Action from the Soap Box Derby during Art Deco Festival 2024. Video: Paul Taylor
The Art Deco Festival’s fascination with the automobile has taken on a new gleam with confirmation it will include the unveiling of a Hamilton-built replica Bugatti Type 57S Atlantic Coupe.
Jean Bugatti's 1936 Bugatti Type 57S Atlantic Coupe long-since missing, but with a built-again successor made in Hamilton and set to be unveiled during the Art Deco Festival. Photo / Tom Andrews Collection.
The pride of Hamilton enthusiast, Classics Museum founder and regular Art Deco Festival visitor Tom Andrews, it’s thought to be the world’s first rebuild of the “missing” 1936 model owned by Jean Bugatti, son of Bugatti founder Ettore Bugatti.
Four, known as La Voiture Noire, were “hand-made”, each with different characteristics — “probably the four most-famous cars in the World,” Andrews said.
One is in the Mullin Automotive Museum in California, one is in the collection of clothing designer Ralph Lauren, and one is in Spain, rebuilt from the wreckage of a car destroyed in a fatal crash with a train in France in 1955, but the other, was “lost”.
“To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever built an accurate and true recreation of the “lost car”, No 57453,” he said.
Andrews has brought vintage and classic cars to the festival in Napier for so long he can’t remember when he started and when Bugatti would be the “marque” brand this year he latched onto the opportunity, the Atlantic was finished “just before Christmas”, will be unveiled to the public at the Masonic Hotel on February 13 – Day 2 of the February 12-16 festival.
Hamilton vintage and classic cars enthusiast Tom Andrews at his Hamilton museum after acquiring his Bugatti Ventoux in 2015, after it was found in a barn in France. It inspired his dream to build a replica of a "missing" 1936 Bugatti Atlantic Coupe. The replica will be unveiled in Napier during the Art Deco Festival. Photo / NZME
All but three of the 15 vintage and classic Bugatti models thought to be in New Zealand will be in Napier, including four Type 57 grand tourer models, 710 of which were produced in 1934-1940.
According to Hawke’s Bay Vintage Car Club Art Deco festival spokesman Steven Donovan, about 180 vintage and classic vehicles, from as far afield as north of Auckland and Central Otago, well down on the up to 300 gathered in some of the peak years pre-Covid.
Most will be in Napier for the duration of the festival, but the Bugatti fleet, and the unveiling of the 1936 Atlantic, will “compensate” for the decline in numbers Donovan attributes, at least in part, to the current economic climate and possibly the loss of some festival momentum from the issues of the past five years.
The car’s got its own website and blog, which says: “The car had distinctive and unique characteristics that set it aside from the other three coupes. Building what we believe to be the first-ever faithful recreation of this exotic Bugatti would arguably be one of the most difficult and complex projects we could undertake. In 2018 we took on the challenge.”
Asked by phone why he chose Napier for the debut appearance ahead of his own museum, Andrews gives an almost audible shrug of the shoulders and says: “I don’t know how it came about. Bugatti is the marque automobile this year, and we’ve presented lots of cars in the parade.”
The burning question of who drives has a bluntish answer: “No one. It won’t be driven”.
Andrews has over 200 cars, and the two Bugatti he’s bringing will come by closed trailer, to avoid the flying chips of the the Napier-Taupo road.
The value of the Atlantic is barely estimable, with his team’s up-to 18,000 hours’ work over seven years, its intricacies are such that the “nuts and bolts” cost about $25,000, and he said: “It’s like a picture on the wall. It’s a piece of art.”
As it happens, he’s also well qualified to talk about the tarmac of the highways, for he was one of the biggest in the road construction business, with seven asphalt companies and a bitumen plant.
There won’t be any corners cut in the unveiling, with “trailers” of display equipment arriving in Napier on February 10 to begin setting up in and around the Masonic, with huge screens in place to help tell the story.
Doug Laing is a senior reporter based in Napier with Hawke’s Bay Today, and has 51 years of journalism experience, 41 of them in Hawke’s Bay, in news gathering, including breaking news, sports, local events, issues, and personalities.
