Simanaitis Says
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PUR SANG TIDBITS PART 1
MY COLLECTION OF MAGAZINES includes several of Pur Sang published by the American Bugatti Club. In fact, correspondence in its Thirty-Fifth Anniversary issue, 1960-1995, Winter 1995, prompted “Venice Grand Prix” here at SimanaitisSays. What’s more, the issue contained other tidbits, here in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow, which prompted recollections of my own.
A Family Portrait. The inside front cover of this Pur Sang contains a family portrait, identified as “Type 10 Bugatti with EB and Barbara aboard, Carlo in the background.” Wikipedia notes, “In 1907 Bugatti married Barbara Maria Giuseppina Mascherpa.” His father Carlo specialized in Art Nouveau decor incorporating Arabic influences popular at the fin de siécle.
Image from the Petersen Automotive Museum.
Wikipedia adds, “In 1907, Bugatti was appointed Production Director (Directeur des fabrications) with Deutz. Here he designed the Type 8/9. While employed at Deutz, Bugatti built the Type 10 in the basement of his home.”
Le Circuit Mont Tremblant. Club member John Kleen described the first edition of the High Mountain Vintage Classic at Le Circuit Mont Tremblant near St. Jovite, Quebec, some 80 miles northwest of Montreal. “The picturesque 2.7-mile track is nestled in the Laurentian Mountains with Lac Moore and the Riviere de Diable serving as boundaries.”
Kleen and his Type 37 coming out of the Bridge Turn at Mont Tremblant.
Twice the site of a Canadian Grand Prix (1968 and 1970), the circuit was also used for R&T-run advertiser driving experiences organized by the Jim Russell Racing School. (I was there as the magazine “driving suit.”)
Mont Tremblant was also where this Cleveland kid managed to show his big city cred: My first evening there, I asked a colleague about the glimmer of an evident city nearby. Puzzled, he said, “What you’re seeing are called the Northern Lights.”
The Colorado Grand. No less than Bob Sutherland, a founder of the Colorado Grand, wrote the Pur Sang article about the 1994 running of this event.
Spectacular scenery is but one attraction of this event. Below, Bob’s Bugatti Coupe Atlantic replica is pictured on the Gore Pass.
My recollections of the 1996 event include Bob’s offering me the wheel of this fabulous Bugatti.
1931 Bugatti Type 51, Coachwork: Coupe Atlantic by Dubos. Image from Christie’s August 2000 Auction of Exceptional Motor Cars.
“As soon as I wedged into its tight little cabin,” I wrote, “I recognized this was a racing car onto which touring coachwork had been fitted…. I amazed myself with fairly clean pause-a-tad upshifts and double-clutched downshifts of the crash gearbox, all the while entertained by wondrous hot smells of oil and machinery, a cacophony radiating from just about every element of the Bugatti that whirled, whirred, spun or reciprocated.”
Bob, rest his soul, died at age 56 in 1999. In 2013, he was honored in memory by induction into the Colorado Motorsports Hall of Fame.
Tomorrow in Part 2, we’ll see an implication of Ettore Bugatti’s oft quoted “I make my cars to go, not to stop.”
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024
Simanaitis Says 
Bugatti’s whelming dominance in Continental motor racing in the late ’20s, allied with wanting a purebred apart from the fray crafted by, as Richard Hough summed Le Patron in his wonderful tome A History of the World’s Sports Cars, with introductions by W.O. Bentley and S.C.H. Davis:
“….the horse-loving squire, the perfectionist artist, the mechanical genius and Grand Seigneur, the industrialist and sportsman” is understandable, and why Bugattis the leading choice of sports cars through the ’30s for so many of the well-heeled.
However, this outlier has read longtime Bugatti owners decrying “porous castings,” and recalls auto writer/cartoonist Ralph Stein’s preference for Alfa Romeos of the era, and that Ettore Bugatti drove a Packard Eight on long business trips (perhaps wanting solace), leaves some exploring perspective.
I can only tender a lifelong mechanic/machinist/Chrysler, then Volvo dealer, multiple Cord-owning friend, after driving another Cordite’s well tended Type 57 Bug, describing it as feeling “like an expensive pile of parts.” My own behind the wheel Bugatti experience was driving a few suburban roads and a couple exits of freeway a late friend’s well fettled Type 101, which lacked that “carved from a solid billet of steel” sensation you got from his, of all things, ’53 Nash-Healey and another friend’s Porsche 356B coupe.
As so often, I bow to Dennis’s staggering knowledge and experience, and wonder if other fans of this jewel of a website share similarities and/or insights.
Bless your heart, but my wisdom is largely book-derived. And there are those who regard E.B. as an artist/artisan not a particularly gifted engineer.
Very fine story. Vive la marque@@
Thanks, Paul. D’accord. Afsgesproken.—ds