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