AFTER vanishing off the face of the Earth in 1936, with no clue as to its whereabouts, the one of a kind Bugatti Aerolithe has been rebuilt. The car originally debuted at the Earl’s Court Motor Show in the UK in 1935, but after its disappearance, all trace it ever existed lay in just a few photos and some blueprints of the brake pedal and radiator grill. These limitations didn’t stop classic car fanatic David Grainger and his team at The Guild of Automotive Restorers, who painstakingly rebuilt the lost car on a modified Bugatti Type 57 chassis. Using the blueprint of the radiator grill, David and his team worked out the exact dimensions, to the millimetre, of the car and then proceeded to sculpt the body using magnesium, as was done on the original. The magnesium sheets make the car extremely light and therefore increase its top speed. However, the sheets are by no means cheap, costing David around $3,000 each, of which the Bugatti Aerolithe needed 15 for its rebirth. Recreating the body wasn’t the only challenge. David needed to rebuild, from scratch, the tyres to replicate the white walled Dunlop’s on the original car, as they are no longer in production. David’s team skillfully produced identical replicas of the wheels and the Bugatti Aerolithe now stands exactly as it did before, complete with fixed windows and manual brakes.
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MotorTranscript
00:00 00;01;10;12 - 00;01;22;22 Unknown
00:01 This couldn't just be a looks like the arrow. It had to be an absolute recreation of the
00:07 arrow. If somebody found the original car, it's worth 100 million, 150 million dollars.
00:14 And it is one of the great mysteries in the automotive world.
00:17 00;01;22;22 - 00;01;39;22 Unknown
00:18 The air relief Bugatti's long lost magnesium masterpiece. Only one was ever built.
00:28 00;01;39;22 - 00;01;50;22 Unknown
00:30 And it was panned by critics after its appearance at the 1936 Paris Motor Show. Shortly after,
00:38 it disappeared from the public eye. What happened next remains a mystery.
00:43 00;01;50;22 - 00;02;00;22 Unknown
00:45 With almost no chance of the original ever being found. For one car fanatic, there was
00:51 only one option. Build one from scratch, and that would be no mean feat.
00:58 00;02;00;22 - 00;02;10;22 Unknown
00:59 This is the Bugatti Aralith. It's a Type 57 chassis number 57104. It's probably one of
01:04 the most famous cars around right now. The original car was made from magnesium. Well,
01:10 we've made this car from magnesium.
01:12 00;02;10;22 - 00;02;22;22 Unknown
01:13 And what is with the unusual choice of material?
01:15 00;02;22;22 - 00;02;27;22 Unknown
01:16 Why magnesium? Well, the reason for that was it's very light. It's very durable, but it
01:21 has some very bad habits. It cracks. You can't weld it. The entire car had to be riveted
01:27 together. In order to work this material, you have to heat it to 850, 900 degrees to
01:32 make it malleable. Unfortunately, at 1140 degrees, it bursts into flames. We did have
01:39 fires while we were working it. It was just a part of it. So you heat it to a plastic
01:44 state just before it starts to melt.
01:46 00;02;27;22 - 00;02;49;00 Unknown
01:47 And the heat is like 850 or 900 degrees, which when you're using a rosebud is not very far
01:52 away from 1140 degrees. It became a very practiced thing. The guys who were working it learned
01:59 to just watch the magnesium and see the color alterations in it when it got to the right
02:04 temperature and be warned just before it started to get to a point where it was going to ignite.
02:09 It was a very dicey, quite a skill to acquire one that's not going to be very useful for
02:13 the rest of your life. But in this case, it worked for us quite well.
02:16 00;02;49;00 - 00;03;00;00 Unknown
02:17 And as if this build wasn't hard enough already in a quest for authenticity, the team decided
02:22 not to use any tools invented after 1936.
02:26 00;03;00;00 - 00;03;10;00 Unknown
02:27 This couldn't just be a looks like the Erelyth. It had to be an absolute recreation of the
02:33 Erelyth. Was it a happy build? Sometimes I hated this thing. I'd like to have torched
02:37 it. What we had was about 11 photographs. There was two blueprints. One was of the brake
02:43 pedal and the other was of the radiator. There was virtually nothing with the photograph
02:49 overlaying it.
02:50 00;03;10;00 - 00;03;22;00 Unknown
02:51 We indexed the exact center of every single rivet on the spine. Every rivet on that car
02:55 is exactly where the rivets were on the original.
02:58 With painstaking attention to detail, recreating this masterpiece took 10 years.
03:04 The doors are magnificent. They're very large and very heavy. The seats are very simple.
03:10 The only thing from the Bugatti factory you see in here is the steering wheel. Everything
03:14 else we had to hand make. Every single one of these had to be cut out by hand and then
03:19 placed and then it was all vulcanized on.
03:22 The wheels, of course, are all brand new. The center spinners, those are original. When
03:28 you look at this motor, you can see that it's just not an ordinary engine, like a work of
03:34 art. Again, beautiful to look at. The front of the car is interesting and very pretty,
03:38 but the back of the car is my favorite part of almost any car I've ever had anything to
03:43 do with. I mean, I think that the back of this car is just so beautiful and so futuristic
03:48 for its period.
03:50 Something that very few people have ever seen is this, but it makes complete sense when
03:55 you see it. And again, everything you're seeing here, we had to make. Now we consider this
04:04 just the ultimate in style and sophistication and beauty because it is absolutely stunning.
04:11 COMM: Stunning indeed, but what's it like to drive?
04:16 A lot of people say, "Oh, they don't build them like they used to." And they're absolutely
04:29 right. They don't. Like, there's no windows that wind up and down. There's no ventilation,
04:33 there's no windshield wipers. When you're in there, you're sealed in. As cars go, this
04:38 isn't the most usable car in the world, but as art goes, it's an absolute masterpiece.
04:44 You don't want to go rocking and rolling too much with a car that's worth in excess of
04:47 five million dollars.
04:48 COMM: So it's top dollar, but what about top speed?
04:52 Fast as this particular car has gone, probably 40 miles an hour.
05:01 COMM: While this beauty is not going to break any speed records, if the original was to
05:05 be found, it would break the bank.
05:08 It's been lost since 1936 or 1937. If somebody found the original car, now, is it worth a
05:18 hundred million, a hundred and fifty million dollars? I mean, it is one of the great mysteries
05:22 in the automotive world. What happened to the Bugatti Aerolisse?
05:27 you
05:28 you
05:29 you
05:32 you
05:32 [BLANK_AUDIO]