Bugatti Head of Design's Personal 911 Project - DRIVEN

[SIDE CONVERSATION IN GERMAN]
You see all these single-speed bikes here in Berlin, and it's
following, I guess, a very similar concept.
It's just like you barely find a fixie twice.
All those bikes that you see here in Mauerpark, where
people did their own thing, it's just really nice to see.
Special handlebar cut from something else, and everybody
does this little design project.
I like that.
It reminds me a little bit of my early moped days.
There were Kreidler mopeds at the time where you could
exchange parts on the engine so easily to
make it a faster moped.
911, here and there, feels the same to me, because the car
was built in its [INAUDIBLE], so simple, but also so
steadily and in a very similar way that you are able to
exchange parts and combine it to your
personal take on the car.

The car is a 1981 SE body, stripped down completely.
And then all the panels that are loose on that body, which
is a [INAUDIBLE]
body already, they were replaced by Kevlar panels,
meaning the engine lid, the bumper, the door, the front
fender, the bonnet, and the front bumper as well.
And together with the completely stripped-out
interior and the plastic windows, it made the car
extremely light.
It is down to now 820 kilograms.
It has no heater, also.
The whole engine bay is cleaned out.
It all added to the overall concept of an interesting
power-to-weight ratio of the car.
A little bit sign of our time, though, too, that you start to
feel relieved if you take away things and start to
concentrate on the essential things in life and also on
your product.
OK, this is really a minor detail about this car, but
when it came to-- everybody who has tried to paint a Fuchs
wheel by hand had to, at some point, tape it up and tape up
that area where the contrast is between the
silver and the black.
If you ever try to do that yourself, for me, it was
really difficult to get my head around how I do that
myself in a way, and I tried to find all kinds of tricks
how to make that happen.
And in the end, I put it in water with some soap in it to
take away the [INAUDIBLE], and let that water level come up,
and it made me a perfect mark all the way around and gave me
a marking where I could finally tape up that wheel.
And since then, I look at Fuchs wheels completely
different, and I see which ones are done very well and
which ones are done not so well.
And it was just a little insight into just doing things
yourself on your own personal 911 project and failing a
couple of times and then having a
chance to get it right.
When you're used to working on a Bugatti product, it's such a
different world.
It's such a different approach to car design and pioneering
technique in general.
And it's such a necessity to concentrate on high-tech
performance also using high-tech values and also
extreme refinement on materials.
It almost feels like a relief from time to do exactly the
opposite and come back to super simplistic approaches
that maybe also don't cost the world.
[THEME MUSIC]