YouTuber Mat Armstrong Spent £4,500 on a Bugatti Part That Didn’t Work — Then Fixed the Veyron With a £40 HoseMat Armstrong's Bugatti Veyron saga has been running long enough that most people following it have stopped being surprised when something goes wrong. But the latest chapter – a £4,500 part from Bugatti that achieved absolutely nothing, followed by a forty-quid rubber hose that fixed everything – is still worth talking about.The car, a 2006 Veyron that Armstrong rescued from repossession, had been throwing a fault pointing to the fuel pump control module. When the module was plugged in, the engine cut out immediately. Unplug it, and the car ran fine – it just couldn't regulate fuel pressure without it. Armstrong's diagnosis was logical. The part seemed obvious. The problem, as it turned out, was somewhere else entirely.Getting the Part Was Its Own OrdealAt first, Bugatti refused to supply parts to buyers outside of their official dealership network. The car would need to be at their premises, serviced by their people. Armstrong's repeated calls went unanswered – according to the video, the line either rang without response or connected to a message indicating all operators were busy. Eventually, after what sounded like a genuinely exhausting number of attempts, Bugatti relented and agreed to sell him the module. The price: £4,500. Non-returnable, as the person handing over the package apparently neglected to mention until Armstrong asked.AdvertisementAdvertisementHe installed the module. The car cut out, same as before. "four and a half grand for nothing," Armstrong said on camera.To be fair to him, the failed part did narrow things down. With the new module ruling out the regulator itself, Armstrong and his father started working down through the fuel system – swapping pressure sensors between the two banks of the W16 to see if the fault would move, then swapping vacuum lines. Nothing changed.The fault stayed on the same side, which pointed toward the fuel pumps themselves. Getting to them meant draining the right-hand side of the tank and pulling hatches that revealed another hatch underneath.His father found it. The culprit turned out to be a deteriorated rubber fuel line, a high-pressure hose that sits submerged inside the tank and had fully degraded over time. "Oh, that's all perished, isn't it? That's all soggy. Yeah, that's finished, isn't it?" he said when they pulled it out.AdvertisementAdvertisement"This is a high pressure line here which connects there and pumps fuel up into the rail and this is submerged in fuel. So, this was always going to happen over time," Armstrong explained. The working theory on why it degraded is that the previous owner had been running the 2006 car on E10 fuel – a blend with 10% ethanol content that wasn't in circulation when the Veyron was built. Ethanol is an aggressive solvent, and a hose not rated for continuous immersion in it will eventually break down. When Armstrong visited hose supplier PSH to find a replacement part, a specialist there verified that this was indeed the case. "Uh yeah, the fuel would just eat into the silicon," the supplier told him. "Effectively trying to run cheaper fuel in the long run has caused a more expensive repair on this car," Armstrong said.The replacement hose – submersible, correctly rated – cost around £40. They fitted it, ran the car up, watched the fuel pressure hold steady at 4.5 bar on both banks, and drove the thing to Monaco.The Numbers Tell the Actual StoryBugatti's own maintenance guidelines for the Veyron are legendarily brutal. According to The Drive, Bugatti's official maintenance schedule calls for yearly fluid changes running roughly $25,000, new tyres priced at $38,000 per set and recommended every two to three years, and wheel replacements at $50,000 apiece after each 10,000 miles driven. The car's 8.0-litre W16 with four turbochargers producing 1,001 horsepower was never going to be cheap to live with. A base Veyron cost around $1.7 million when new.Armstrong's total bill – service parts, the repair work, everything – came in under £2,000, once you strip out the £4,500 module that had no effect on anything. "This car has been insanely cheap to repair. And if I had diagnosed it right in the first place, I wouldn't have had to spend that 4 and a half grand on that fuel control module," he said.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe Monaco road trip that followed the fix involved a detour to the Bugatti factory in Molsheim, which Armstrong found looking more or less deserted on a midweek afternoon, a brake switch issue fixed with tools borrowed from passing motorists on a Swiss mountain pass, a Lamborghini Murciélago that suffered a fuel leak and had to be trailered the rest of the way, and a Swiss police stop for exhaust noise that resulted in a £250 fine. The Veyron made it. At 13 miles per gallon at motorway speeds, fuel costs for the return journey ran to over £1,000 – comfortably more than it cost to fix the car.They staked the total fuel expenses on one roulette spin at the Monte Carlo Casino. Black came up. "I'm not sure we're going to ever get better than this," Armstrong said, parked outside.The Veyron is running. Only took a fuse, some service work, a £4,500 lesson in misdiagnosis, and forty pounds of rubber hose to get there.