Loris Bicocchi: "How exciting to sit in this car after so many years...
It's incredible"
Vittorio Filippini: "Cars are wonderful, but their true value is
under the skirt: that's where the magic happens.
These Bugattis are very beautiful, we worked hard on the styling
but even better was the work done underneath: engine, transmission, suspensions
required great effort and just a team as ours with the passion we had could
end up with a result like this".
Fabio Baroni: "I worked... or rather, I was lucky enough to work
for the Bugatti Automobili in the R&D department
and I involved in the development of the car
that raced in the 24h of Le Mans with two colleagues and two
other technicians from the Synergie team who took care of the car on the track.
It was a great experience, partly because we built a car that
had never existed done: it was the first time the Bugatti EB110 participated in the 24h of Le Mans".
Romano Artioli: "Something we thought was crucial for a brand like Bugatti was racing.
We had already built the methane-powered EB110 that broke records for
methane-powered cars and was street legal too, but there was more we could do.
We decided to enroll these two cars here to the endurance races in Le Mans and in the USA:
these are the races from which a brand can benefit to build better and better cars later".
"I remember that nobody told me anything: one day I saw a team of French people
coming into our R&D department where I was working, where the road cars were tuned.
These guys came running and start dismantling this car which was parked
inside one of the department's five bays.
They started removing the doors, the seats, the interior etc...
We were all curious and then we got to know that someone wanted to
race a Bugatti in the 24h of Le Mans".
Giampaolo Simonini: "The car was already well developed when I joined the firm,
there were various prototypes running, some with the carbon-fiber frame, others
with the honeycomb aluminum one, but it still didn't have the final body we can see here"
Giampaolo Benedini: "I don't want to take credit for Gandini's work.
The stylistic base is his, I just modified the front end and other things like
the interior and this is the result.
Because of the car's characteristics and performance, some people saw a future for it
and came with a request:
at that time there was a GT championship dominated by the F40.
Martino Finotto, a wealthy pharmaceutical entrepreneur
who made a turbocharged racecar with Carlo Facetti that he raced in the
IMSA championships in the US, came to Bugatti (in his helicopter, an 8-seat Agusta)
with Carlo Facetti. He asked if something could be done with the Bugatti Super Sport.
I think Carlo Facetti himself advised him against this, he probably thought the car was too complicated".
"It was amazing. We were already delighted with the road cars we were developing,
everything was ambitious, strange, nearly mad, but I think
the story of this Bugatti was mad from the beginning, so it sort of made sense".
"When we started working on the racecar, it was an even bigger challenge.
Why? Because creating a road car with these levels of performance was already hard,
take it to the track, with even more performance was an entirely new challenge.
In some ways we found ourselves unprepared but we didn't lack enthusiasm and determination:
we sensibly gathered information from those who
could do these things or those who already did them".
"... and what we can see here is the car made for the IMSA championship
that we adapted to the championship restrictions.
Some body modifications were possible, so we worked on the front end
and made some air-intakes to cool the brakes, added some headlights,
we modified the front and rear arches to create some diffusers,
both for aerodynamics and cooling purposes. The glass area were lightened
with some polycarbonate parts, we removed the window-opening mechanism,
simplified the interior, fitted a roll cage and a fixed rear spoiler,
I think the car weighed about 1200 kilos".
"This team was led by Lucien Monté, a skilled tuner and technician
which is still tuning cars nowadays for the 24h: he's a good man, very passionate...
I think he's 80 now and he's probably still working.
Some guys who worked for Bugatti pitched in because we knew the car better, so they needed our help".
"Something we wanted to do was fitting the car with a straight-cut dogbox transmission
(the road car had a synchronized gearbox) because the gear changes were faster etc... How?
In those days I worked on calculations and design, within the team:
calculating gears, shafts, the cinematics of the suspensions was my daily bread.
"Design the gears for the racing gearbox"... Jeez, how would I do that?
Luckily, thanks to some friends, I was able to get in touch with Dallara
who was very kind and took me to see an F1 transmission drawing. He told me:
"I can't give it to you, but you can look at it" I didn't have a camera with me,
so I started measuring the gears and bearings with a ruler and wrote down the numbers.
Then I came back to the factory and worked out the calculations for that gearbox,
trying to understand what the designer was thinking while drawing it:
that's how I designed the Bugatti gearbox. We drew it
and then encountered some logistical problems, it was a difficult period for Bugatti back then
(we are talking about the winter of 1994 to 1995), the company crisis could be felt,
the suppliers were not responding in the usual way and was not easy to find somebody
who could make the gears for the transmission, a frequent supplier was...
... unwilling to handle our order the job, that's probably the best way to put it.
so we asked Colotti, who built racing gearboxes. I went there
and told him what I wanted to do. He said:
"We can do it, I'll make you the gears".
I tried to understand what kind of machinery he had and I designed the gears so that
they could be made with his existing machineries to not spend more money
(other than the base materials) on more advanced ones.
So I gathered information from here and there and the gearbox design was finished.
Unfortunately, when the car was ready in the spring of 1995,
the gearbox was not ready and we fitted the stock EB110 gearbox instead.
We only changed two gears: the FWD ones, since the car had larger rear tires,
the two axles needed some adjustments, the gear ratio changed between them...
these two gears were made by our usual supplier. Just a couple
so there was little money involved and little risk for them.
When the gearbox was ready, the MRT fitted it in Monaco,
helped by some Bugatti technicians, including myself.
Once the gearbox was in, Gildo drove it... but it was a tough gearbox, not easy to use.
Gildo was a gentleman driver and didn't like it, he said:
"Put the standard gearbox back in and I'll be fine".
So the new gearbox (made in two examples) stayed there in Monaco,
maybe they have been thrown away, but they could have worked with
a different sort of driver: for instance, the car was also driven by Patrick Tambay.
He was part of the team and he would have probably liked that gearbox
since he was an old-school F1 driver, but the gearbox had no future.
That's the story of that gearbox".
"The car probably needed more development to be competitive,
even if there was some potential, maybe the 4WD should have been removed
to make it just RWD for many reasons: a racecar has different needs from a road one".
"Given the time pressure, there was some skepticism...
Then, when we saw it leaving on the truck for France, I couldn't bear to miss the opportunity of seeing it in action at Le Mans".
"We went there without any of the testing that is usual to prepare
for this kind of races: we left as soon as the car was ready".
"Two holes have been made at the front to blow air onto the disks and cool the brakes
and a diffuser at the rear of the wheel arch helped both cooling and aerodynamics.
For some races, the car was fitted with diffusers over the arches like the Le Mans car
that were probably removed here when the car was restored.
The wheel arches were also enlarged to accommodate slightly bigger tires and
the split BBS rims with the "monodado" ("single nut") simplified the tires changes".
"On the racecar there was a single nut, but we had some problems with the road car
since we have reached a tightening torque of 110 kilogrammeters which is huge,
we had a special wrench to tighten them and still there were some cases
where the nuts unscrewed themselves. Loris Bicocchi, the test driver,
complained about this and after driving it, he checked and the nuts were always a bit loose...
I couldn't figure out how to resolve it but after a while, I discovered that
it was a joint problem: the wheel hub assembly was too stiff, too big in other words, too robust
and when the wheel moved, this stiffness made the nut lose its initial torque.
I remember telling the technical director: "I've just identified the problem" and he said:
"Are you brave enough to remove some material from the hub and make it thinner?"
Pedrazzi was worried about the car's safety, but I told him:
"I'm not brave enough, but this is the problem: it's too stiff".
So production went ahead with wheel hub as it was, although that's not completely true because
we studied a 5-nut hub on the last EB110 prototypes to get rid of the single nut
since we hadn't solve the problem. The single-nut wheels were also not easy to change:
when you took the car to a workshop, they wouldn't have the right wrench to reach that tightening torque,
whereas a conventional 5-nut hub would be easier easier to work on and also safer.
I wanted to replace the one we had and actually the EB112 had a 5-nuts hub,
sorry if I'm going on a bit...
The racecar however had to have the central nut though, so how could we solve the problem?
I remember Pedrazzi telling me: "Call the Synergie team, they raced and we didn't hear any problems from them"
So I called and they sent me the drawing of the lug nut they used,
I did the calculations again and understood what they had done with the cone angle, the thread pitch etc...
and we realized that it could work just by using the right calculations.
On Gildo's EB110 we put the exact same nut that Synergie used, a company that
was familiar with racecars and had probably dealt with this kind of problem before.
God only knows which car this nut came from, but they put it on the EB110 and we did the same thing"
"Obviously the windshield wiper was replaced with another one that
could withstand high speeds, even if it couldn't be homologated
because it didn't wipe the minimum area demanded by the traffic regulations,
the glass area had been lightened with a front LEXAN polycarbonate windshield
and fixed side windows. The rear wheel arches were widened as well,
they are larger than the original and there are more efficient cooling outlets
at the back and a fixed carbon-fiber wing, lighter than the road spoiler
that retracted electrically at low speeds".
"I was fortunate enough to accompany the car during the racing.
I had a VIP pass to go into the pits, it was a wonderful experience,
Le Mans also has its own Bugatti Circuit, so everything "merged".
See the car racing for 23 hours and a half was a victory in itself.
From the moment the idea was born and the car was modified...
even if it stopped half an hour from the finish because of an accident, it was still a victory".
"There had been problems but we always fixed them, we built a unique car"
"There was a problem with the turbocharged, but it was the first time
the car had run in a tough race like that and, if we had had the chance to
prepare it for future races, the Bugatti could have hoped for great results.
It was thrilling".
"The engine, the transmission, the suspensions were actually the same the road cars had,
something incredible because, you know, when somebody builds a racecar,
he rips it open and starts from scratch, while we exploited all the potential of the road car.
We just lightened it, put on some slick tires, tuned it properly, but
the modifications were not radical.
As a technician, I found this astonishing: it's a sign that this granny, this EB110 was not bad at all".
"After this project, we prepared the car for the IMSA championship in the USA a year later
and that was an even bigger project, since we started from a stock EB110
and modified everything according to the FIA rules"
"Another important detail was the suspensions:
the set-up was completely different from the standard.
What did we change? Well, we couldn't change much because the rules provided that
the suspension points needed to be pretty much the standard ones.
So how could we lower the car? We rebuilt the hub mounting, so the hub was higher and the car was lower.
The stock hub mountings were made in cast aluminum, an investment we couldn't afford...
The solution we found was making them in welded steel:
a central hub with the bearing and a welded steel plate.
We drew it with great caution, since they had to be safe, Pedrazzi told me:
"Vittorio, be careful" I found the right material, I defined the welding process so it had to work.
But who would make them? We found a factory in Padulle called "Turbomoto"
that already worked on racecars and they made us the components from the drawings,
using the material and the welding process we wanted. Perfect.
One day I went there to see how things were going:
they were welding on the floor, something that made my skin crawl.
I got very worried and went back to tell Pedrazzi: "Oliviero,
this is how they are making the hub brackets: ..." he said: "Let's wait till they're finished and then see".
Actually, it was not bad. It was okay but "Can we be sure we won't lose a wheel?" he said,
something that must not happen. Safety first. So we put it under a press
and measured how much it distorted under a certain pressure.
I knew the forces to which a wheel is subjected and we verified that it worked
and it was quite strong;
so if those guys had finished the work, despite the fact they were welding on the floor, things would have gone well (that one was just an example).
In fact when they came they were not bad at all, they were beautifully welded.
I spared myself another trip to the workshop so I wouldn't have worried too much,
I just waited and when they arrived, they had been nicely done,
we put them in and everything worked fine.
There's another important thing: we looked at this bracket
and we thought about the future: we wanted to go further, we were capitalizing on this racecar experience.
Oliviero said: "The next will be made from solid steel, just one piece" "That's cool", I said.
He drew an example with a thin plate (2mm thick), it was wonderful to look at.
We gave this drawing to our internal workshop: we had some CNC machines
that we programmed and our guys shaped this high-strength steel block
(there were piles of metal chips this high) and it was marvelous;
even today when I think about it... God only knows where it ended up,
it stayed there on a table or on the floor, it was just a test to see if
it was a feasible option. Oliviero and I were excited:
"Next time we'll do it like this: we'll buy some steel, we've got the machines,
we won't be afraid of the weldings either" because you know,
there are some thermally-altered areas, it's a delicate process.
If it's done properly, the result is perfect, otherwise is a mess; meanwhile,
made in one piece is a different story. It was a monolith, beautiful... but
sadly we never had a chance to use it, though that had been our plan.
I'm saying all this to say how much enthusiasm we had to solve this problem and future ones.
The car would have improved over time, but actually this one is not bad:
we were all amazed by how well it worked.
I remember that when the car was ready, we started it for the first time that night
and went for a drive (we worked all night, Gildo was waiting for this car)".
"Gildo Pallanca Pastor officially commissioned a car to Bugatti to race in the GT1 IMSA championship".
"After talking with Engineer Simonini, our first work was the roll cage
(which did not exist for this car) that had some different specifications from
the one fitted to the Le Mans car, so we built it from scratch.
We were nearly done when they told us it wasn't right
because the metal didn't follow the FIA specs, so we built another one.
It was all part of the game, but we were enthusiastic enough to keep going.
Then we did the other necessary works, we modified the suspensions, the hubs,
put all the mechanical components and the interior in place.
One day we even called Gildo Pastor (who had commissioned the work and was also one of the drivers)
to build him a tailor-made seat with the polyurethane foam seat, he sat in the car,
we put a bag on and with the two-part polyurethane
(that forms a foam when mixed together) we made the seat.
Even that time there was a set back because we made a mistake with the quantities
that produced heat after they're mixed. Gildo started shouting: "Ouch, ouch!" and we told him:
"Stay calm, don't move, otherwise the seat will not come out well" "But it's burning!"
"Inspired by this car, we improved the next one. We knew the timing,
we worked more extensively on the suspensions cinematics (hub brackets, springs etc)
and that was a step forward compared to this one, which was done in a hurry.
"These are works that swallows up a great deal of time in any case. And here's another fact:
I don't know why in the automotive world, even if you know the exact date of the Geneva Auto Show a year before,
you still end up working the night before. I was shocked by this the first times,
I said: "We've known about this for a year and we're still here" but it's normal.
You finish at the last second (maybe it lacks a detail or two), but you finish.
Same story for this car: the customer wanted it and we finished it, it worked,
it just lacked some details that were later mounted by the MRT.
The car brought us huge satisfaction and high hopes for the future, especially the sporting future of Bugatti.
We really believed in this".
"Another anecdote was when we tested the IMSA car for the first time,
we pushed it out the Bugatti factory where there was some kind of track
where we could test the cars.
Loris Bicocchi got into the car, drove a first lap, then a second one and
when he lifted off the accelerator, flames came out of the exhausts.
I remember a guy who said: "It's burning!" I said: "It's not burning"
but he was scared and ran inside to get a fire extinguisher.
It was getting dark and these flames were very noticeable,
so this guy ran inside because he thought the car was on fire".
"I'm really happy they are here today, so I can see something characteristic and pleasing in our story".
"I learned a lot from this racecar, all of us were learning
and I knew I had to gather the information around but I didn't want it to be lost,
so I made a booklet with all the data of this car,
so that I wouldn't have to start from scratch next time:
I knew where we stopped and I knew the direction to take.
This is a book ready to build another racing EB110,
improve it and make it more efficient.
It was a challenge, thanks to Artioli who always motivated us.
It's not easy to turn a road car into a racecar, a road car has a mission: the road,
the comfort, the speed, but racing on a track and be competitive is another story.
Racing cars are tailor-made for the circuits: that's their mission.
A car that "changes jobs" makes it harder.
The car was suitable for racing, but it was not a racecar.
Tracks are cruel and ferocious, but in the end, we got the results".
"California, 6h of Suzuka, we did the 24h of Daytona and
the prequalification for the 24h of Le Mans where it crashed unfortunately".
"I also went to the first shakedown of the IMSA car in Vallelunga,
I went there because there was a problem with a hub bracket bearing and
I left the factory in an Opel owned by Bugatti, drove from Campogalliano
to Vallelunga with the part, because I wanted the car to be as perfect as possible".
"Something nice I like to tell was the Daytona experience where
something ridiculous broke: a little piece in the gearbox that costs something like...
... 50 cents. The engine could blow, a differential could collapse but no: that thing broke.
The great thing, though, is that when the car was running, we were in 1st place for our class and 6th overall.
All the TV crews, the people at Daytona's magnificent oval racetrack were there for the Bugatti.
It's something that still gives me goose bumps after all these years.
The Bugatti was the center of attention: it was something new. It was a profound experience".
"Beyond the technical aspects, there was the human one: we worked at night,
but we weren't forced to do so. We thought it was the right thing to do
since we were involved in the development and manufacture of this car.
It was instinctive, we didn't look at the clock, the important thing was
that the car had to be ready on time and properly built.
It was really great"
"Seeing her again here is... something that makes me look back, but also reawakens
the deep emotions I felt... Yeah...
It's beautiful, it has been a privilege working on these cars,
living these experiences, working night and day has been wonderful... really wonderful".
Written and directed by Davide Cironi
Filmed by Stefano Ianni
Filmed by Francesco Colantoni
Translated by Elia Pozzani
For more contents and photos feel free to check out our website WWW.DRIVEEXPERIENCE.IT
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