CarBrandLogos archive · Bugatti · 1924

BugattiType 35

More race wins than any other car in history, and it looked like sculpture doing it.

Photo: Lothar Spurzem · CC BY-SA 2.0 de

The story

A defining chapter in Bugatti history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Bugatti Type 35, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Ettore Bugatti's approach to racing was that a car should be beautiful, light and made properly, and that speed would follow. The Type 35, introduced at the 1924 French Grand Prix at Lyon, is the argument for that method. Its horseshoe radiator, tapering tail and hooped body are still the shorthand image of a pre-war racing car, and almost every detail was as functional as it was elegant.

Bugatti Racing Cars

Design and engineering

The engineering was fastidious. The straight-eight ran three valves per cylinder driven by a single overhead camshaft, with a crankshaft carried on roller bearings — expensive, precise, and good for revs. Capacities ranged from 1092 cc to 2262 cc across the family, with outputs from around 60 hp to 130 hp in the later supercharged cars. The hollow front axle, forged and then drilled through so the springs passed inside it, was a piece of work that took hours of skilled labour to save a few pounds. The eight-spoke cast aluminium wheels integrated the brake drums, so a driver changing a wheel changed the brakes with it — a real advantage in long road races.

Bugatti Type35b Dashboard · SimonBelgium · CC BY-SA 4.0

In production

The family grew to cover most of what a customer might want. The 35A used simpler bearings and was sold as an affordable trainer, the 35T was built around the Targa Florio's regulations, and the supercharged 35C and 35B took the design as far as it would go. Crucially, Bugatti sold them to anyone who could pay rather than reserving the good machinery for a works team, which is why the model's record is unlike anything else in the sport. Well-funded amateurs and future professionals learned their trade in them, and a Type 35 was for several years the default way to go motor racing at all. They filled the grids of European racing throughout the second half of the 1920s, and the accumulated total of wins across grands prix, hillclimbs and minor events runs into the thousands. Five consecutive victories in the Targa Florio between 1925 and 1929 are the headline, along with the 1926 grand prix world championship for manufacturers.

1929 Bugatti Type 35 C · Pelicanactor · CC BY-SA 4.0

Legacy

Production ran from 1924 to 1930, replaced by the twin-cam Type 51, and the Type 35 became the car by which Bugatti's whole reputation is measured — the reason the name could be revived twice, decades after Molsheim stopped building anything at all. Original examples are among the most valuable pre-war cars in existence, and they are still raced.

At a glance