CarBrandLogos archive · Bugatti · 1934

BugattiType 57

Jean Bugatti's car, and the most beautiful thing to leave Molsheim on four wheels.

Photo: Ramgeis · CC BY-SA 3.0

The story

A defining chapter in Bugatti history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Bugatti Type 57, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

By the mid-1930s Ettore Bugatti was spending much of his time in Paris, and his eldest son Jean was effectively running the design office at Molsheim. The Type 57, launched in 1934, was the first Bugatti that was fully his, and the difference showed: where his father's cars were engineering exercises that happened to be beautiful, Jean's were designed as objects from the outset.

1937 Bugatti Type 57SC Gangloff Drop Head Coupe profile · No machine-readable author provided. Sfoskett~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY-SA 3.0

Design and engineering

Underneath was a 3,257 cc twin-overhead-camshaft straight-eight in a conventional chassis, a deliberate simplification of the sprawling model range that had preceded it. Around 710 cars were built between 1934 and 1940, most of them bodied in-house to Jean's designs, each with a name: the Ventoux coupé, the Stelvio cabriolet, the Galibier saloon and the Atalante, a two-seat coupé of exceptional grace. The lowered, supercharged Type 57SC chassis produced the fastest and most valuable of them.

Bugatti Type 57C

In production

One body has become the most famous car in the world in some circles. The Atlantic, of which four were built, used a riveted dorsal seam running the length of the roof and tail — a detail inherited from an experimental magnesium-alloy prototype whose panels could not be welded, kept because it looked extraordinary. Two survive, and one changed hands privately for a figure reported to be the highest ever paid for a car.

1935 Bugatti Type 57T Tourer · Brian Snelson · CC BY 2.0

Legacy

The Type 57 also won Le Mans, in 1937 and again in 1939 with a streamlined tank-bodied version. Weeks after that second victory, Jean Bugatti was killed near Molsheim while testing the winning car, swerving to avoid a cyclist who had wandered onto the closed road. He was thirty. The company never fully recovered, and the Type 101 that followed after the war was little more than a rebodied Type 57 sold into a world that had moved on.

At a glance