Bugatti: Aero Beauty and Innovation

[orange4boy]

I have bee looking at 20's and 30's Bugatti cars recently and realizing how aerodynamic they were.

One of the most beautiful cars ever built: The type 57 SC Atlantic.









1923 Type 32: This car must have seemed radical compared with the open wheel cars of the time.

[Arragonis]

There were lots of Aero designs in the 30s and I agree the Type 57 is superbly beautiful. When you also think back that Bugatti had twin cam 16v engines before WW1 you have to admire the design.

For aero with beauty though stay French (and yes this does pain me as an Englishman) however just google Robert Opron (especiall images). Citroen DS, CS, GS GSA and so forth.

[thatguitarguy]

Why is it that if you take such a beautiful design and turn it around into a more aerodynamic configuration, that it looks incredibly dorky??

[gone-ot]

...looks like a "Batman Car" from the 1930's (ha,ha).

[wdb]

Ettore Bugatti was an innovator in many, many areas of automobile design and construction, as well as more generalized engineering pursuits.

Just one example: Because head gaskets were a failure point, his engines had none; the head and block were machined from a solid block. As was the crankshaft of course! Carving a hemispherical combustion chamber, valve seats, and so on into the far end of a cylinder bore required a great deal of invention in the area of machining.

The Type 35 won over 1000 races, in fact it is still winning vintage classes today. Alloy wheels in 1925!

[orange4boy]

Agreed, The type 35 is also a gorgeous car. Amazing what one can do with copious amounts of cash.

I think the heads were scraped by hand to fit perfectly. Old school engineering but apparently hand scraping is still done when absolute accuracy is needed.

[Frank Lee]

I think maybe this should be called "beauty and innovation" rather than "aero beauty and innovation".

While I have not located any drag specs for these two cars, plugging likely specs for the Atlantic into the performance calculator nets a likely Cd of worse than .50!

The tank looks great to me from the nose to the front of the cockpit, where it then proceeds to fall apart aerodynamically. (Armchair aero, I know, but what else is there?) I'd wager it has a poor Cd too.

[luvit]

perhaps they were aero for their time, frank. keep things in perspective.
you'd be pluggin in a ton of numbers to compare models of the same era.

[orange4boy]

The type 32 was racing against open wheel cars of the time so it would have had a lower Cd than those no doubt. The type 32 was built just two years after the Rumpler Tropfenauto.

Ettore Bugatti designed this automobile for the 1923 Grand Prix in Tours.
It was not successful, 4 were entered and third place was the best. The
problem was its handling, which was poor due to aerodynamic lift, although
it was fast on the straights.

(SHHH...Don't tell Hermie)

engine: 2-litre (1991cc) 8-cylinder
power: about 100 bhp
top speed: around 150-175 km/h
wheelbase: 2 metres

Frame/body:
rectangular and underslung frame
enveloped body of an aerofoil-like side elevation and
rectangular front elevation

[Frank Lee]

Originally Posted by luvit

perhaps they were aero for their time, frank. keep things in perspective.
you'd be pluggin in a ton of numbers to compare models of the same era.

Then again, perhaps they weren't.

Odd to proclaim them "aero" in the absence of any evidence

My educated guesstimates put the Atlantic at Cd .65-.70, which is no better or worse than anything else of the era.