Bugatti's Royale turns 100, and its engine sold far better in trains
Six Royales exist, and three of them spent a weekend in Molsheim
Bugatti's festival in Molsheim ran from 3 to 6 September, and this year it marked 100 years of the Type 41 Royale. Three of the six that survive stood together behind the Château: the Coupé Napoléon, the Coupé de Ville Binder and the Park-Ward Limousine. Two travelled up from Mulhouse, one came from Wolfsburg. Bugatti calls the reunion a rarity, and for once the marketing word is the literal one.
Two Royales came from Mulhouse, the Binder from Wolfsburg
The Coupé Napoléon is chassis 41100, Ettore Bugatti's own car, wearing the body Jean Bugatti drew for it in its final form. It lives at the Musée National de l'Automobile in Mulhouse, the old Schlumpf collection, which also holds the Park-Ward Limousine, chassis 41131. The third car, the Coupé de Ville Binder, is chassis 41111 and belongs to Volkswagen, which sent it from the Autostadt in Wolfsburg. Molsheim is still the brand's home: the Tourbillon is assembled there, in a factory that opened last year.
A 12.8-litre straight-eight, 6.4 metres of car and three tonnes
The Royale runs a 12,763 cc straight-eight making about 300 hp at 1,800 rpm, which is the least interesting number attached to it. The wheelbase alone measures 4.3 metres, longer than a current Volkswagen Polo is from bumper to bumper. The car is 6.4 metres nose to tail and weighs roughly 3,175 kg. Ettore Bugatti built it for emperors, kings and queens, and priced it as though they were queuing.
Ettore planned 25 Royales and found three customers
The plan was 25 cars sold to royalty. Six were built, and in Ettore's lifetime three found buyers, none of them royal. Armand Esders, a Parisian clothier, took chassis 41111 in 1932. Joseph Fuchs, a Munich doctor, took 41121 the same year. Cuthbert Foster, a British food industrialist, took 41131 in 1933. The Depression accounted for the rest. Two cars stayed with the family unsold, and Ettore kept the Coupé Napoléon for himself.
The spare engines became 88 railcars and a 196 km/h record
Ettore had built 25 engines for a run of cars nobody was buying, so he found them another job. The straight-eight went into railcars for the French railways, and by Bugatti's own count 88 were built. In 1934 one of them set a world rail speed record at 196 km/h, which made it the fastest train on earth. The railcars stayed in service into the 1950s and earned the company the money the Royale never did. A single example survives, Le Présidentiel, at the Cité du Train in Mulhouse.
The Kellner Royale set a world record at £5.5 million in 1987
The market took 55 years to disagree with Ettore's customers. On 19 November 1987, Christie's sold chassis 41141, the Kellner Coupé, at the Royal Albert Hall for £5.5 million, then a world record for any car at auction, to Swedish property developer Hans Thulin. The car nobody wanted new had become the most expensive in the world. Bugatti has since gone into the restoration business itself, returning an early Veyron to as-new condition to mark that model's twentieth birthday.
AutoNext Take
The centenary really belongs to the engine. Six Royales were built and 88 railcars followed, so the straight-eight found roughly fifteen times more work on rails than on roads, and it was the trains rather than the cars that carried Bugatti through the 1930s. A machine designed for emperors was rescued by a railway timetable. That belongs in the story at least as much as the coachwork everyone photographs.
There is a lesson in it for the modern company, and it runs the opposite way to the one Molsheim tells. The Royale was scarce because it failed. The Tourbillon and its naturally aspirated V16 are scarce because Bugatti decided the number before anyone had seen the car. That is by far the better business, and it is also why no Tourbillon will ever have the Kellner's story, because a car has to be unwanted first to become the most expensive in the world 55 years later.
