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
00:00This couldn't just be a looks like the Aerolith, it had to be an absolute recreation of the Aerolith.
00:09If somebody found the original car, it's worth $100 million, $150 million and it is one of the great mysteries in the automotive world.
00:22The Aerolith, Bugatti's long lost magnesium masterpiece.
00:27Only one was ever built and it was panned by critics after its appearance at the 1936 Paris Motor Show.
00:37Shortly after, it disappeared from the public eye.
00:41What happened next remains a mystery.
00:45With almost no chance of the original ever being found, for one car fanatic, there was only one option.
00:54Build one from scratch.
00:56And that would be no mean feat.
00:59This is the Bugatti Aerolith. It's a Type 57, chassis number 57104.
01:03It's probably one of the most famous cars around right now.
01:07The original car was made from magnesium.
01:10Well, we've made this car from magnesium.
01:12And what is with the unusual choice of material?
01:15Why magnesium? Well, the reason for that was it's very light.
01:19It's very durable, but it has some very bad habits.
01:22It cracks. You can't weld it.
01:25The entire car had to be riveted together.
01:27In order to work this material, you have to heat it to 850, 900 degrees to make it malleable.
01:33Unfortunately, at 1140 degrees, it bursts into flames.
01:38We did have fires while we were working it. It was just a part of it.
01:42So you heat it to a plastic state just before it starts to melt.
01:46Unfortunately, that state is like 850 or 900 degrees,
01:49which, when you're using a rosebud, is not very far away from 1140 degrees.
01:54It became a very practiced thing.
01:57The guys who were working it learned to just watch the magnesium
02:01and see the color alterations in it when it got to the right temperature
02:05and be warned just before it started to get to a point where it was going to ignite.
02:09It was a very dicey, quite a skill to acquire,
02:12one that's not going to be very useful for the rest of your life.
02:14But in this case, it worked for us quite well.
02:17And as if this build wasn't hard enough already,
02:19in a quest for authenticity, the team decided not to use any tools.
02:24Invented after 1936.
02:27This couldn't just be a looks like the Aerolith.
02:30It had to be an absolute recreation of the Aerolith.
02:33Was it a happy build?
02:35Sometimes I hated this thing. I'd like to have torched it.
02:38What we had was about 11 photographs.
02:41There was two blueprints. One was of the brake pedal,
02:44and the other was of the radiator.
02:46There was virtually nothing.
02:48With the photograph overlaying it,
02:50we indexed the exact center of every single rivet on the spine.
02:54Every rivet on that car is exactly where the rivets were on the original.
02:58With painstaking attention to detail,
03:00recreating this masterpiece took 10 years.
03:04The doors are magnificent. They're very large and very heavy.
03:08The seats are very simple.
03:10The only thing from the Bugatti factory you see in here is the steering wheel.
03:14Everything else we had to hand make.
03:16Every single one of these had to be cut out by hand and then placed,
03:20and then it was all vulcanized on.
03:23The wheels, of course, are all brand new.
03:26The center spinners, those are original.
03:28When you look at this motor, you can see that it's just not an ordinary engine.
03:34Like a work of art. Again, beautiful to look at.
03:37Some of the cars are interesting and very pretty,
03:39but the back of the car is my favorite part of almost any car I've ever had anything to do with.
03:44I mean, I think that the back of this car is just so beautiful and so futuristic for its period.
03:50Something that very few people have ever seen is this.
03:54But it makes complete sense when you see it.
03:57And again, everything you're seeing here, we had to make.
04:01Now we consider this just the ultimate in style and sophistication and beauty,
04:06because it is absolutely stunning.
04:11Stunning indeed. But what's it like to drive?
04:24A lot of people say, oh, they don't build them like they used to.
04:26And they're absolutely right.
04:28They don't. Like, there's no windows that wind up and down.
04:31There's no ventilation. There's no windshield wipers.
04:33When you're in there, you're sealed in.
04:36As cars go, this isn't the most usable car in the world.
04:39But as art goes, it's an absolute masterpiece.
04:42You don't want to go rocking and rolling too much with a car that's worth in excess of $5 million.
04:47So it's top dollar. But what about top speed?
04:51Fastest this particular car has gone? Probably 40 miles an hour.
04:5540 miles an hour?
05:01While this beauty is not going to break any speed records,
05:04if the original was to be found, it would break the bank.
05:10It's been lost since 1936 or 1937.
05:13If somebody found the original car, now, is it worth $100 million, $150 million?
05:21I mean, it is one of the great mysteries in the automotive world.
05:24What happened to the Bugatti Aerolisse?