A Bugatti built 70 years later

 

The Bugatti Type 64 on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum is the culmination of a decade of work and dedication by the owner Peter Mullin (the chairman of the Petersen board of directors), the designer, Art Center College of Design’s Stewart Reed and Mike Kleeves, owner of the Automobile Shaping Company of Kimball Michigan.

The Bugatti Type 64 was conceived by Gianoberto Maria Carlo “Jean” Bugatti in 1937 to be a successor to the type 57 Atlantic coupe with papillon (butterfly -  what we now call gull-wing) doors, with the detailed design work performed by Noel Domboy and Antonio Pichetto. The car was powered 270-cubic inch 2-valve DOHC straight-8 engine with chain-driven camshafts and rode on a 130-inch wheelbase chassis of riveted duralumin (then known as duraluminum) with a cast duralumin firewall and suspension pieces.

Duralumin is an alloy that is 95% aluminum, 4% copper, 0.5% magnesium, and 0.5% manganese which is malleable but after it is heat treated it becomes very hard and strong. Duralumin was used extensively in rigid airships that included the German passenger Zeppelins and the US Navy dirigibles.


While the addition of copper to the alloy added strength it also it also made it susceptible to corrosion. The combination of the labor intensive riveting process and the duralumin corrosion considerations make it hard to believe that the Bugatti type 64 could have ever been viable for production.

The ground-breaking chassis design also used Lockheed hydraulic brakes (with twin master cylinders) and telescopic shock absorbers. The transmission on this car, chassis #64002, is an Armstrong-Siddeley pre-selector gearbox paired with a Daimler fluid flywheel, a forerunner to modern automatic transmissions.    

Alas, the dreams of Jean’s “papillon” doors for the type 64 died with him in a testing accident in August 1939. While he was testing the 1939 LeMans 24-hour race wining supercharged Bugatti type 57G “tank” on a closed public road at night Jean the eldest son of company owner and founder Ettore Bugatti clipped a bicyclist struck a tree and was killed instantly at age 30.       

The Bugatti factory built three Type 64 chassis and engines and it appears that the factory built two bodies - both coupes (one with a “B” pillar – a ‘berline’ and the other a ‘hardtop’ with no “B” pillar) but both versions lacked gull-wing doors. According to the book Bugatti 57 - The last French Bugatti written by Barrie Price in testing, the type 64 “was not up to Bugatti standards with regards to the handling at high speed,” The completed berline Type 64 is shown at the museum Cité of the Automobile in Mulhouse, France which also owns the remaining chassis and engine  

The third Type 64 chassis, #64002 was completed as a running chassis before the project was abandoned.  After it passed through multiple owners, financier, car collector and museum owner Peter Mullin acquired the Type 64 chassis in 2003, Reed designed the body as an homage to Jean Bugatti’s design. Automotive Metal Shaping Company built the water-cut mahogany buck that was then used to form the car’s aluminum body panels. The Mullin car was completed in 2013, both the car and the wooden buck on part of the Petersen permanent display.

 

Photos by the author