Beschreibung:

Ventoux coachwork by Gangloff Colour: Grey and black The Type 57 - arguably the finest road-going Bugatti of all – was unveiled at the 1933 Paris Salon. Its overall design owed much to the influence of Ettore Bugatti's talented young son Jean (Gianoberto) who, although only in his mid-20s, possessed a remarkable talent for styling allied to a keen grasp of technical matters. Essentially a completely new design, the Type 57 was a refined 3.3-litre twin-cam straight-eight that finally gave the Bugatti marque a civilised road car that could match rival products from Delage and Delahaye. Its performance was prodigious; the Type 57 was capable of maintaining an average speed of 60 mph on the ordinary roads of the 1930s and Jean Bugatti later boasted of being able to cover the 435 kilometres that separated his Molsheim factory from Paris in just under three and a half hours, a door-to-door average of some 77 mph. Even though it had been designed as a fast road car, the Type 57 had tremendous track potential, and in its ultimate T57G “tank” racing guise, it brought Bugatti victory in the final prewar Le Mans 24-hour race in 1939, ending a 12-year run of English and Italian victories. The success of the new Bugatti is reflected in its production figures: some 680 examples of all models (supercharged and unsupercharged) of the T57 were produced between 1934 and 1940, and the postwar T101 was based on the T57 chassis. In its original unblown form, the Type 57 was an outstanding performer, with ultra-sharp handling allied to a silent, smooth-running engine: it was one of an exclusive handful of cars available in the 1930s capable of 100 mph on the open road. Added refinement was introduced at the end of 1936 when the engine was rubber-mounted in a heavier chassis with more cross-bracing, a different design of exhaust manifold was fitted and a new dashboard with two instrument panels was fitted. The car offered here is one of that improved “Series 2” design with the benefit of hydraulic brakes and telescopic shock absorbers and was originally purchased by a M Louis Roussel. Type 57 No 57546 was driven out of the Bugatti works at Molsheim in chassis form on 11 May 1937, en route to the Gangloff coachworks in Colmar, a drive of some 55 km. Though Bugatti had its own bodyshop, demand for the T57 series was such that it could not keep up with the production of chassis, and so many were bodied by the Colmar Gangloff factory, a subsidiary of Switzerland’s most fashionable coachbuilder set up in 1919 to cushion the parent company from falling demand for bespoke bodywork in its own country, where it had been extablished since 1830. At first the Colmar Gangloff company had operated in rented accommodation in the old-established Wiederkehr coachworks, but in 1930 Gangloff purchased Wiederkehr. Gottlieb Moor and Paul Horlacher, two Swiss nationals who had joined Gangloff in 1927, became joint managing directors and established a close relationship with Bugatti. Accordingly, Gangloff of Colmar became Bugatti’s most important outside coachbuilder, producing as many as five bodies in a month. The naked chassis were driven to the Gangloff coachworks in the Rue Stanislas in Colmar by members of the Bugatti staff, among them works racing driver René Dreyfus, who regarded the taxing journey, often undertaken in bad weather, as an excellent form of training for forthcoming competitions. After test-driving an early Type 57, which covered a flying kilometre at over 100 mph and took just 39 seconds for a standing kilometre, Dreyfus, who drove his cars hard and fast, was unstinting in his praise: “Vraiment une voiture fantastique!” was his verdict. While the general lines of most bodies built on the Type 57 chassis by Gangloff broadly followed those laid down by Jean Bugatti the Bugatti works sent no drawings to Gangloff, so that all the 180 or so Type 57 bodies built at Colmar were entirely their own creation. Heading the small design office at Gangloff – it