CarBrandLogos archive · Bugatti · 1927

BugattiType 41 Royale

Seven cars built for kings who never bought one, and the engine that paid for them.

Photo: Thesupermat · CC BY-SA 4.0

The story

A defining chapter in Bugatti history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Bugatti Type 41 Royale, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

The story usually told is that a woman at a dinner party told Ettore Bugatti his cars were not the equal of a Rolls-Royce, and that the Royale was his reply. Whether or not it happened, the car behaves as if it did. Conceived in 1926 and built from 1927, it was the largest and most expensive car in the world: a chassis of enormous length, a 12,763 cc straight-eight derived from an aero engine project, three speeds in a gearbox mounted at the rear axle, and wheels the size of a small dining table.

Autorail Bugatti Mulhouse FRA 001-01 · ignis · CC BY-SA 3.0

1932 Bugatti Type 41 Royale Binder Coupé De Ville - rvr

Design and engineering

Bugatti intended to sell it to royalty, and quoted a chassis price that assumed a customer for whom money was a formality. He then had the misfortune to launch it into the Depression. Seven cars were built between 1927 and 1933, and only three were sold to outside customers; the remaining four stayed with the Bugatti family, bodied variously as a berline, coupé, cabriolet, roadster, brougham and coupé de ville by different coachbuilders. The most famous, the Coupé Napoléon, was Ettore's own, and one earlier body was destroyed after he crashed it while driving home tired.

1932 Bugatti Type 41 Royale Binder Coupé De Ville - rvr · Rex Gray · CC BY 2.0

1932 Bugatti Type 41 Royale Binder Coupé De Ville - fvr

In production

The project should have ruined the company. What rescued it was that the enormous engine, unsellable in a car, turned out to be exactly right for a railcar. Bugatti's Autorail used them in pairs and fours, sold well to the French state railways, and made more money than the Royales ever cost.

1932 Bugatti Type 41 Royale Binder Coupé De Ville - fvr · Rex Gray · CC BY 2.0

Legacy

All seven cars survive, which is remarkable given that they spent the Second World War hidden in a sewer and elsewhere to keep them from occupying forces. When one changed hands in the late 1980s it set a record price for any car, and they remain among the most valuable objects the motor industry has produced.

At a glance