The story
History
Bugatti’s son Jean had died in 1939, and the Germans occupied the Bugatti works at Molsheim. Ettore worked from an office at Levallois-Perret in Paris, drawing everything from an engine for a bicycle to a marine eight of 62 litres.source 1 Among the drawings was a very small car.
The engine came first. Designed about 1940, the Type 68 was a four of 45 × 50 mm, 318 cc, though it is often quoted as 330 cc, with twin overhead camshafts driven by gears, four valves a cylinder, a Roots supercharger in front and four contact breakers and coils instead of a distributor.source 1source 2 Long bolts clamped its cast-iron liners between the head and the crankcase with no gasket at all, and it was designed to rev to 12,000 rpm.source 1 Unusually for Ettore, the head came off: the Type 68 and Type 73 are, Jacob Munkhammar notes, the only Bugattis of his time without a fixed cylinder head.source 2 About three engines were made. To keep the project quiet, one was tested with its transmission in a motorcycle, a frame of Ettore’s own design.source 1source 2
With classic Bugatti features scaled down, such as the oil filter, it’s a jewel of a thing… The valves are so small they look like nails.
The 16-valve head was impractical to make. About 1945 Ettore drew a simpler one, with two valves a cylinder, for the Type 68B, and opened the bore to 48.5 mm for 369.5 cc. The supercharger moved to the side, and the engine gave its best at 9,000 rpm.source 1source 2source 3
It was an incredible design for the time, but would have been too expensive to produce because the critical machining of the cylinder head would have been impractical in 1945.
A roadster for 2 CV
Work on the car began in 1942 or in 1944; German Wikipedia cites one source for each.source 3 The engine went on show at the Paris Salon in October 1946, and the car, a puggish open two-seater, was finished in 1946 or 1947; the photographs show its horseshoe grille.source 3source 1 It was rated at 2 fiscal horsepower. The engine, mounted in front, turned a propeller shaft to the rear axle; both axles were solid, on leaf springs, with reversed quarter-elliptics at the back.source 3source 1source 2 For the gearbox Ettore planned two speeds with a fluid flywheel, or possibly a Cotal electromagnetic box. The car is about 2,900 mm (114 in) long and 1,380 mm (54 in) wide.source 1source 3
Other bodies were drawn. Roland Bugatti, then 25, sketched a gullwing coupé and a cut-down roadster with head fairings in the manner of the Grand Raid, Ettore himself an Atlantic-style coupé, and three low “underslung” chassis frames are believed to have been completed.source 1source 2
Who else in 1945 was thinking about material shortage, limited fuel supply and city congestion?
Ettore Bugatti died in August 1947. Roland and the new director, Pierre Marco, tried to revive the firm with the Type 101 instead, and the little car lost its place.source 1source 4 The Grand Prix driver Maurice Trintignant remembered testing it in the early 1950s; the fluid flywheel gave trouble, and the car went into storage.source 1
The mini Atlantic
Half a century later the coupé was begun after all. From the 1970s the German collector Uwe Hucke gathered Bugatti drawings and parts, among them a Type 68 chassis frame, a rear axle and an incomplete engine. About 1996 Richard Day built up a 16-valve engine from the original drawings and a new block; on the bench it ran for three seconds at 1,500 rpm. For the gearbox he used modern Reliant gears in a case of Bugatti style. Tim and Ivan Dutton fitted the axles and steering, Steeve Bernaud-Heyd, a stylist who had worked on the Bugatti EB110, drew the body from Roland’s sketch, and Terry Hall built it in aluminium. Michel Bugatti came to see it, and loved the “mini Atlantic”.source 1source 3
Hucke died in April 2002 with the car unfinished, and his daughter Angela inherited it. It was shown on Dutton’s stand at Rétromobile in Paris in February 2018, then went to the Bugatti Trust at Prescott; in 2019 it was said to be 80 per cent done.source 1
