In 2019, then-Bugatti president Stephan Winkelmann announced the company was finished chasing speed records. Bugatti test driver Andy Wallace had just obliterated the 300 mph barrier in a Chiron Super Sport 300+ and Winklemann (now the chairman and CEO of Lamborghini) was content.
“Our goal was to be the first manufacturer ever to reach the magic 300-mile-per-hour mark. We have now achieved this,” he said at the time. “We have proven several times that we build the fastest cars in the world. In the future, we will focus on other areas.”
Five years later, his successor says not so fast, man. Mate Rimac, the upstart Croatian genius behind the nearly-2,000-hp Rimac Nevera, took the helm at Bugatti in 2021 and he has a different idea of where the hypercar builder is headed. And now there is the Bugatti Tourbillon, which comes equipped with a blow-your-mind hybrid setup–a brand-new 8.3-liter V16 boosted with three electric motors–capable of 1,775 hp. It seems obvious that Bugatti isn’t settling down anytime soon, but it doesn’t hurt to check.
Is Bugatti finished with speed? I ask Rimac in our meeting during Monterey Car Week.
“It was. It isn’t,” he quips, flashing a coy smile.
Later, Bugatti Rimac’s CTO Emilio Scervo drops a couple more hints.
“Bugatti in the future for me is going to be high speed but not at heavy cost. It has to [have] better aerodynamics, with a lighter car, with the more emotional engine,” Scervo says. “So we’re still going to pursue to move this barrier higher, but keeping this in a way is very Bugatti, very comfortable. It is not like a scary high speed drive, but it’s getting more emotional and more sophisticated in the way it delivers it.”
‘We just barely made it. Barely.’
Rimac is known for his tenacity, starting back when he was a teenager converting a 1984 BMW 3 Series from ICE to electric in his garage. By the time he was 23, he had built his first electric supercar, the Concept One. Then he caught the attention of heavy hitters like Porsche as he built his eponymous company, Rimac. In the meantime, Mate Rimac scrambled his way through financial turmoil like most young startups.
During the development phase of Concept One, the royal family in Abu Dhabi offered up a tempting financial offer that would have erased his debts and given him room to grow. However, that came with a significant proviso: Rimac would have to move his company to the Middle East. The inventor, a proud Croatian transplant from the former Yugoslavia, turned it down. He still winces at the memory.
“Bugatti in the future for me is going to be high speed but not at heavy cost. It has to [have] better aerodynamics, with a lighter car, with the more emotional engine,” he says. “So we’re still going to pursue to move this barrier higher, but keeping this in a way that is very Bugatti, very comfortable. It is not like a scary high-speed drive, but it’s getting more emotional and more sophisticated in the way it delivers it.”
“Well, that was pretty stupid, to be honest,” Rimac tells me. “Thinking back, doing this is hard enough; it’s super hard. And why did I choose to make my life even more difficult and even more complicated by doing it in Croatia? It’s like I did it out of patriotism, but in the end, I made my life a hundred times more difficult. But fine; we are where we are. Maybe it would’ve gone another way if I had moved.”
It all turned out for the best; look at him now, right?
“You don’t know how many near-death situations the company had, how much struggle I had, how many existential survival questions and issues,” he remembers. “We just barely, barely, barely made it. Barely.”
It’s Mate’s Bugatti
Tough times behind him, these days Mate Rimac is operating at a breakneck pace that would be exhausting for a mere mortal. The pressure is high to both innovate and keep the legacy of Bugatti alive.
“There’s so much at stake; it’s not about [me],” Rimac asserts. “It’s about, in our case, two and a half thousand people. It’s about the whole industry. It’s about the heritage of a brand that’s been around for over a hundred years. You don’t want to be the one who screwed up just because you want to cling to something.”
While he feels as though he has already accomplished quite a bit, Rimac says he has an internal debate with himself, seeing two forks in the road ahead.
“One is to continue to be all in at full throttle. And the other one is like, ‘you have done enough –hey, slow down a bit,’” he says. “To me, you can either be a hundred percent throttle or zero; you cannot be in between. You cannot have a normal life and do this.”
He uses Elon Musk as an example. Musk was 37, only a year older than Rimac is now, when he assumed the role of CEO at Tesla. That was 17 years ago, and Rimac says he can’t imagine keeping this pace for that long. Musk is one of his heroes in the industry, along with Swedish hypercar builder Christian von Koenigsegg and Croatia-born Nikola Tesla. EVs have been his passion for half his life, and even Rimac seems to marvel at finding himself at the helm of a company with roaring internal combustion engines.
‘Absolute Risk Taker’
Rimac’s favorite part of the new Bugatti Tourbillon is the 3D printed suspension because it’s “beautiful but functional.” It’s 45 percent lighter than the suspension in the Chiron, using aluminum instead of steel.
And if he weren’t the one leading Bugatti, Rimac says, “nobody else would have the balls” to do something like that. Despite its boundary-pushing products, Bugatti is a conservative company that has always sought to avoid unnecessary risks. Rimac has shrugged off those voices, calling himself an “absolute risk taker.”
“For me it was like, if you don’t do this in a Bugatti, where else do you test new things like that? I said, ‘Let’s do it’ and somehow we’ll figure it out,” he says. “Just like with the analog instruments and the naturally aspirated V16 engine… it’s just complexity on top of complexity. But for me it’s just a symbol of taking risks and in the end being happy with the outcome, because somehow you figure it out. You just jump out of the plane and while you drop, you build a parachute.”
Figure it out—running what is arguably the world’s most prestigious automaker is as simple as that. Just like we’re left to figure out what Bugatti’s next speed record might be because Mate Rimac won’t elaborate. Petition to put a Tourbillon on Bonneville, anyone?
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