BUGATTI TYPE 35B
If Ettore Bugatti (1881–1947) had designed only one car, the Type 35B would be enough to make him immortal. His father, Carlo, was an artist, jeweller and designer of Art Nouveau furniture so Ettore studied art at the Accademia Brera in Milan. However, he was also strongly drawn to the new field of motoring and became an apprentice at the Milan firm of Prinetti & Stucchi. In 1899 Bugatti won the tricycle class in the Grand Prix of Reggio Emilia on a Prinetti & Stucchi machine of his own design.
By 1910 Bugatti had set up as a manufacturer at Molsheim, Alsace, where he produced a fascinating series of high-performance cars that had extraordinary – even perverse or archaic – features. Bugatti always refused to be influenced by the mainstream auto industry and has been called ‘the last of the artist-engineers’, able to build a business around his own personality and tastes. His designs were strongly influenced by his car philosophy of le pur sang – the thoroughbred – a reflection of his passion for horses and dogs. Indeed, his mechanical parts can often seem organic – the exquisitely forged front axle ends for the Type 35 remind us more of a wrist than a machine part.
The eight-cylinder Type 35, introduced in 1924, has been called the most aesthetically satisfying racing car ever made. It gained a phenomenal reputation because, apart from the many Grand Prix races won by the factory, amateurs, too, could buy one and win. It represents the high point of Bugatti’s production, for it came at a time when his factory’s meticulous craftsmanship and hand assembly could produce a significantly superior performance. Later, as Bugatti sought to keep up with the increasingly industrialized output of his rivals, the cars became more thickset and the lightness, poise and accuracy of the Type 35B were never to be recaptured.
Original poster from 1925.
H. Heusser in the Buckower Dreieck – a triangular circuit east of Berlin, c.1924. The Type 35 was a ‘catalogue racer’ that you could buy and win with.