: first, the excruciatingly sharp crack of the exhaust, a high-level ripping sound; second, the characteristic growling, rattling, bucket-of-bolts noise of the roller and ball-bearing engine. A racing Bugatti engine in good shape always sounds as if it were about to fly to pieces. Third, there is the siren-like rising and falling scream of the supercharger. Ah, joy!”
So even on a rainy Sunday autumn morning in Christchurch when the Bugatti sits there on the side of the road, looking gorgeous and simply refusing to work, you somehow convince yourself that it is just like being in the company of a beautiful lady, when you can forgive any of her infuriating foibles just for the enjoyment of being in exciting company. Did I say that? Must be the Bugatti talking…
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