A Veyron-based speedster and two stunning Bugatti GT concepts revealed for the first time
It isn’t every day a car company lets a handful of journos take a sneak-peek at key design projects that never ended up seeing the light of day. It’s even more intriguing when the marque in question is Bugatti.
So here I am, along with five other European scribes, ensconced within a conference room in a nondescript grey building tucked away in an industrial area in Wolfsburg.
Bugatti design boss Achim Anscheidt – resplendent in his customary bowtie and a brown blazer – walks into the room and says he’s going to show us three projects that have never been seen by anyone outside the company.
We then make our way into a studio downstairs and lay eyes on a drop-dead gorgeous coupe with classic long-snout-short-tail GT proportions and curved gullwing doors.
“Back in 2014 we created the Atlantic concept, inspired by the Type 57 Atlantic,” Anscheidt explains.
“We envisioned a mid-front-mounted V8 [a 4.2-litre unit sourced from within the VW Group] with a transaxle gearbox… albeit with full interchangeability with an electric powertrain.
“We knew at this time that Porsche was working on the Taycan, but ours was a completely different approach.”
Bugatti spokesman Tim Bravo then chips in to say a second model line – in addition to the Veyron and its Chiron successor – has always been on the agenda for the brand, as evidenced by the publicly revealed EB112 and Galibier concepts.
Anscheidt adds: “However, the question on our minds at the time was whether it would be the right strategy for Bugatti to go slightly downmarket into a higher volume segment.”
Anscheidt then neatly pirouettes away from the stunning design study to show a rendering of a coupe – dubbed “Rembrandt” – that’s similar in theme to the Atlantic concept we’ve just been eyeballing, except for the fact that it has an 8.0-litre W16 engine stuffed in its snout.
“This is as exclusive as it gets,” he says. “We were considering a production run of between one and five cars, priced between $US15-20 million.”
“There is nothing that’s off the shelf in this car, and you can see from this where the inspiration for La Voiture Noire [revealed at last year’s Geneva show] came from. This is where it all started.”
With a slight smile he adds: “I was not allowed to show this car at the time to Ferdinand Piech [then VW Group Chairman] because, if he saw it, he would have wanted us to build it… and then engineering would have killed me!”
Unfortunately, the eruption of Dieselgate (in September, 2015) led to both GT projects being canned, and the Chiron nearly went the same way.
The only reason the latter lived to see the light of day is because the company was by this stage too far down the development process to axe it.
“Fortunately, our CEO at the time [Wolfgang Dürheimer] pulled all the strings he could to get the Chiron to a black zero so that at least we were not costing the company any money,” Anscheidt confides.
The third concept we see (in rendering form) is the Veyron Grand Sport-derived Barchetta – a speedster-style roadster with an ultra-low wrap-around glasshouse.
Bugatti management at the time didn’t want to venture down the path of building ultra-exclusive derivatives, so the Veyron Barchetta never gained momentum, but the company’s philosophy regarding low-volume spin-offs changed after former Lamborghini boss Stephan Winkelmann was installed as CEO in January, 2018.
Bravo explains: “The Veyron Barchetta symbolises one of our first coachbuilding proposals, 10 years before Stephan Winkelmann joined Bugatti and gave Achim Anscheidt a free hand for modern-day coachbuilding, as expressed in the Chiron-based Divo, La Voiture Noire and Centodieci.”
What a pity Winkelmann hadn’t come on board a decade earlier…
Keyword: Three secret Bugattis you've never seen before