Meteor On The Horizon

Bugatti’s radically-lightweight new fireball the Bolide...

- Nicolas Stecher

A couple of years ago we visited the hallowed ground of the Château St. Jean in Molsheim, France. This plot of grassy earth is home not only to one of the most elegant mansions we’ve ever set foot in, it is also the holy land for automotive truth-seekers — the house which Italian furniture and jewellery designer Carlo Bugatti built in 1856 for his family, in what was then part of Germany. Ground zero for Bugatti lore, the place where Carlo’s son Ettore, one of the greatest minds in automotive history, would go on to design, engineer and build the fastest cars the planet had ever seen from 1909 to 1939. That visit was to witness the first example of Bugatti’s latest street-legal production car, the Chiron, be built and personalised. Now the French marque has lifted the veil on the craziest, fastest, most obscene track-focused version of the Chiron to date: the aptly named Bolide, meaning fireball, or an “extremely bright meteor that explodes in the atmosphere.”

“Bugatti never stands still,” vows the always sharply-dressed President of the iconic company, Stephan Winkelmann. “We are perpetually aiming for new and exciting goals, and the question that we always keep in mind is: what if?” Built around the mythical 8.0-litre 16-cylinder engine that has been the heart of every Bugatti since the brand relaunched production in 2005, the Bolide is the final solution to the challenge of producing the radically lightest Bugatti hypercar possible — one with a weight-to-power ratio more on par with a Formula One car than anything that has come before it. “Driving the Bolide,” Winkelmann notes, “is like riding on a cannonball.”