We Built The World's Only Bugatti Aerolithe | RIDICULOUS RIDES
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 $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 (upbeat music)
00:01 This couldn't just be a looks like the Aerolith.
00:05 It had to be an absolute recreation of the Aerolith.
00:08 If somebody found the original car,
00:11 it's worth 100 million, 150 million dollars,
00:14 and it is one of the great mysteries
00:16 in the automotive world.
00:17 (gentle music)
00:22 The Aerolith, Bugatti's long lost magnesium masterpiece.
00:27 Only one was ever built.
00:30 And it was panned by critics after its appearance
00:33 at the 1936 Paris Motor Show.
00:36 Shortly after, it disappeared from the public eye.
00:40 What happened next remains a mystery.
00:43 With almost no chance of the original ever being found,
00:48 for one car fanatic, there was only one option.
00:52 Build one from scratch, and that would be no mean feat.
00:59 This is the Bugatti Aerolith.
01:00 It's a Type 57, chassis number 57104.
01:03 It's probably one of the most famous cars around right now.
01:06 The original car was made from magnesium.
01:10 Well, we've made this car from magnesium.
01:12 And what is with the unusual choice of material?
01:15 Why magnesium?
01:16 Well, the reason for that was it's very light.
01:19 It's very durable, but it has some very bad habits.
01:22 It cracks, you can't weld it.
01:25 The entire car had to be riveted together.
01:27 In order to work this material,
01:29 you have to heat it to 850, 900 degrees to make it malleable.
01:33 Unfortunately, at 1140 degrees, it bursts into flames.
01:37 We did have fires while we were working it.
01:40 It was just a part of it.
01:42 So you heat it to a plastic state
01:44 just before it starts to melt.
01:46 Unfortunately, that state is like 850 or 900 degrees,
01:49 which when you're using a rosebud
01:50 is not very far away from 1140 degrees.
01:54 It became a very practiced thing.
01:57 The guys who were working it
01:58 learned to just watch the magnesium
02:01 and see the color alterations in it
02:03 when it got to the right temperature
02:04 and be warned just before it started
02:06 to get to a point where it was gonna ignite.
02:09 It was a very dicey, quite a skill to acquire,
02:11 one that's not gonna be very useful
02:13 for the rest of your life,
02:14 but in this case, it worked for us quite well.
02:16 And as if this build wasn't hard enough already,
02:19 in a quest for authenticity,
02:21 the team decided not to use any tools.
02:24 Invented after 1936.
02:26 This couldn't just be a looks like the Aerolith.
02:30 It had to be an absolute recreation of the Aerolith.
02:33 Was it a happy build?
02:35 Sometimes I hated this thing.
02:36 I'd like to have torched it.
02:37 What we had was about 11 photographs.
02:41 There was two blueprints.
02:42 One was of the brake pedal
02:44 and the other was of the radiator.
02:46 There was virtually nothing.
02:48 With the photograph overlaying it,
02:49 we indexed the exact center
02:52 of every single rivet on the spine.
02:54 Every rivet on that card
02:55 was exactly where the rivets were on the original.
02:57 With painstaking attention to detail,
03:00 recreating this masterpiece took 10 years.
03:03 The doors are magnificent.
03:05 They're very large and very heavy.
03:06 The seats are very simple.
03:09 The only thing from the Bugatti factory
03:11 you see in here is the steering wheel.
03:13 Everything else we had to hand make.
03:16 Every single one of these had to be cut out by hand
03:18 and then placed, and then it was all vulcanized on.
03:22 The wheels, of course, are all brand new.
03:25 The center spinners, those are original.
03:28 When you look at this motor,
03:29 you can see that it's just not an ordinary engine.
03:33 Like a work of art.
03:34 Again, beautiful to look at.
03:36 The front of the car is interesting and very pretty,
03:38 but the back of the car is my favorite part
03:41 of almost any car I've ever had anything to do with.
03:44 I mean, I think that the back of this car
03:45 is just so beautiful and so futuristic for its period.
03:48 Something that very few people have ever seen is this.
03:54 But it makes complete sense when you see it.
03:56 And again, everything you're seeing here, we had to make.
03:59 Now we consider this just the ultimate
04:04 in style and sophistication and beauty,
04:07 because it is absolutely stunning.
04:10 Stunning indeed, but what's it like to drive?
04:16 (car screeching)
04:19 (car revving)
04:22 A lot of people say, "Oh, they don't build 'em
04:27 "like they used to."
04:27 And they are absolutely right.
04:29 They don't.
04:30 Like, there's no windows that wind up and down.
04:32 There's no ventilation, there's no windshield wipers.
04:34 When you're in there, you're sealed in.
04:36 As cars go, this isn't the most usable car in the world,
04:40 but as art goes, it's an absolute masterpiece.
04:44 You don't wanna go rockin' and rollin'
04:45 too much with a car that's worth
04:46 in excess of $5 million.
04:48 So it's top dollar, but what about top speed?
04:52 Fast as this particular car has gone,
04:54 probably 40 miles an hour.
04:56 While this beauty's not going to break any speed records,
05:04 if the original was to be found, it would break the bank.
05:08 It's been lost since 1936 or 1937.
05:13 If somebody found the original car,
05:16 now, it's worth 100 million, $150 million.
05:20 I mean, it is one of the great mysteries
05:22 in the automotive world.
05:23 What happened to the Bugatti Aerolisse?
05:25 (upbeat music)
05:28 (upbeat music)
05:30 (upbeat music)
05:33 [BLANK_AUDIO]