At The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering in the summer of 2019, Bugatti unveiled the Centodieci, a coachbuilt tribute to the EB 110, and said it planned to produce 10 such cars for “an exclusive clientele.”
It was the EB 110 that put Bugatti back on the road in 1998 and that led to the development of the Veyron and its various versions.
“The Centodieci is Bugatti’s way of paying its respects to the Italian entrepreneur Romano Artioli and architect Giampaolo Benedini, the men who created the EB 110 some 30 years ago,” Bugatti Automobiles said in a news release announcing the beginning of production of the Centodieci prototype.
“The challenge for us was not to get caught up in the design of the legendary EB 110 itself and avoid focusing solely on a retrospective approach,” added Achim Anscheidt, Bugatti design director.
“Our aim was to create a modern interpretation of the shape and technology of that time: but at the same time, we didn’t want to lose the charm and character of the EB 110. After all, the super sports car is still fascinating today with its distinctive design and technology.”
The company said the biggest challenge was “to transform the very flat, wedge-shaped and graphically virtually two-dimensional body of the EB 110 into a modern, three-dimensional sculpture to project the fascination of the super sports cars of that time into the modern age.”
A 1,600 horsepower 8.0-liter W16 engine will power the Centodieci.
“We are creating a very small series that at the same time has to meet and even exceed all the quality and safety standards of a large series,” noted André Kullig, technical project manager for one-off and few-off projects at Bugatti.
“Series development of a few-off project is an especially exciting challenge – and that is also true in the case of the Centodieci, which is a very design-driven project,” he added.
“With the newly designed body, there are changes in many areas that we had to simulate using special computer programs. Based on the data, we were able to establish a basic set-up as a starting point for series development and the first prototype.”
After the initial prototype is built and tested, the 10 customer cars will be produced. By the way, they all were sold out within hours of the car’s 2019 unveiling. The price was €8 million each, or $8.874 million at the summer of ’19 exchange rate.
Bugatti says customers can expect their cars to be delivered during 2022.
