Bugatti Centodieci

Achim Anscheidt and Nils Sajonz had six months and an awkward brief: make a Chiron look like an EB110 without copying one. The reading is clever rather than literal. The nose drops far lower than a Chiron's, the horseshoe grille is reinterpreted at EB110 proportions, and the slab headlamps of the 1991 car become slim LED units. The roofline and profile are new, the surfaces flattened into planes that catch light in the Bauhaus manner the original used. The signature move is the C-line, reshaped so each flank carries five round cooling ports arranged as a diamond, a direct quotation of the EB110's intakes. Air goes in there, passes over the engine under a glass cover borrowed conceptually from the Italian car, and leaves at the tail. That glass panel is the detail people remember, because it makes the W16 part of the exterior design. The work was done in CAD and virtual reality rather than by the traditional route, which is a quiet irony for a car whose whole argument is a tribute to 1991.

The Centodieci itself has never turned a competitive wheel and never will. Bugatti runs no racing programme, and a ten-car coachbuilt hyper sports car has no class to enter anywhere in the world. The racing in this story belongs to the car it honours. The EB110 was campaigned in period, and the Italian company built two factory EB110 LM race cars with the V12 lifted to around 660 PS, which ran at Le Mans in 1994 while Campogalliano was already in financial trouble. That effort is part of why the EB110 matters, and part of what the Centodieci is acknowledging. Molsheim's own modern competition life is demonstration rather than competition: cars taken to circuits and hill climbs, historic Bugattis run at speed events, and a serious racing record that belongs entirely to the pre-war company. The Centodieci is a monument to a race car, built by a manufacturer that no longer races, and there is nothing dishonest in that as long as nobody pretends otherwise.

The Centodieci's cultural weight comes from an act of corporate reconciliation. For years the EB110 sat outside the official Bugatti narrative, an Italian interruption between Molsheim's pre-war cars and Volkswagen's Veyron, and Bugatti's own literature simply skipped over it. Building a ten-car tribute at eight million euros a copy, then publishing a photo essay of a Centodieci parked beside an EB110, settled the argument in the most expensive way available. The reveal itself, at The Quail in August 2019 on the marque's 110th anniversary, was pure modern Bugatti: a car shown to an audience that already owned the last one. Beyond that its public life is small by design. It appears in Bugatti's own films and at concours events, and it has been produced as a LEGO Speed Champions set, which is how most people under fifteen have encountered it. Ten cars in private hands generate very little else, and that scarcity of coverage is itself part of what the buyers were paying for.

Living with a Centodieci means accepting that you own coachwork as much as a car. Mechanically it is a Chiron, which means it is well understood, thoroughly developed and supported by a factory that will send people to you. The body is not a Chiron, and that is where the thinking has to change: the panels, the lights, the glass engine cover and the reshaped C-line exist in ten sets, so a stone chip or a kerbed splitter becomes a conversation with Molsheim rather than a trip to a body shop. Owners behave accordingly. The car offered in Paris in 2025 had covered 437 km in almost three years and had never had a service appointment, which is the norm rather than an outlier. Cars that sit need their fluids, batteries and tyres tracked by date. The rest is administrative: insurance, storage, transport and customs paperwork are permanent features of ownership at this level, and none of them is a reason not to drive the car, only a reason to plan the drive.