In recent years, the Le Mans 24 Hour race has been dominated by the likes of Toyota, Porsche and Audi but back in the early 1900s, when the now-legendary event was new on the scene, it was a different picture. If you wanted half a chance of winning, you’d bring either a Bentley, an Alfa Romeo or a Bugatti.
The French marque hasn’t officially raced at the Le Sarthe circuit for decades, only making appearances at the 1994 race with its EB110 LM and in 1996 with a privateer team. But it looks like a Bugatti Le Mans return may be on the cards, as a radical track-only version of the Chiron hypercars has been spotted testing at the Paul Ricard circuit in the South of France.
The hypercar looks drastically different from the standard Chiron. The nose, for instance, sits far lower and the iconic Bugatti grille has a vertical splitter in the middle of it, possibly to channel air beneath the car. There are also two gigantic vents sculpted into the bonnet and a sizeable scoop on top of the cockpit to feed air into what we presume will be an 8.0-litre W16 engine.
So why do we think this could be a Le Mans car in disguise? Well, there are new regulations coming in next year that will see today’s LMP1 category dropped in favour of a hypercar class, where racers are based on limited-run performance cars that are homologated to road use.
While we can’t say for sure that the Chiron spied in France is a new Le Mans challenger that’ll go up against the Toyota GR SuperSport and Brabham BT62, as it may just be a track-only monster for wealthy racing fans, it could be a sign that Bugatti is plotting its first major motorsport return in a century.
Keyword: Bugatti '0.67': will the French marque take on Toyota at Le Mans?