Bugatti EB110: the supercar that arrived ten years before the future caught up

Ask most people under forty when Bugatti returned to building cars and you’ll get the same answer. The Veyron. 2005. Volkswagen. End of story.

That’s wrong by about fourteen years and one country. Before the W16, before Wolfsburg’s open chequebook, before the 400 km/h chase, Bugatti had already come back. The car was built in a brand new factory near Modena. It had a carbon fibre monocoque built by an aircraft company. It had a 3.5-litre V12 with four turbochargers, four-wheel drive and a six-speed manual gearbox. It was the first production car in the world with a full carbon fibre tub. It launched on 15 September 1991, on what would have been Ettore Bugatti’s 110th birthday, in front of the Grande Arche at La Défense in Paris.

It was called the EB110, and almost nobody who quotes Veyron stats today remembers it exists.

That forgetting is the second part of the story. The first part is what the car actually was. Because once you strip the badge and look at the engineering, the EB110 isn’t a curio. It’s the supercar that defined the modern hypercar template before McLaren had even delivered an F1 to a customer.

The Italian who tried to bring Bugatti back from the dead

Romano Artioli is the name to remember. An Italian businessman with serious money, most of it generated by a Suzuki dealership empire that had been printing yen in Italy for decades. In the late eighties he decided he was going to revive Bugatti. The marque had been effectively dead since the fifties. The rights to the name floated in a strange legal limbo. Artioli bought them.

He didn’t stop there. He could have done what so many revival projects do, which is slap the badge on something existing and milk the legend. He went the other way. He built a brand new state-of-the-art factory at Campogalliano, just outside Modena, in the heart of Italy’s Motor Valley. He hired the best supercar engineers he could find. Paolo Stanzani, the man who had designed the chassis of the Lamborghini Miura, ran the engineering. When Stanzani left, his replacement was Nicola Materazzi, fresh from the Ferrari F40 project. The styling was Marcello Gandini, the man who had drawn both the Miura and the Countach.

Imagine the football equivalent. Artioli signed Maradona and Cruyff for the same team. And for the chassis, he didn’t go to a car supplier. He went to Aérospatiale, the French aerospace company that built Airbus. The monocoque of the EB110 came from the people who made airliners. Full carbon fibre. In 1991. Before the McLaren F1, which everyone remembers as the carbon fibre pioneer, had been homologated. Before the Ferrari F50 had even been thought through. The Ferrari F40 that Materazzi himself had just finished still used a steel spaceframe with carbon panels bonded on. The EB110 was the first production car with a true carbon fibre tub.

Nobody talks about that. That’s the first tragedy.

A designer who walked away, an early warning

Worth pausing on Gandini, because what happened during the design says a lot about how this story was going to end.

Gandini drew the EB110 in his own idiom. Pop-up headlights, aggressive wedge lines, the kind of taut visual aggression he had built his career on. Artioli looked at the model and decided he wanted something more elegant, more Bugatti, less Lamborghini. So he brought in Giampaolo Benedini, an architect who had also designed the Campogalliano factory itself, and Benedini reshaped the car. Out went the pop-ups. The nose came up. The lines softened. What was delivered to the public in 1991 was the polite version of Gandini’s original.

Gandini was furious. So furious that years later he took his original drawings to another small manufacturer, who built the car he had wanted to build. That car was the Cizeta-Moroder V16T, another oddity of nineties Italian supercar history that never quite became a thing. But the relevant point here isn’t Cizeta. It’s that the EB110 launched with a major internal fight already in its design DNA. A car born in conflict is a warning sign before a single one rolls off the production line.

What the machine actually was

Open the engine cover. Mentally, because looking inside one in person is something most of us never get to do.

The 3.5-litre V12 is the kind of motor an engineer admires and a mechanic eyes nervously in equal measure. The admiration is for the rationality of the design. Alloy block. Five valves per cylinder, three intake, two exhaust. Double overhead camshafts per bank. Dry sump lubrication. The nerves are for what they bolted on top: four small IHI turbochargers, two per bank, each with its own intercooler, plumbing and wastegate. If you’ve ever had to debug a single-turbo car, you know how delicate that ecosystem is. Four small turbos are mechanically a better answer than two big ones for low-rev response, but they’re also four times the points of failure.

It worked. It worked properly. The GT made 553 horsepower at 8,000 rpm. The Super Sport version made 603 at 8,250. To put that in context with the cars Chris Harris would mention in the same breath: the Ferrari F40, contemporary, made 478. The McLaren F1, just arriving as the EB110 launched, made 627 atmospheric horsepower out of a much larger BMW V12. The EB110 SS gave you nearly as much power as the McLaren, with four-wheel drive, in a car that weighed 1,418 kilos against the McLaren’s 1,140. The McLaren is the obvious win on the power-to-weight comparison, but the McLaren also didn’t have AWD, three differentials and a permanent 27:73 torque split sending the V12 to all four corners.

Three differentials. A central one, a front one, a rear one with a limited-slip arrangement. In 1991. The kind of system that became standard kit for hypercars after the Veyron in 2005. The EB110 was already there fourteen years earlier. That’s the line that matters in this whole story. The EB110 didn’t follow the Veyron. The Veyron followed the EB110, even if Volkswagen would rather frame it the other way.

Was the EB110 perfect? No. It was heavy for what the spec sheet promised. The gearbox was a tough customer, demanding firm hands. Luggage space was a joke. And once the company collapsed, parts and knowledge went with it, so any car that broke after 1995 became its owner’s private problem. A handful of independent specialists eventually rebuilt that ecosystem, but for a long stretch an EB110 in trouble was a car nobody could fix.

The Super Sport, and the Schumacher chapter

Six months after the GT, Bugatti released the EB110 Super Sport. The SS shed 200 kilos by binning sound deadening, swapping panels for exposed carbon, fitting a fixed rear wing instead of the GT’s active electronic unit, and finding another fifty horsepower in the engine map. The numbers came out at 603 horsepower, 348 km/h top speed, 0 to 100 km/h in 3.2 seconds. Only thirty SS units were built before the lights went out at Campogalliano.

One of those thirty is responsible for the EB110 entering wider popular memory. In 1994, after winning his first Formula One World Championship, Michael Schumacher walked into the showroom and bought a yellow Super Sport. Chassis 020. He kept it until 2003. That tells you something the spec sheet won’t. Schumacher could have had anything. He had Ferraris, he had Mercedes, he had whatever he wanted. He kept the Bugatti for nine years. You don’t do that with a car that doesn’t deliver.

The Schumacher halo still hangs over EB110 SS values today. A good SS at auction will move between 2.5 and 3.5 million dollars in 2026 money, and lost cars are still surfacing. One Super Sport that had been physically missing for twenty-four years reappeared at auction in 2026, having been forgotten at a supplier facility when the company collapsed in 1995. The ghost of Campogalliano stretches long.

Le Mans, Daytona and a quiet poison

Artioli wanted the EB110 on track. He was right to want it. A marque with Bugatti’s racing history, with the Type 35 in its DNA, couldn’t sell a six-figure supercar without showing up at Le Mans. So in 1994 a blue EB110 LM ran at the 24 Hours with Cudini, Hélary and Boullion at the wheel. It didn’t win and didn’t finish, but it ran. A year later, with the company already wobbling, a privately-entered EB110 SC entered the 1996 Daytona 24 Hours with Derek Hill, son of American F1 champion Phil Hill, sharing the seat. They qualified 21st, ran as high as 7th overall, and dropped out after seven hours with electrical trouble.

There’s a quieter thread that deserves naming. According to the EB110 registry, part of what killed Bugatti Automobili wasn’t just Artioli’s overstretch. It was Ferrari putting pressure on shared suppliers to stop doing business with the revived Bugatti. That kind of leverage, exercised through a tightly networked Italian supply chain in the Motor Valley, is the kind of thing nobody writes about in press releases. Maranello held more power in that ecosystem than any of its rivals could afford to challenge. Combined with Artioli’s financial position, it helped finish the job.

The year the lights went out

By 1995 three things had hit Artioli simultaneously. The Japanese yen surged, which devastated his Suzuki import business in Italy, his cash cow. He had bought Lotus from General Motors in 1993 to plug British chassis engineering into Bugatti, and Lotus consumed capital like an open furnace. And he had pushed the EB112 four-door saloon project into active development, another car that needed money he no longer had.

In September 1995, Bugatti Automobili SpA filed for bankruptcy. The Campogalliano factory was padlocked with cars half-built on the line, tools still in their places, like an industrial Pompeii. Total production stood at 139 EB110s across GT and SS variants. Some cars and many parts ended up in the bankruptcy estate. In 1997 the administrators auctioned everything off. Most of it went to Jochen Dauer, the German racing specialist in Nuremberg, who finished three SS and one GT between 1999 and 2000 wearing his own Dauer badge. B Engineering, formed by Bugatti engineers who refused to let the project die quietly, built the Edonis on the EB110 mechanical base, another car almost no one outside specialist circles has heard of.

Artioli personally lost much of his fortune. But he kept one thing, the Bugatti name rights he had originally bought. In 1998 he sold them to Volkswagen.

What the EB110 left behind

Volkswagen took those rights and built the Veyron. When you look at a Veyron, with its W16 quad-turbo engine, its all-wheel drive, its 1,001 horsepower, its mission to be the world’s fastest production car, you are not looking at a new idea. You are looking at the EB110’s idea executed fourteen years later with the full weight of Volkswagen’s industrial machine behind it, with all the development money in the world, with all the time anyone could need to refine it. The concept was identical. Monstrous turbocharged engine, AWD to make that power useable, no compromise.

The EB110 was not a perfect car. It was heavy, it was expensive to maintain, it was demanding. But it was the correct idea put on the table too early, with an industrial project too ambitious to survive the worst possible financial moment. If Artioli had been backed by a Volkswagen-scale parent in 1991, the EB110 would have done what the Veyron did. Probably sooner, almost certainly better remembered.

Cars don’t always fail because they’re wrong. Sometimes they fail because they’re too right too soon, in the wrong place, with the wrong person handling the cheque book. That’s the EB110 story. A supercar that had everything the industry would spend the next decade slowly working out, already done and on sale in 1991.

When an EB110 SS changes hands today for three million dollars at auction, what you’re watching isn’t nostalgia. It’s the market quietly admitting the car was right all along, thirty years late.

Check you’re still alive.