Bugatti’s Design Director Breaks Down the One of a Kind ‘Golden Era’ Chiron

Frank Heyl came into the festivities of the 2023 Monterey Car Week riding high.

For starters, he’d just been appointed Bugatti’s director of design a couple weeks before, assuming the position his old boss, Achim Anscheidt, had just vacated in order to adopt a broader advisory role at the hand of Bugatti CEO and EV wunderkind Mate Rimac. But he also came to California in the company of a new Bugatti unlike any he’d worked on in the past — one that celebrates the carmaker’s history with its designers’ work illustrated not just in the sheetmetal, but on it, too.

The Bugatti Chiron Super Sport ‘Golden Era’ — quotes officially included — takes the company’s current piece de resistance, the 300-mph, 1,578-hp long tail version of the quad-turbocharged, 16-cylinder Chiron, and uses it as a canvas to honor the long, proud history of the brand from its start in 2016 to now — what Heyl describes as “an era of internal combustion.”

“Everyone loves design sketches,” Heyl says. “Why not sketch them onto the car?”

Bugatti

A great idea in theory; a tricky one in practice. Obtaining the look they wanted at the level of quality worthy of a multi-million-dollar boutique automobile, he says, turned out to be a more difficult task than anticipated when they originally pitched the concept to the car’s wealthy owner.

“We were like, oh no, what did we get ourselves into?” Heyl says.

In the end, Heyl and his team figured out a way to nail it: a system that alternated between colored pencil illustrations and paint for four to five layers, embedding the drawings below and within the clearcoat and the Doré gold pigment. (Think of it almost like a tattoo in your skin.)

Will Sabel Courtney

The tweaks extend beyond the illustrations, too. For example, the Golden Era car is the only one with a golden Bugatti badge (or as Heyl calls it, a “Bugatti macaron”). It’s all part of the brand’s Sur Mesure program, its bespoke tailoring service that enables buyers who don’t consider a $3.9-million-dollar hypercar that can outrun small aircraft unique enough to further customize their cars with practically any color, design or automotive-grade material imaginable.

Customers, Heyl says, are increasingly choosing customized cars — many intend to keep said cars in the family for decades to come, passing them down like a fine watch.

Bugatti

Bugatti

Not only are the illustrations drawn on the exterior, but they’re also incorporated into the interior trim.

Still, while many things can be tweaked and many things may change, some elements of the brand’s design are, well, elemental. Bugattis will always have a horseshoe-shaped grille, Heyl says, and they’ll always have what he calls a “Bugatti line” — the large C-shaped arc along the side.

What they won’t have, however, is pure internal combustion power beneath the hood. While the brand isn’t expected to go full-electric like Rimac’s Nevera anytime soon, the Chiron’s successor will pack a new hybrid engine — a powerplant that CEO Rimac described as “totally bonkers” in a 2022 interview with Auto Express.

In that same interview, Rimac said to expect to see the new powerplant — perhaps attached to the Chiron’s successor, perhaps not — sometime in 2023. With four months left in the year, there’s still plenty of time for it to show its face, even if the Chiron’s production run still has a little life left in it. One thing’s for certain, though: whatever the future of Bugatti is, much like its present, it’s sure to keep Heyl busy.

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