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Hear The Words Of The Voices Behind The Bugatti EB110 As You Take A Haunting Tour Of The Former Factory And Showroom


Hear The Words Of The Voices Behind The Bugatti EB110 As You Take A Haunting Tour Of The Former Factory And Showroom

In 1987, when Romano Artioli brought Bugatti back to life, the company had been out of the automobile manufacturing business for decades. The nameplate carried weight, due to the efforts of Ettore Bugatti’s work, with early cars…look up the values for any of them if you want an exercise in head-spinning dollar amounts. Bugatti were tall, long, imposing and an immediate symbol of wealth, and they had a racing pedigree to boot. Artioli had massive shoes to fill and was well aware of the challenges that lay ahead. And the result of years of engineering effort was the EB110, a quad-turbocharged V-12 powered road car that preceded the term “hypercar”, yet fit the bill perfectly. And then, suddenly, Bugatti was gone again, not to return until the Volkswagen Group bought the rights to the company in 1998.

The EB110 was a footnote in the history of Bugatti, a quick blip in time between the old and the current, but any car built requires a team of individuals to bring the concept to life. Bugatti Automobili did just that, cranking out 139 cars before the company overextended itself by both acquiring Lotus Cars and attempting to create the EB112 sedan. Nowadays, the Bugatti Automobili factory and showroom sit, empty, frozen in time to the day production stopped in 1995. Davide Cironi got to take an EB110 back to the factory in Campogalliano and got the opportunity to interview the people behind the car: Loris Bicocchi, the test driver; Paolo Stanzani, the designer and engineer; and Artioli himself. The words are present, subtitled from Italian. But the views that Cironi captures are just haunting…the factory floor, which still looks amazing if you ignore the rainwater leaking in. The manuals, sitting unused. The deadly empty showroom…all testament to the failure of a dream, a dream of a car meant to be a world standard.


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