The Bugatti EB110 GT is the hypercar for an era before the word hypercar was invented. Briefly the fastest car in the world, the EB 110 pushed the limits of technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s to develop a car to which all modern hypercars owe a lineage.

The story begins in the 1980s with Paolo Stanzani and Ferruccio Lamborghini, who begin got cook up the idea of a completely new supercar with Bertone styling. The project soon evolved thanks to the investment of Romano Artioli, who with Ferruccio Lamborghini’s encouragement, purchased the Bugatti trademark in 1987 and created Bugatti Automobili S.p.A.

The brief from Artioli was clear, not only create a groundbreaking supercar, but also imagine what a contemporary Bugatti would look like had the Molsheim marque continued production throughout the post-war era. The story of the cars development is worthy of a novel, but the result was a supercar built with a pioneering carbon fibre chassis, a small displacement 3.5 litre V12 fitted with four turbochargers, and a luxuriously appointed leather and wood clad interior.

Power delivery was ferocious with 553 hp being delivered via the 4-wheel drive system. The top speed was 212.5 mph / 342 km/h, and 0-100 km/h (62 mph) came up in 3.46 seconds … not bad even today, mind bending in 1991.

The rest of the story is one of motoring history’s most intriguing stories. The car was launched in to great fanfare in Paris on what would have been Ettore Bugatti’s 110th birthday, and simultaneously into one of the most devastating economic crises of the post-war period. By 1995 Bugatti S.p.A was in dire financial difficulty and declared bankruptcy, closing the doors to its remarkable Fabbrica Blu in Campogalliano with only 139 cars having been produced.
The EB110 GT is an enduring legacy of remarkable ambition, and today one of the most important and rarest pioneering supercars ever built.