Mat Armstrong fixed a non-running Bugatti Veyron with €46 of parts
A Bugatti Veyron nobody in Dubai wanted, running again on €46 of parts
Mat Armstrong, the British YouTuber who spent the past year rebuilding a crashed Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport without any help from Bugatti, has bought a second Veyron. This one is a one-off Oakley Design car with 1,200 hp that had been sitting in a Dubai showroom because it would not start and would not reliably select a gear. The parts that fixed it cost about £40, or €46.
The Oakley Design Veyron: a 1,001 hp EB 16.4 rebodied in carbon and remapped to 1,200 hp
The car is the Veyron that Oakley Design revealed in 2016, an original 1,001 hp EB 16.4 with every body panel except the doors remade in carbon fibre. JF Automotive in Maidstone measured 987 hp and 1,350 Nm on its dyno as delivered, then spent five days mapping it to 1,200 hp and 1,584 Nm, after which Oakley recorded 415 km/h at a top-speed facility and ran the car in the Gumball 3000.
In-tank fuel hoses, a €3.50 resistor and Tiguan bonnet struts: the whole €46 bill
The start fault was in the tank. Ethanol in modern petrol had degraded the in-tank fuel hoses, and the company preparing the car for shipping recognised the symptom from an earlier Armstrong video about his first Veyron, which had the same fault, and replaced the hoses free of charge. It arrived in England starting and driving, then stalled again because the new hoses had been fitted with the wrong clamps. Armstrong redid the job with submersible fuel hose for around €12, replaced an ignition switch that cost little more, traced excess resistance in the pyrofuse wiring to a badly repaired connection, fitted a resistor for about €3.50 and, for the bonnet, a pair of gas struts from a Volkswagen Tiguan. The parts came to roughly £40, about €46.
Tom Hartley valued the Veyron at £1.5 million, and Armstrong is keeping it
Armstrong drove the Veyron to dealer Tom Hartley, whose business has followed the car since it was new. A history check found no undisclosed accident damage, and Hartley put a value of £1.5 million on it, roughly €1.73 million. Armstrong paid a seven-figure sum for the car including transport and import duty, and says he intends to keep it for now rather than sell.
Bugatti locked the Chiron's VIN, so the Veyron's spares came from VW and Audi
The video lands at the end of a year-long public argument with Molsheim, where Mate Rimac took the president's title himself the week Porsche sold out. In October 2025 Armstrong took on a crashed Chiron Pur Sport belonging to a Miami owner after an insurance repair estimate of $1.7 million. Armstrong says Bugatti declined to supply parts, locked the chassis number so no dealer could sell them either, and told him the rebuild was impossible. He finished it anyway, with airbags from an Audi A3, custom-made radiators and aftermarket body panels. Against that background, a Veyron bonnet held up by Tiguan struts is a point being made as much as a repair.
Bugatti's own Veyron programme swaps $42,000 tyres for $3,600 ones, wheels extra
Bugatti has its own answer to ageing Veyrons, and it launched it three weeks before Armstrong's video. At Pebble Beach in August, La Maison Pur Sang showed a factory-restored Veyron for the model's 20th anniversary, along with a configurator and new 20- and 21-inch wheels that accept Chiron-size Michelin tyres, a set of which costs around $3,600 against the $42,000 quoted for the original PAX rubber. Bugatti has not said what the wheels cost. A standard annual service is generally put at around $20,000, and 450 Veyrons were built between 2005 and 2015. The W16 that powers them went out of production this summer, so the parts question is not going away.
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Impossible, in Bugatti's vocabulary, has come to mean unrepairable by Bugatti. A Veyron the factory would charge $42,000 to put tyres on ran again on a fuel hose, a resistor and two struts from a Tiguan, and a dealer then put £1.5 million on it without asking Molsheim anything. Nothing about the car's value depended on the factory's participation.
Bugatti launched its Veyron configurator in August without a price for the wheels that make the tyres affordable. If that price is still unpublished by Monterey Car Week in August 2027, the factory will have conceded the argument: the only Veyron parts worth restricting are the ones nobody else can make, and a bonnet strut is not one of them. The £1.5 million is a valuation, not a sale, and until it becomes a sale the €46 is the only figure in this story that has actually been paid.
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