The Bugatti EB110 Was A Quad-Turbo, V-12 Greek Tragedy — Revelations with Jason Cammisa

theater like all entertainment is very often a reflection of real life but always with the mundane cutout or you would win an Academy Award for standing in line for 2 hours at the Home Depot the Bugatti evb 110 is 100% unadulterated Tony awardwinning theater on the comedy side it was the world first all carbon superar it was the fastest car on the planet and it was presented to the public in a twod day long two country Extravaganza so opulently exorbitant it would have bankrupted Ferrari however just a few short years later comedy turned into tragedy when it all went down in flames with actual tears a suspicious bankruptcy and soap poer were the accusations of bribery and extortion Plus the realization that the whole thing had likely been financed by its own main competition plus Suzuki stay tuned for the high drama theatrical story of the fascinating Bugatti EB [Music] [Applause] 110 [Music] this episode of Revelations is brought to you by the Hagerty Drivers Club which includes a subscription to our award-winning magazine 247 flatbed roadside assistant and far more join or get more info at the link [Music] below the legendary French brand Bugatti started making cars in the early 1900s and within no time it had racked up literal thousands of major race wins Bugatti was Untouchable atori Bugatti believed that racing was a great way to Showcase his car's abilities but he wasn't a racer he was a perfectionist and a half in fact had the term obsessive compulsive disorder existed while he was alive he would have insisted that it be renamed CDO because CDO is OCD in alphabetical order as it should be mure Bugatti's cars reflected mure Bugatti's CDO not only were the engineering masterpieces but every single part was a work of art from the engine turned metal firewalls to the perfectly crafted cam boxes the cars weren't the only sculptures so too were the machines that made the cars many of which were designed by Mur Bugatti as were most of the things in the factory including the the silverware because those other people's implements were never good enough Bugatti even made his own electricity to power the factory and the electric car he designed for himself when the power company had the gall to tell him he was late with a payment you're getting the picture right let's just call a spade a spade the man was nuts or maybe he was just French it's kind of hard to tell actually he wasn't even in French he was just nuts atori was born to an Italian family in Italy a fact that he referred to as quote that accident but little did he know that 40 years after his death his company would be resurrected in Italy and that script started with a bit player named ferio Lamborghini perhaps you've heard of him he was mulling the idea of creating a new Italian Supercar about 10 years after he'd sold his own company together with a French writer and his old friend the engineer responsible for the Amura and count they contemplated calling the new car company Furla or just ferio since ferio couldn't use the name Lamborghini things got serious when they brought in a bunch of Italian Supercar Superstars and then a man named Romano artioli if that name sounds familiar it's because he was The Man Behind the Lotus Elise but that hadn't quite happened yet at the time aroli was the southern European distributor for Suzuki and had the largest Ferrari dealership in the world and he suggested that the new car be sold as a Bugatti fio eventually lost interest but through equal parts luck charm and slight of hand aroli managed to pry that French national treasure away from France and so suddenly Bugatti was back and [Music] Italian and it was relocated to Cog galano a small town biking District from Ferrari Maserati and Lamborghini this meant artii had access to the dream team of Engineers who had created every poster worthy Italian Supercar of the previous 20 years the Dream Team set out startup style to build the best supercar in the world at the same time artioli spent more than $70 million building the best Bugatti Factory in the world even the storm drain grates had the EB logo on them and no this time they didn't build a new power plant to power the factory but the air conditioning was powered by energy recovered from the dinos when breaking in the V12 engines Bugatti indeed and it gets better the ceiling design of the Rotunda was inspired by the wheel of a Bugatti type 59 with Windows to provide soft light for the designer's drawing boards it then had rows of electric lights that would automatically adjust to vary with the intensity and path of the sunlight coming in through those windows the factory was so distracting to motorists on the highway next to it that the roadway had to be artificially banked to stop people from crashing while staring at it on the day that would have been atori Bugatti's 109th birthday the new Factory was inaugurated in a ceremony that genuinely could have won an Oscar for the most dramatic performance of the century to symbolize the passing of the flame between the old factory in mosheim France and the new Factory in COG galano Italy Bugatti decided to bypass the idea of a symbolic gesture and go straight for a literal one they had the youngest employee working at the mosheim factory light a flame and place it into an ornate engine turned case mounted to the front of a Bugatti galier together in a flotilla of 77 classic Bugattis that flame was driven to Cog galano 400 mil away where the youngest employee of the new Bugatti company used it to light a torch at the factory which the Archbishop of Moda then blessed this is the kind of high camp over-the-top performance that could out drama an entire graduating class of theater Majors on Iowa WKA that was laced with MDMA and that was just the factory things get even more over the top when we're talking about the [Music] car Bugatti decanted the used oil from the first EB 110 engines that ran into little flasks resembling aaza and gave them out as gifts to engineers and friends we're painting a picture here folks the new Bugatti V12 wasn't just assembled in kug galano it was created there even the block was cast inhouse because that is how you build a Bugatti engine the Bugatti V12 never needs a belt service because it has no timing belt it also has no timing chain its four cam shafts are gear driven something you won't ever see outside of racing it had 12 independent throttle bodies feeding five valves per cylinder design licensed from Yamaha it had an entirely conventional cylinder bore of 81 mm but a piston stroke of just 56.6 that's a shorter stroke than Ferrari's 1 and 1/2 L Formula 1 V12 and likely the shortest stroke of any production car engine ever K cars included and there was a cool reason for it the engine and transmission were one unit with the transmission main shaft in the center of the car in the same tiny little case literally inches away from and parallel to the engine's crankshaft a long stroke would have resulted in longer throws pushing the transmission further away and locating the engine even further off center to the left the compression ratio was an ultra low 7 1/2 to1 and combined with that tiny piston stroke and just 3 and 1/2 L of displacement this thing is absolutely positively dead off boost but at 5,000 RPM when the Boost finally hits it turns into a monster and pulls all the way to its 8600 RPM Redline in true drama form It's All or Nothing EB 110 GTS made 553 horsepower the later SS model made 603 and was enough piss and vinegar to make the ev10 the quickest and fastest car in the world a record that stood for all of 3 months before it was beaten by the McLaren F1 but for its debut the McLaren F1 was unceremoniously plunked down in a drizzly parking lot in Monaco with a bunch of journalists asking questions when it came time to show the new Bugatti to the world artioli and Company put on a festival of thesbian histrionics so lavish that autocar magazine said it would have made a royal event at Windor castle look like a garden party but by comparison once again the date was chosen to celebrate atori Bugatti's birthday this time his 110th in case you're wondering where the name EB 110 came from the two-day long launch event kicked off at par LS with more than 5,000 invited guests to witness hours of speeches and of course a brunch there were 70 vintage Bugattis arranged in the Horseshoe shape of the classic Bugatti Grill any sort of commercial advertising was forbidden in the Esplanade but flowers were not so Archi's wife who was responsible for an entire line of Bugatti branded merch had a gargantuan floral arrangement made out of roses in the shape of the Bugatti logo ha take that Gordon Murray with your piece of M McLaren F1 this is how you do a spectacle it was absolutely miserable according to Robert cumberford from Automobile Magazine who was there and said the speeches were interminable and of no interest and worse they were in French with no interpreters available but hey the whole thing made for great publicity photos especially when it ended and the eb-10 was joined by a 50 bike motorcade of police two prototypes and a sea of vintage Bugattis all in the midst of a complete Parisian traffic nightmare fighting to get to the arct of and we're not even close to the end yet that evening 1,700 people joined for a sitdown formal dinner at The Chateau of versailes drinking Bugatti branded champagne while senori aroli and his wife danced the first dance of the evening it was a waltz in case you wanted to know it was like an Indian Royal Wedding only far more expensive meanwhile the car was already in a truck on its way to mosheim 300 M away because the next morning on the actual day of at tor's 110th birthday it would be put on display for the public to see in town and then at the Chateau San the Small Castle that atori had used to entertain his guests and to spy on their table manners to decide whether they were worthy of his car don't worry Ari's Bugatti also had a selection committee charged with doing the same though specifically they were weeding out speculators and trying to make sure that real drivers bought the eb- 110 one German made it through the screening process his name was Michael schoemer maybe you've heard of him and he took very public delivery of his eb-10 SS but then very privately crashed it somehow that never made it into the newspapers must have been driver error we all know that man can't drive and besides nobody else complained about the eb-10 handling in fact the SS made it around the nurburg ring in 7 minutes and 47 seconds that's just a couple seconds slower than the Veyron managed 12 years later later it pulled a world record. n9g on the skid pad is tested by radent track and its handling was universally praised with neutral Behavior under power because unlike other period all-wheel drive systems it sent 73% of the power to the back it rode better than any other superar it had wonderfully communicative steering it was a dynamic Masterpiece perfect even until you got in it is very 1990s in here and this is the part of the program where we go from Comedy to tragedy along the way though we need to stop at irony Bugatti took the time to cast the engine block in its own Factory to say nothing of having its own logo on the porcelain dishes in the cafeteria because nothing less would do for a car wearing a Bugatti badge and yet sitting here in the expensive seat I am looking directly at a nardy badge and a Nakamichi badge and I spy 1970s Fiat group Dash vents that are not fooling me with an EB logo on them to say nothing of the poltrona fra branding right on the seat then there were the BBS wheels an exhaust Weber fuel injection there were logos everywhere look this isn't that uncommon but the Bugatti was supposed to be different was there more marketing here than substance well there sure was a lot of substance this thing weighs just under 4,000 lb and by the way it's only as long as a gr Corolla that's a lot of weight today but back then this was an astronomically heavy car and certainly against atori Bugatti's Mantra that waight is the enemy which sounds like Lotus founder Colin Chapman whose famous formula for Success was simplify and add lightness of course Romano ortii purchased Lotus while he owned Bugatti and he envisioned a worldwide network of lotus Bugatti dealers a sports car manufacturer with those two Brands as bookends the Lotus side worked out for a while but Bugatti was in for a rough ride from the start the EB 110 was a hell of an automobile but the theater surrounding the company just turned to tragedy the likely culprit was really just timing calendar not Cam that was done by gears don't forget perhaps aroli should have taken it as an omen that 5 days after the form of Bugatti automobile SBA was Black Monday well Panic is the only way to describe what happened on Wall Street today the massive stock market crash that led to a worldwide recession the eb110 likely would have done a lot better if it was an eb15 at tor's 110th birthday was just a bad time to launch a new Supercar with a worldwide recession that just destroyed Exotic Car Sales Bugatti wanted to sell 150 of these a year and yet wound up producing only about 115 over 3 years of production however that explanation is far too rational for a melodrama like this artioli insists the company went bust with a full book of orders because a certain competitor threatened Bugatti's suppliers to stop sending parts and even paid off his employees to mess up the cars if you ask others it's because Bugatti didn't pay its bills Suzuki probably had an inadvertent part in the failure of Bugatti it cancelled Ari's distributorship as one of the Dream Team alleges because Ari pissed them off in another deal if you could ask atori Bugatti directly he'd probably just blame it all on Italy maybe it wasn't his Italian birth that was a mistake maybe it was the Italian Renaissance of his company but that produced one hell of a roller coaster remember we're looking for the highs and the lows here never the mundane and the Bugatti EB 110 was any anything but [Music] [Music] mundane [Music] [Music] a [Music] oh

Channel: Hagerty

Views: 683,342

Keywords: camisa, camissa, decanted oil, FerLa, Ferruccio, vinegar, bugatti crazy, ettore, v12, supercar, lampredi, miura, countach, diablo, f40, materazzo, bugatti history, veyron, chiron, rimac, short stroke, sound, pov, acceleration, noise, history, story

Id: OM2sUknP5Pg

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2024