By the mid-1930s the Bugatti factory in Alsace could no longer live on sales of skinny, swift, nervous near-racers so developed a market for a more civilized high-speed sports car.
The Type 57 was generally more conventional than previous Bugattis and owed much to Ettore Bugatti’s eldest son, Jean (1909–39), who was talented, active and not as stubborn as his father about adopting necessary trends from the mainstream auto industry. In fact, Jean Bugatti was in effective control of the factory from 1936, for Ettore, embittered by a strike and growing communist militancy at the factory, had largely decamped to Paris where he worked on his new and successful railcar business and his own design of racing aircraft.
Jean Bugatti would no doubt have continued the success of the Bugatti marque had he not been killed while testing a racing version of the Type 57 near the works in 1939. The fact that this occurred at ten o’clock at night on the open road to Strasbourg, supposedly closed and policed by employees from the factory, speaks of the unusual organization of the firm. Sadly, a cyclist evaded or ignored the helpers and Jean hit a tree as he veered to miss him.
The Atlantic really represents the epitaph on the original Bugatti enterprise. After Jean’s death, Bugatti design entered a twilight phase. There were no really new designs and no ruling genius to revive the firm after the war. The special Atlantic body on some Type 57s was Jean’s own creation and, while not as fluid as the aerodynamic coachwork being created in Paris for firms such as Delage and Delahaye, it is a wonderful and almost eccentric marriage of the streamline idiom with the classic sports racing car.
Bugatti’s coachwork for his ultra-rapid Type 57.