Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

If you can believe it, the greatest car of all time has been around for 20 years now. That’s right, the Bugatti Veyron officially entered production in September 2005, following an extremely long, fraught development cycle — one that I was glued to like the kid watching TV in “Poltergeist,” but in a good way. I devoured every Veyron spy shot and update in the magazines and web blogs. When it finally went on sale, I marveled at every print review and “Top Gear” appearance, saved photos of every new one that got spotted, argued about which new special edition was best on forums, recited every piece of trivia to anyone who would listen; usually that was just my parents. (Did you know it’ll run out of fuel in less than 8 minutes at top speed?) In my professional career, I bring up the Veyron at almost every opportunity. I might have spent more time of my life thinking about the Veyron than anything else, car-related or otherwise.

It was six years between the Veyron entering production and me actually seeing one for the first time, and I happened to see three all in the same day when I visited the Los Angeles Auto Show as a freshman car design student. Every spotting since has taken my breath away, even in recent years when I’ve been lucky enough to attend car shows that Bugattis frequent, and live in a city where I can just randomly spot one driving down the street pretty often. The Veyron remains a mythical creature, a technical impossibility, a total moonshot work of art that somehow lives right here on our planet, on our roads. If there were automotive wonders of the world, it would be at the top.

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

So you can imagine what it was like for me walking onto the lawn of the Las Vegas Concours last weekend, where there were forty-five Veyrons all organized together as part of a 20th anniversary celebration. Not only was it the largest public gathering of Veyrons ever, but it was the largest number of Bugattis in one place ever. And there were actually 47 Veyrons, as Broad Arrow had auctioned one off the night before for a record price and placed it in a separate section of the show, and Bugatti had a Veyron on its stand, a glorious white Super Sport that was the 300th car built. Also amongst the 45 Veyrons were three Mistrals and eight Chirons, and flanking the Super Sport 300 on Bugatti’s stand was another Chiron Super Sport, another Mistral, a one-of-ten Centodieci, a one-of-40 Bolide, a one-of-40 Divo named Lady Bug, and the design model for the Tourbillon.

It was extremely overwhelming, and I feel like I’m still riding the high of that day. Just as overwhelmed was Bugatti director of design Frank Heyl, who joined the company in 2008 as a senior exterior designer. “Even I am at 18 years with the brand, and I haven’t seen this many Bugatti Veyrons in one spot ever,” Heyl told me as we decompressed from the show in the shade next to the Bugatti stand and reflected on the Veyron’s legacy, secrets of its design and development, how the art of Bugatti family members influences new cars 100 years later, and why there never has been, or ever will be, another car like the Veyron.

Genesis

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

It’s honestly impossible to overexaggerate what an accomplishment the Veyron was, especially given the targets set by then-Volkswagen-Group-chairman Ferdinand Piëch, who announced the revival of the Bugatti brand in 1998. When Volkswagen green-lit the project in 2001, two years after the concept car’s reveal, the purported specs seemed like total fantasy. “First car with a thousand horsepower, first car to 400 kilometers an hour, first car that’s a million Euros; it set a whole segment that didn’t exist until then. Nobody had heard of a car for a million euros. Nobody had heard of a car that goes 400 kilometers an hour, nobody had heard of a car with a thousand horsepower,” Heyl said. “1,001 horsepower like ‘One Thousand and One Nights,’ that’s where it came from.”

Piëch’s inspiration for the 400-kph-plus top speed (just over a measly 248 American miles per hour) came from the Porsche 917 racing program that he was also the mastermind of. “His strategy for Le Mans — this is before the Hunaudières straight had two chicanes, it was just one straight — was to just outrun top speed everyone else, and leave the corners to the others. And this was a brilliant race strategy that got him and Porsche many wins. He had a top speed in excess of 50 kilometers an hour over everybody else. And then in the corners it’s hard to pass, just make yourself wide,” Heyl recounted. But of course, instead of being track-focused like so many supercars, the Veyron would be the ultimate hyper GT, something actually usable day-to-day that also happened to be able to reach 400 kph. Piëch famously said he wanted you to be able to hit that top speed in the morning, and take your wife to the opera in the evening.

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

To achieve those speeds, the Veyron used a newly developed W16 engine that originated from a sketch drawn on a napkin during a bullet train ride. One of Piëch’s most outrageous powertrains was Volkswagen’s VR6 engine, which used a narrow 17-degree V bank angle to transversely mount a V6 engine in a compact car. The Group developed subsequent W-shaped eight- and twelve-cylinder engines, and the Veyron’s W16 was like two narrow-angle VR8s stuck together, mated at a 90-degree angle. “The W16 engine came from saving space. That engine is only 645 millimeters long. It’s much shorter than a V12 because the cylinders are staggered, they’re not next to each other,” Heyl said. “So it’s fairly wide, the engine, but fairly short.”

Heyl described the engine architecture as the Veyron’s “master key.” Unlike most supercars, its gearbox is mounted in front of the engine, and because it’s all-wheel drive (still a supercar rarity in 2005), there’s a second prop shaft going along the crank case to the back. “That makes the wheelbase only 2,700 millimeters. It’s very short, it’s two meters wide, it’s not that low actually versus other cars — the Tourbillion is lower than the Veyron,” said Heyl. “All these dimensions led to a unique appearance. What I love about the Veyron from the perspective of the architecture is for what it is, how small it actually is.” We think of supercars as being these super extreme, extravagant, elongated vehicles, but the Veyron really isn’t. At 175.7 inches long and 47.4 inches tall, it’s about three inches shorter in both measurements than a 992-generation Porsche 911.

Form follows function

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

That focus on the engineering and performance targets above all else resulted in a totally unique shape in the world of supercars, one that was classy and understated yet impactful and imposing. It was instantly recognizable as a Bugatti, both because of more explicit brand signatures and the sculpture and vibe of bodywork itself. “People say, ‘yeah, you do a bunch of sketches’, but design is, you go into the very bits and pieces of architecture and you put everything the right way. Only like that you come to no compromises in proportion. And what works technically usually is aesthetically pleasing too,” Heyl told me. “And then you start putting a theme on, putting a line on, putting a color on. That is all secondary. If the proportions are right, only then you can put a Bugatti line and put a center line, put a two-tone color split on, put a horseshoe grille on. All these things are secondary to first shaping the architecture and then the proportions.”

Not only was the Veyron a different sort of supercar in size and proportion, but in stance as well. “What’s also remarkable from a design perspective I find is the body posture of a Veyron. Unlike all these seventies Gandini wedge-shaped cars, the Veyron is leaning back. It’s quite a normal gesture, or body posture,” Heyl said. Compared to other 2000s supercars like the Ferrari Enzo and Koenigsegg CC8S, the Veyron seems downright relaxed.

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

“The belt line is dropping. That’s very unusual. I love the form language being quite solid. It is almost like a Boolean operation,” Heyl said. (In digital design, Boolean operations are methods or programs that take two or more shapes that are overlapping and intersecting, then combining them, subtracting from each other or excluding overlapping areas, sometimes resulting in a new shape.) “You’ve got this big carved out, full volumes, almost no line to it. And it has that kind of tennis ball intersecting two volumes; the front section, which is usually another color, and then the rear section, and they intersect on the air intakes. The body side has a criss-crossing ground plane. The front dives into the air intake and then the rear takes over. When you look at it from front view, that’s how it’s got that planted stance. It’s got that fat ass actually, I love that.”

The Veyron’s rear end is Heyl’s favorite aspect of the design. “It’s just so unusual. It’s just vertical lines and these big arches. To me the most significant thing on a Veyron is the rear three quarter panels because I just love those, sorry, those are sexy shapes. The wheel arch, it’s just a simple surface and then a big blended wheel arch. And the way that the rear wheel sits in that is gorgeous. That’s my favorite corner,” Heyl said. He then brought it back to the Booleans, talking about the exposed engine bay and pair of shiny intakes. “What I also love is you have that volume of the car and then you have almost the drive train intersecting. The engine comes out and it has these two scoops from metal and it looks like the engine. And these scoops are all just one sculpture that’s sort of intersecting with the exterior and it looks out the top.”

The Super Sport

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

The first project that Heyl worked on when he was hired by Bugatti in 2008 was the Super Sport, an even more powerful model that aimed to surpass the standard Veyron’s top speed (and other, jankier supercars that had beat it by a little bit). The Super Sport did just that, reaching 267.856 mph (431.072 kph) against the 16.4 Veyron’s 253.81 mph (408.47 kph). Heyl remembers going to watch the testing team at work at Ehra-Lessien, the famous track in a village outside of Wolfsburg in northern Germany. You’ll remember Ehra-Lessien from the multiple “Top Gear” episodes where the original Veyron and then Super Sport showed off their top-speed abilities.

“It’s very secretive. It was originally built close to the east and west German border, which was a no-fly zone. Mr. Piëch wanted to have it there so that no spy planes could actually take pictures of prototypes so that you could run the prototypes without any camouflage. So that place had a myth. When I first got to that place, that’s where the Bugatti was being developed in that very special, almost cold war kind of... it had a very special aura to it somehow,” Heyl said. “And so I remember standing by the guard rail, like triple guardrails, three lane, eight kilometer, dead straight. Not a single wave in it, just absolute perfect tarmac, one-degree angle for the water to run off. And at two ends, banking curves.”

“You were supposed to as a test driver, to reach 400, go through the banking curve at 250 kilometers an hour already, and you level into the plane and then you fully hammer it up to 400. I was standing by the guardrails and the test car was coming by at 400. You wouldn’t hear engine noise, you wouldn’t hear anything. It would be like a jet going by like this—” Heyl said, making a whooshing noise and miming how his pant legs were baffled by the wind. “And I was like, ‘f**k, this is what I want to be doing.’ So I stuck to it, 18 years later still here.”

That feeling is really behind the why of it all when it comes to the Veyron. “It was a certain fascination that comes from these pioneering spirits. So yeah, of course you can say why would you want to go 400 kilometers an hour? But then you could also say, why would you want to as a human ever travel faster than sound, or why would you want to go to the moon?” Heyl opined. “I know these things can’t be directly compared, but the pioneering spirit is what I loved about how the engineers went to work. That’s what really got me fascinated. And I became half an engineer myself. I don’t have an engineering degree, but by sitting in these meetings for years and years and learning and experimenting with aerodynamic shapes and finding solutions and listening to the best engineers, how they solve things, that made me half an engineer too.”

He wanted to do a longtail Veyron

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

You might not think an additional fourteen miles per hour would require a lot, but gaining another 14 mph when you’re already doing over 250 mph is a much taller ask than when you’re already doing 200 mph. Bugatti gave the Super Sport another 200 horsepower and nearly as much more torque, improved the engine cooling, reworked the chassis for even better handling and more grip, and totally overhauled its aerodynamics.

“The story with the Veyron Super Sport is upgrade the engine and lower the drag. So how do you do that? To lower the drag, take away the ram induction air intakes, put a flat NACA duct that has zero resistance. The air travels over it and curls in and gets drawn into the intake,” said Heyl. One of my favorite Super Sport details is the extension of the roof and rear cowling, surrounding and covering more of the engine while still leaving much of it exposed to the elements. “Extend the roof a little bit, close the roof, but still have a free vision onto the engine bay. That’s why the roof’s like that.”

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

Heyl told me he wanted to give the Veyron Super Sport a long tail back then but didn’t have the opportunity, as “it was just too much change,” and the car didn’t end up needing it. The Veyron already had a pioneering blown rear diffuser, with a blatantly visible center-exit exhaust pipe and two hidden pipes in the diffuser in either side. While Heyl couldn’t do the long tail, he was able to give the Super Sport its own unique rear end in a different performance-enhancing way. “I couldn’t do the long tail, but I could do a double diffuser,” Heyl said. “These are the days of the 2009 Braun GP in Formula 1, when they had this double diffuser which was just killing everybody. And I was like, ‘yeah, double diffuser, let’s put it on.’” It resulted in a totally dramatic new look for the Veyron.

Fast-forward to 2019, when Bugatti is working on a Super Sport version of the Chiron that has 300 mph in its sights. “Alright, now is the time,” Heyl said. “That was my opportunity. We didn’t need double diffuser, I could actually just extend the whole tail, bring the actual cutoff area to a smaller cross section. The smaller you can get that the less weight you have, the less drag you’ll get. So that’s why the Super Sport has 44% less tear off area than a regular Chiron.” In addition to its longer tail end, the Chiron Super Sport got its own stacked exhaust system and diffuser design, and the rear wing stayed flush when it smashed past the 300-mph barrier. “There’s a lot of experience that came from now almost 20 years in doing these high-speed programs. A lot of the experience from those days went into the next project and it’s always, okay, we found this at the next opportunity, we’re going to put it in the car.” Hopefully that bodes well for a potential Tourbillion Super Sport.

Every detail matters

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

Heyl showed me a photo of him working on a Super Sport clay model (“back when we still did that”), that looked just like the final car, save for one important detail. “That’s how the front of the Super Sport used to look like, before I found out that I needed another chamfer for the air to go into the brakes,” Heyl said, pointing out the air vent underneath the headlights that was added on the Super Sport and Grand Sport Vitesse models. “That vent used to just be a slot, and then we went into the wind tunnel line and found out sh*t, no air goes in there, the air goes over.” That’s no good.

“So I had to take this bottom surface and angle it in so that air that streams up gets caught on the underside of the headlight and gets forced into the brake cooling ducts. We have problems with brakes overheating, because you put another 200 horsepower on the acceleration in every corner, you’re a little faster, a little more heat in the brakes and you need to cool better,” Heyl explained. “So that’s why it all has a story. Each corner, each little feature has a story behind it, why exactly that looks the way that it looks.” The Super Sport and Grand Sport Vitesse also got new bumper intakes, plus a chin strap mesh grille running along the lower edge, which contained better integrated U.S.-spec marker lights than the early Veyron bumpers.

Like the haze on a long, straight road

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

Heyl is particularly proud of the Super Sport’s horizontal-split color scheme. Before then, Veyrons either were a single color, or they had the classic Bugatti A/B tennis ball split. The World Record Edition used bright orange on the car’s lower third and exposed carbon-fiber on the upper two-thirds, with the wheels and other design elements being painted orange to match. “I made it horizontal split to incorporate something new, always,” Heyl said. Since the Super Sport, every new model or variant has introduced some sort of new color scheme or color split. “I came up with the idea to level out the proportions. I wanted a two-third upper half, one-third lower half so that it would horizontally divide the car and you would read it as a lower car even though it’s obviously the same volume”.

It was especially impactful at Ehra-Lessien. “So we see it from a distance, and we did the record in July — it was hot, you get that reflection in the road. If you see a hot road and it’s kind of flurrying in the distance, when the image bounces into the street and it’s almost like the sky is part of the street from very far away,” described Heyl “That thing, it looked like it was traveling on a pillow of orange. I quite like that still.” One of Heyl’s favorite cars at the show was a Grand Sport Vitesse with a horizontal split of blue carbon fiber and bright blue, with the wheels painted to match. (There was another with the same split, but white on top and bright blue on the bottom.)

If you’re using amazing materials, show them

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

But in the grand scheme of Veyron color schemes, the World Record Edition Super Sport doesn’t come close to the visual art of some of the other Veyrons on display in Vegas. Many of the cars at the show were early 16.4 coupes, which made up 252 of the Veyron’s total 450-car production run. Already in development when Heyl joined was the convertible Grand Sport, of which 58 were made starting in 2009, then there were 48 Super Sport coupes, and 92 Grand Sport Vitesse convertibles. (The Vegas show consisted of twenty 16.4 coupes, eight Grand Sports, five Super Sports, and thirteen Vitesses.) At first, the Veyron 16.4 was either available only with paint in a single color or the two-tone finish, with more customization options and color choice than any other automaker at the time — and by a huge margin.

“When series production was picking up back then, let’s say the first hundred Veyrons, they’re all solid colors,” Heyl said. “As that started rolling, people started getting used to having any color you like on the interior and exterior. That was not normal [in the supercar world] back then. People started individualizing just with colors.” As the appetite for more extreme customization increased, Bugatti had the idea for not just exposed carbon-fiber body panels, but colored carbon, something not even being dreamed about by other car companies.

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

“So we said, ‘okay, exposed carbon fiber, okay, great.’ [We needed a] new set of tools, because lots of the first Veyrons actually have aluminum exterior panels, not carbon fiber. That’s how we also went, ‘okay, let’s stay with true material-ness, let’s create the Pur Sang.’ That was the car that started the whole thing,” Heyl said. The Pur Sang was the first special edition Veyron, with only five being built following its debut in 2007. Its front and rear fenders, doors, front bumper and side skirts were all made from polished aluminum (more on that in a moment), while the hood, roof, rear deck and rear bumper were exposed carbon fiber. “We called it grey carbon fiber because it’s just carbon fiber as it is; graphite gray, clear coat on it, that’s it. Then we thought, ‘okay, let’s do the next version,’ which was called Sang Noir.”

Bugatti made twelve Sang Noirs, and two of them were on display in Vegas, including the only one with a red interior instead of the Tangerine orange of the other eleven. The Sang Noir used the same material split as the Pur Sang, with exposed carbon on the hood, roof and center rear section. But its carbon fiber has a 10% black paint tint in the clear coat, which makes for it a super subtle contrast against the black paint of the other body panels. “At second glance you think, ‘okay, it’s a black car.’ You walk up to it, and only from meter away you realize, ‘oh, it’s exposed carbon fiber,’ but it’s so dark you can barely make it up,” Heyl said. “We always said it’s like wearing the mink inside. It’s very understated, just very much like the character of the Veyron overall is.” The Sang Noir also got special black headlights and bright polished pieces like the grille and mirrors.

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

From there it was off to the races. Bugatti did a car with blue-tinted carbon next, expanding to basically anything the customer could think of. The company offered three different blue-hued carbon fibers, as well as green, brown, red, purple, and more. “And so that’s also where customers started saying, ‘Oh, it’s $300,000 extra. Yeah, great, I’m getting it.’ From that point on, the individualization spec worth picked up, what people were, let’s say, willing to spend to individualize their car,” Heyl said with a smile. Now Bugatti can do basically whatever the customer desires, including extremely intensive paint jobs on already limited-run car. “We have the Lady Bug here as a prime example, the Divo. I mean that was such a complicated project to do. It took me almost a year.”

Damn, I look good

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

That first Veyron to have blue-tinted carbon fiber was at the show, another favorite of both Heyl and I. Called the Sang Bleu, it was the first special Grand Sport to be shown, combining polished aluminum body panels with that blue carbon. It sold last year in Miami for over $3 million at an RM Sotheby’s auction. (Annoyingly, the car currently has wheels that look like the original stock units but are larger replicas, which some Veyron owners do to be able to fit cheaper, more readily-accessible tires on them.) One of the Super Sports at the show had a full blue carbon body like the original press car; it was a Euro-spec model that the owner apparently spent over a year getting homologated. Another Super Sport, the Alkon, has the Super Sport color split with blue carbon on top and bright silver on the bottom, while the fifth Super Sport at the show had the WRE scheme but wasn’t actually one of those editions, having its own wheel finish and interior. One Vitesse that used to be local to me but sadly is no longer combines a cream with blue carbon, and another pairs shiny black carbon with satin black paint, plus orange accents and wheels, bright grilles, and a bright orange interior.

The Sang Bleu wasn’t the only exposed-aluminum Veyron at the show, either. To cap off the car’s production run, Bugatti produced a series of six Les Légendes de Bugatti special editions based on the Grand Sport Vitesse that were dedicated to racing legends from the company’s past. Just three of each were made, and one of the Meo Costantini examples was at the show. Named after a two-time Targa Florio who was head of Bugatti’s race team and a close friend of company founder Ettore Bugatti. This Legends model got its own unique color split scheme, paying homage to the Type 35 by pairing Bugatti Dark Blue Sport paint with polished aluminum bodywork that gets a clear lacquer coating. It’s especially impressive when looking at the front wings, where both paint and aluminum is found on the same piece of body. Another fabulous touch are laser engravings of past Bugatti race cars on the leather door panels. There was also a Jean-Pierre Wimille Legends edition at the show, also beautiful but not nearly as shiny.

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

This was my first time getting to see a Veyron with polished aluminum panels in person (not to mention two!), and it was just breathtaking. Even with these two cars being a bit dirty and not polished as well as they probably could have been, the aluminum panels were bright and clear enough to provide as crisp a reflection as a mirror, looking spectacular under the bright Vegas sun. “Actually polished aluminum is mega difficult to do. The scrap rate was... some of the people polishing these doors would go through the actual skin with their polishing tools because they had polished off too much,” Heyl said, “so it’s very, very difficult to get right.” One Vitesse customer wanted all of his Vitesse’s body panels to be made out of milled aluminum, which cost more than the $2.5 million car itself.

Light and magic

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

Two Veyron Grand Sport Vitesses and two Chiron Super Sports at the show (the latter owned by a wife-and-husband duo) had what Bugatti calls the Vagues de lumière paint scheme. That’s French for “waves of light,” as the stripes are inspired by the way light reflects on the car’s bodywork. The first Bugatti to feature this motif was the one-off L’Or Blanc from 2011, which had a white and blue color scheme and real porcelain trim inside and out. Its stripes were laid out and painted by hand — Heyl’s hands, in fact.

“I taped that personally,” Heyl said. “When I was done when I was done taping that and we dismantled the car and sprayed everything, I was like, ‘f**k, I never want to do this again. This is too much.’ In the evening I would go to bed after thirteen and a half hours of just taping, I would close my eyes and I would have lines on my eyes. It was like looking at a test picture of a TV for too long, going to imprint on your eyes. So I thought, ‘I’m never going to do this again.’ Little did I know we had to do eight of those in the end. From [the L’Or Blanc] it took off.” Now Bugatti will even do the Vagues de lumière in combination with carbon fiber, which is even more difficult.

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

Another of Heyl’s favorites is the red-and-black Vagues de lumière Vitesse named Hellbug, owned by the same people as the Ladybug Divo. But the car I probably took the most photos of at the show in general was the other Vitesse, with Vagues de lumière paint in bright blue and white, bright-finished grille mesh (a must-have Veyron option in my opinion), and a searing Tangerine leather interior accented by dark blue carbon fiber. Absolutely sensational.

Even the seats are cool

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

I brought up the cream-over-brown Veyron that sold at Goodwood this year, one of my favorite Veyron specs ever, especially because it has the comfort seats. “Do you like the comfort seats?” Heyl asked, to which I responded that I love them. “Why?” I said partially it’s because so few Veyron owners spec’d them, but I really love the design, with dramatic bolstering, horseshoe-shaped headrests held up by metal arms, and embossed logos in the seatbacks. Plus, in a car like the Veyron I want power seats, instead of the carbon-fiber-backed manual-adjustable Sparco buckets in most Veyrons.

“I have to say both seats are good. You can also sit in the Sparco seat, which is fine and it looks pretty good too, but it’s a little more, let’s say, seen it before somewhere,” Heyl said. “But the comfort seat is made by Recaro, it’s so unusual. And you are right, the minority of owners have actually ordered that seat. Most seats are the Sparco seats,” Heyl says. “That’s what I would be looking for too, is rarity. And they are actually really comfortable, adjusting the backrest is pretty good.”

Where did it all start?

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

At the 1999 Tokyo Auto Show, Bugatti unveiled the Veyron concept (below), which was penned by Jozef Kabaň under Volkswagen design director Hartmut Warkuß. Heyl recently got to see that car next to a production Veyron at the company’s headquarters in Molsheim, and while they look very similar at first (impressively so, even), there are actually many differences with the designs.

“Having them side by side, you would see, okay, yeah, the themes are there, but everything’s changed. The horseshoe is lower, the intakes are not as deep anymore. The headlights are higher, the front wheel is smaller, it’s got a different air outlet consequence. Even the shut line of the door is different. The side window is a little lower, the interior is completely different. The back end didn’t have a wing. So there’s a lot of development work that went into that thing to make it still look like that. And it’s only because of Piëch really hard saying ‘This is what it looks like, guys, no changing, I want that.’ So sometimes it takes somebody to say, ‘no, this is how it is.’”

Bugatti

The engine was also totally different, as the brand was initially thinking about a naturally aspirated, three-bank W18 before landing on the Veyron’s quad-turbo, four-bank W16. (A lightly updated version of the Veyron 18/3 was shown in 2000, renamed the Veyron 16/4 with that new engine.) Early prototypes of the production car gained a fent in the front fenders ahead of the door, but that didn’t end up being needed.

There were two other concept proposals from other in the Volkswagen Group that Piëch passed on in favor of Kabaň’s Veyron. One was the 18/3 Chiron, designed by Giugiaro and actually displayed at auto shows. The other was designed by Walter de Silva in Spain with help from Steve Lewis, it had seemed lost to time, relegated to a few low-res images circulating the internet that originated from a European magazine story years ago.

At least, not until now. Walter de Silva’s Veyron concept emerged at a German auto museum and then Bugatti’s own event at Molsheim earlier this year, and it’s an extremely weird thing that I am truly obsessed with. While I think Piëch chose the right proposal in the long run, it’s fun to think about an alternate history where that’s the car that Bugatti made. With the company now proudly presenting it as part of Bugatti’s heritage, maybe we’ll even see some of its whimsy on future models.

First encounters

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

I asked Heyl about the first time he saw a Veyron, and like me it was a memorable moment.

“I started my design career at Volkswagen Design in Wolfsburg in 2002, and they already had a theme park called the Autostadt where every brand of the Volkswagen Group has a pavilion, and there was a Bugatti in there. So that’s where I first saw one, but it was so far — I was like, ‘okay, great, this is the Bugatti. I’ll never be there.’” Cut to just six years later, and Heyl is working at the marque.

“When I first arrived at Bugatti, we had a prototype with over a hundred-thousand kilometers on the clock. And it had different body panels, like a green bonnet and a grey back end, a total mosaic kind of car. And I got to drive that in Ehra-Lessien in this mythical test facility, which got me just... oh my God. The acceleration. I remember, okay, by today’s standards it’s only a thousand horsepower car, but still, two and a half seconds it went from zero to 60.”

(Unrelated to those comments from Heyl, but the above Grand Sport was another favorite of mine, a classy silver over Havana spec with the ultra-rare Hermès wheels, all four of which were curbed. Schwarzenegger’s old Vitesse was also present, with a similar color scheme.)

Authenticity is key

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

“The Veyron also set out Bugatti to become what we know Bugatti is like today. But it wasn’t back then, there was nothing there. Ferdinand Piëch had bought the rights to the brand in 1998, and then had the ’99 Tokyo Motor Show car — it took another seven years to put in production. Imagine today. Usually if you start a project, it’s 48 months, four years until it’s on the road, not seven years,” Heyl said. “Try to pay for seven years of development and the whole engineering team building prototypes seven years, that’s three years longer than any other car project. You have to even consider also the financials behind that. The investment that they went through just to establish the brand is substantial. Now we can say, ‘ah, of course it’s Bugatti.’ It wasn’t there then.”

Earlier in the conversation, Heyl brought up the concept of authenticity, which is crucial to Bugatti. “Also here on the lawn we see pre-war cars. Last year we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Type 35. So we had one of my favorite pictures taken at Monterey Car Week in the Laguna Seca pit lane. We had a Type 35 from 1924 next to a Bolide from 2024,” Heyl said. “I remember seeing those pictures, both blue, both with the horseshoe, both with the macaron badge on the front, both Bugattis. And you could still see those cars are a hundred years apart, same DNA. You could still make ’em out as Bugattis.”

“Both were in the pinnacle of their time in the technology of the time. Obviously a hundred-year-old car will be technologically outdated, but it doesn’t matter because the story is still there, and through that it becomes authentic, and through it becoming authentic, it endures time and it’s still interesting today,” Heyl remarked. “And that’s also the responsibility I feel that when we do new cars. Those cars might be around for decades if not even centuries in some cases. That’s the responsibility also not to go with trends or fashion. You need to have a story. You need to be authentic and need to become enduring time like that.”

The Bugatti family’s influence is always present

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

Bugatti’s connection to the past goes far beyond just cars. Carlo Bugatti, Ettore’s father, became an acclaimed designer of furniture and jewelry after moving from Milan to Paris. Ettore’s brother Rembrandt was a renowned sculptor that specialized in animal figures — his prancing elephant is used as a motif on Bugatti cars to this day, and Ettore used it as the hood ornament of the Type 41 Royale, the most extravagant and expensive car of the pre-war era. Ettore’s eldest son, Jean, was a car designer as well. Bugatti being such an artistic family is something I love about the brand, and it’s a throughline that sets it apart from all other automakers.

“What I see in Rembrandt sculptures is an eye and a hand for slightly over exaggerating proportions for the more drama,” said Heyl, who himself has a masters in art. “You’ll see a flamingo with just slightly longer legs, even thinner than they actually are. Or you’ll see a panther with slightly bigger shoulders and slightly more slim body and slightly smaller head so that the shoulders will come out proportion of head to shoulder, a little over exaggerated. Or the elephant stretching for some, reaching for something. I thought he always has two things: First of all, over exaggerating proportion in a beneficial kind of way, and second, odd posture, which is just interesting to look at, like his giraffe that’s drinking with two front legs spread apart.” Those same qualities are found on Bugatti road and race cars throughout the decades.

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

In addition to having 34 Bugattis of all different sorts, the largest collection of its kind, the same collector who commissioned the one-off Brouillard that was shown at Car Week this year has an extensive collection of Carlo Bugatti’s furniture and Rembrandt’s sculptures. “Carlo made all this amazing dining rooms, stools, bedrooms and stuff, incredible stuff,” Heyl said, “The actual bedroom designed by Carlo Bugatti is in [the Perridon collection], and he has also the dining table with all the chairs. Obviously he can’t sit on them. I hadn’t really seen that stuff in real life, I had only seen pictures. So it’s a very complete collection.”

The celebrations continue

Daniel Golson / Jalopnik

I mentioned how it’s nice to see some Veyrons at the show that have never been shown in public before, and how some of my favorite specs are rarely seen. “Some owners prefer to be not public, and that’s understandable. Not everybody wants show, and that’s fair. That’s also a part of the Bugatti family. There’s many different color of collectors and some like to show, some like to be more private, and that’s all fair. Whatever makes your heart beat,” Heyl said. “And I think what unites us all, and this is what I love about cars in general, whether it’s a $10,000 Mazda Miata or a €10,000,000 Bugatti, there’s a car enthusiasm to it. No matter what country you are from, what language you speak, cars bring people together. From all social backgrounds, ethnic groups, whatever sexes, skin color, continents, nationalities. You can go to Japan and celebrate cars and you can go to the U.S. and celebrate cars. You can come to Europe and celebrate cars, you can go to Dubai. Cars somehow connect people. I like that.”

The Vegas Concours isn’t the only event that Bugatti will be honoring the Veyron’s 20th anniversary at. The company will have a presence at Rétromobile in January, and Bugatti recently held an event in Molsheim with a lot of cars, including all the Veyron’s predecessor concepts. “In Molsheim, we had the most special prototypes there, like the one with the round eyes you’d never seen or all the different build stages you could go through. And we had one of every kind. It was great. In Rétromobile, there’s going to be a bigger installation. Maybe not as big as this,” Heyl said with a laugh.

Because nothing will compare to quality and number of Veyrons on the Wynn’s golf course. Hell, 50% of all Veyrons that were originally delivered to the U.S. were there. “Here we have the sheer amount of almost 50 Veyrons. You never see that. It didn’t happen before in history. Maybe the diversity is a little more [at other shows], but in terms of just assembling the most amount of Veyrons, I think it doesn’t get any better than this. I was just fascinated, I think, and I love how it’s different flavors, and different flavors of celebrating [the anniversary]. This is American style, how you guys celebrate that stuff. It’s very hard to pull together,” Heyl said. I hope I’m around for many more Bugatti anniversaries in the future. I may not know what those will be like, but I know the Veyron will still be the greatest of all time.