Fernando Alonso bought the aluminium Bugatti Veyron nobody else would
Fernando Alonso's aluminium Veyron sat unsold for 27 months before it reached Monaco
Fernando Alonso has taken delivery of the Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse that a German dealer has been calling the most expensive Veyron ever built since it went on sale in June 2024. A video filmed near the Casino this week shows the Aston Martin Formula 1 driver easing the polished-aluminium car through Monaco traffic. When Mechatronik of Pleidelsheim listed it, the odometer read 750 km after nine years.
Chassis 8.100 is a Grand Sport Vitesse with 20 tonnes of aluminium behind it
The car Mechatronik lists as chassis 8.100 was ordered from Molsheim in 2014 and delivered in 2015 with a front bumper and seamless side panels milled from solid aluminium blocks, then polished, on a body that is otherwise exposed carbon fibre. More than 20 tonnes of aluminium went to Molsheim to produce those panels, Bugatti had to write dedicated CAD programs for them, and it spent longer building this Veyron than any other. Underneath it is a standard Vitesse: an 8.0-litre W16 with four turbochargers, 1,200 hp, 1,500 Nm and 410 km/h with the roof in place. The options bill alone exceeded the Vitesse's list price of about €1.69 million before tax.
The first owner held all six Veyron Legends editions and used them as leverage
The car exists because of an ultimatum. According to Mechatronik, the first owner already had a Veyron Pur Sang and had ordered all six Grand Sport Vitesse Legends editions, the 2013 and 2014 series built three cars apiece, along with several Super Sports. Bugatti declined the aluminium body as too expensive, and the client answered that the rest of his order book would go elsewhere if it did not build the car. It built the car. It then covered 750 km in nine years before it was consigned to a showroom near Stuttgart. Bugatti's own La Maison Pur Sang restoration programme now treats twenty-year-old Veyrons as classics, and this one arrived at that status without ever being used.
Alonso said at Goodwood in July 2024 that he wanted 'a small collection'
Alonso set out the shopping list himself, a month after the Veyron was listed. Interviewed at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in July 2024, he said he was 'in the moment of my life where I'm really looking forward to having a small collection', and added that some of the luxury brands he had driven for 'went into a different direction: bigger numbers', whereas he liked makers that 'treat the customer like unique customers'. The list that followed was an Aston Martin one: a Valkyrie due around his 29 July birthday, one of the 38 Valiants he commissioned with a manual gearbox he admitted he never drives, and a DB5 he was chasing through the heritage department. Two years on, the cars that have actually arrived are a one-off Pagani Zonda Roadster Diamante Verde in May and now a one-off Bugatti, both bought from Mechatronik and both delivered in Monaco.
A Veyron built on one customer's ultimatum fits Alonso's own definition of luxury
Chassis 8.100 is the most literal version of what Alonso said he valued: a factory that built exactly what one client wanted and never repeated it. Bugatti made 450 Veyrons between 2005 and 2015, and the Pur Sang of 2007, five cars in bare aluminium and carbon, was the factory's own earlier experiment in showing the metal. That is the same instinct that produced design director Frank Heyl's bespoke Veyron, and it explains why a car that spent 27 months unsold suited this buyer.
Alonso drives what the first owner did not: 750 km in nine years, then Monaco traffic
The Veyron's first owner averaged less than 100 km a year in it. Alonso, by his own account at Goodwood, drives every day: he lives in Monaco, uses 'maybe more scooters than cars', and takes his Aston Martin DBX to the airport each race week. The video shows the aluminium car doing exactly that kind of duty, waiting at a junction below the Casino rather than sitting under museum lights in Llanera. That puts him in the same camp as Lando Norris, filmed in London this week in the Ferrari F40 a friend crashed last year. Alonso's price is undisclosed; Mechatronik never published one.
AutoNext Take
A polished aluminium Veyron is a hard car to sell, and 27 months on a showroom floor say so. It is too loud for a collector and too personal for an investor, because the story belongs to a stranger's ultimatum. It works for a buyer who wants to drive it in the one principality where a Veyron is background traffic, and who said two years ago that what he values is a maker treating one customer as unique. Alonso did not buy the most expensive Veyron. He bought the only one built the way he said cars should be built.
The gap in the collection is the car he named first. The DB5 he was chasing in July 2024 has still not surfaced, while two one-offs from a German dealer have arrived in four months, which suggests Alonso now buys what is available rather than what he planned. We expect the DB5 to appear before the Goodwood Festival of Speed in July 2027. If it does not, the 'small collection' has become a hypercar collection with an Aston Martin badge on the daily driver.
