But in the grand scheme of Veyron color schemes, the World Record Edition Super Sport doesn’t come close to the visual art of some of the other Veyrons on display in Vegas. Many of the cars at the show were early 16.4 coupes, which made up 252 of the Veyron’s total 450-car production run. Already in development when Heyl joined was the convertible Grand Sport, of which 58 were made starting in 2009, then there were 48 Super Sport coupes, and 92 Grand Sport Vitesse convertibles. (The Vegas show consisted of twenty 16.4 coupes, eight Grand Sports, five Super Sports, and thirteen Vitesses.) At first, the Veyron 16.4 was either available only with paint in a single color or the two-tone finish, with more customization options and color choice than any other automaker at the time — and by a huge margin.
“When series production was picking up back then, let’s say the first hundred Veyrons, they’re all solid colors,” Heyl said. “As that started rolling, people started getting used to having any color you like on the interior and exterior. That was not normal [in the supercar world] back then. People started individualizing just with colors.” As the appetite for more extreme customization increased, Bugatti had the idea for not just exposed carbon-fiber body panels, but colored carbon, something not even being dreamed about by other car companies.
Daniel Golson / Jalopnik
“So we said, ‘okay, exposed carbon fiber, okay, great.’ [We needed a] new set of tools, because lots of the first Veyrons actually have aluminum exterior panels, not carbon fiber. That’s how we also went, ‘okay, let’s stay with true material-ness, let’s create the Pur Sang.’ That was the car that started the whole thing,” Heyl said. The Pur Sang was the first special edition Veyron, with only five being built following its debut in 2007. Its front and rear fenders, doors, front bumper and side skirts were all made from polished aluminum (more on that in a moment), while the hood, roof, rear deck and rear bumper were exposed carbon fiber. “We called it grey carbon fiber because it’s just carbon fiber as it is; graphite gray, clear coat on it, that’s it. Then we thought, ‘okay, let’s do the next version,’ which was called Sang Noir.”
Bugatti made twelve Sang Noirs, and two of them were on display in Vegas, including the only one with a red interior instead of the Tangerine orange of the other eleven. The Sang Noir used the same material split as the Pur Sang, with exposed carbon on the hood, roof and center rear section. But its carbon fiber has a 10% black paint tint in the clear coat, which makes for it a super subtle contrast against the black paint of the other body panels. “At second glance you think, ‘okay, it’s a black car.’ You walk up to it, and only from meter away you realize, ‘oh, it’s exposed carbon fiber,’ but it’s so dark you can barely make it up,” Heyl said. “We always said it’s like wearing the mink inside. It’s very understated, just very much like the character of the Veyron overall is.” The Sang Noir also got special black headlights and bright polished pieces like the grille and mirrors.
Daniel Golson / Jalopnik
From there it was off to the races. Bugatti did a car with blue-tinted carbon next, expanding to basically anything the customer could think of. The company offered three different blue-hued carbon fibers, as well as green, brown, red, purple, and more. “And so that’s also where customers started saying, ‘Oh, it’s $300,000 extra. Yeah, great, I’m getting it.’ From that point on, the individualization spec worth picked up, what people were, let’s say, willing to spend to individualize their car,” Heyl said with a smile. Now Bugatti can do basically whatever the customer desires, including extremely intensive paint jobs on already limited-run car. “We have the Lady Bug here as a prime example, the Divo. I mean that was such a complicated project to do. It took me almost a year.”
