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Next week in Napier, NZ at Art Deco Fest, Tom Andrews and his team at the Classics Museum will be unveiling two Bugatti's. One is a 1937 Type 57 Ventoux that Tom pulled out of a barn in the Metro Paris area and did a full restoration on. The other is a one of kind Atlantic type 57S which is faithful recreation of Jean Bugatti’s black car, known as “La Voiture Noire” that Tom's team scratch built from blueprints and archival photos. It will be the only one in the world.

You can find out more about both builds here:

bugattiatlantic.co.nz/

For those not aware, Tom was the gentleman who loaned us a 33 Packard Super Eight and the Auburn Convertible Sedan for two weeks while we adventures around New Zealand last year.

Thanks for posting Big Kev, remarkable stories and work on these cars. We are going to NZ next year, hopefully we will be able to see these.

Superb dedication. Thanks for posting this. A lifelong Cordite who also owned and rebuilt a '35 Packard 1201 (not 120) coupe-roadster, '41 Cad conv., '41 Lincoln Continental coupe, among others, a licensed mechanic after mustering out of the Navy serving the final year as a 17-year-old machinist's mate, then wrenching at his father's Chrysler-Plymouth-GMC dealership (started as Buick 1921, switched to Chrysler-Plymouth 1928, Volvo 1966-on) drove a friend's Type 57 Bugatti coupe, said it felt "like an expensive pile of parts." I had the precise feeling driving a mutual friend's well-fettled Type 101, the postwar continuation of the Type 57, one of seven built.

In fairness, only drove a couple exits on the freeway at 65, then surface streets. Perhaps they came into their own at extreme speed. Have also read a Bugattiast apparently beyond the usual single marque-itis mentioning Bugatti's "porous castings."

You get the feeling that, like Enzo Ferrari, Ettore Bugatti was more interested in racing, perhaps, than his street cars. Enzo's sole interest in his road cars was that they funded his chief love, racing. But road Bugattis had to have substance, real merit, because few cars can survive on myth, hyperbole alone.

An aside: Bugattis and Rolls-Royce believed in "stitching" cars together with a multiplicity of fine-threaded bolts. Packard did the same, albeit on a modern assembly line. This can make Packards, junior or senior, a b__ch to work on at times, but is another mark of quality.

In this day of yahoos dumping crate engines into everything, even senior Packards and Pierce-Arrows of the '30s, it's refreshing to read about someone devoted enough to a rare and/or unobtainable original producing an intensely faithful reproduction.

Thanks again, Kev.