The customer is king – more than ever, this applies to those customers who spend hundreds of thousands of euros or even millions for highly individualized dream cars to give their own car collection a special shine. It’s anything but easy to make a super sports car worth millions like the Bugatti Chiron even more exclusive – but it’s possible. And in a unique way according to a very special customer request. According to Bugatti, the Chiron Super Sport Golden Era is the most demanding project that the car manufacturer from Molsheim has ever tackled through its “Sur Mesure” customization division.
Next week, the unusually styled car will be handed over to its owner at the world’s most exclusive car event, the Monterey Car Week. “Our clients can be incredibly creative and we take great pride in helping them achieve their dreams, but large scale special commissions like this are extremely rare – we don’t typically see more than one or two creations of this magnitude a year,” explains Former Bugatti chief designer Achim Anscheidt, “Considering the vision and the challenging nature of this project – and the fantastic idea we wanted to realize – ‘Golden Era’ is probably the most challenging piece of bespoke personalization work that my team and I have ever worked on have.”
The idea for the Golden Era came from a very special Bugatti customer whose name was still unknown until the handover next week in Pebble Beach, California. In conversations he expressed that the Chiron Super Sport with its W16 engine represented a milestone in the world of automobiles for him. He wanted to celebrate this status with a very special one-off piece. After that, the creative department at Bugatti looked around in its own history to find more such icons that could be combined into a golden era in the one-off. “Our team proposed a concept with 45 sketches of the brand’s icons to be drawn by hand directly on the car, and the owner was immediately enthusiastic about the idea,” recalls Achim Anscheidt, “the implementation may sound quite simple, but to achieve a perfect finish that stands the test of time required more patience and craftsmanship than one can imagine.” The customer himself kept visiting the Bugatti design workshop and thus became an important part of the working process.
Bugatti Managing Director Hendrik Malinowski: “Sur Mesure literally means tailor-made, and it is precisely this customer-centric approach to the development of luxury cars that characterizes the brand. Our teams work hand-in-hand with our customers to design exactly what they want and then work closely with them over the course of months or even years to bring it to life.” So designed, the Super Sport was born Golden Era to a frenzied painting with numerous illustrations from Bugatti history. On the passenger side, 26 hand-drawn sketches show icons such as the Type 41 Royale or the Type 57 SC Atlantic. On the driver’s side, images show the rebirth of Bugatti since 1987, from the EB 110 through the Veyron to the Chiron. Particularly spectacular: a simple depiction of the 3,712 individual parts that make up the legendary W16 engine.
