24h Le Mans
Having delivered the last of the 450 Veyron sold last April, Bugatti turned its attention to a whole new kind of supercar: a virtual racing concept for the Gran Turismo video game. On show at the Frankfurt Motor Show, the Vision takes its inspiration from the 1937 Le-Mans winning Bugatti Type 57G Tank - though is more futuristic than it is retro.
After the Veyron, a tribute to 1939 Le Mans victor Pierre Veyron, and ahead of the Chiron, named after Louis Chiron, the brand’s spearhead in the 1930s (but who never crossed the finish line at Le Mans), Bugatti has revealed the Vision, an entirely virtual car that has been created in cooperation with the French sports car brand’s design team to look just like a real Bugatti racing car.
It sports a Bleu de France livery, evoking the colours worn by French teams at that period, and the dashboard features a Le Mans track map, a nod to the real-life drivers who paste the same map in their cockpit. Something drivers in the 1930s probably didn’t do in their open-top cars but that didn’t stop Robert Benoist and Jean-Pierre Wimille from winning the race in 1937 with a Bugatti Type 57G Tank. Wimille repeated the feat two years later, this time sharing the wheel with Pierre Veyron in a Type 57C.
The Frankfurt Motor Show (IAA) will run from 17 to 27 September 2015.
Text Cécile Bonardel/ACO Translated from French by Clair Pickworth
