There aren’t many situations where arriving in a Bugatti leaves you worried that someone else might have the same car.
MANSORY has nevertheless found a solution.
For its first appearance at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, the German tuner has prepared two Bugatti-based world premieres: the Vincerò and Vivere. And both are one-offs.
The Vincerò starts with the Bugatti Mistral, already one of the rarest and most spectacular road cars on sale. Rather than treating that as a reason to leave it alone, MANSORY has fitted newly developed aerodynamic pieces and colored exposed-carbon body components.
New forged wheels complete the exterior transformation.
Inside, the Mistral receives an entirely bespoke cabin using leather, carbon-fiber trim and individually made details. MANSORY hasn’t simply changed the exterior and left Bugatti’s interior untouched.
Whether any of this constitutes an improvement is a much more entertaining question.
The Mistral was hardly anonymous when it left Molsheim. Bugatti created it as the ultimate open-top expression of its W16 era. There is an argument that modifying such a car is a little like buying an original painting and deciding the artist should have used more red.
Then again, MANSORY’s customer probably isn’t looking for restraint.
The second car is called Vivere, another one-of-one Bugatti project created specifically for Pebble Beach. It also uses colored exposed carbon and newly developed aerodynamic parts, but MANSORY has designed an entirely new generation of forged alloy wheels for this car.
Again, the interior gets the full treatment rather than a handful of badges.
MANSORY says the objective was to emphasize the original vehicle’s design while maintaining high manufacturing quality. That’s the sensible description.
The less sensible description is that somebody looked at one of the world’s most exclusive hypercars and thought: I need mine to be rarer.
And perhaps that’s exactly why these cars exist.
At the lower end of the tuning world, modification often means improving performance or making an affordable car more distinctive. Once you’re dealing with Bugatti, neither argument works particularly well.
The base cars are already enormously powerful. They’re already handmade. They’re already produced in tiny numbers. And they’re already expensive enough to make most supercars look relatively ordinary.
So the product MANSORY is really selling here isn’t horsepower.
It’s individuality.
Owning a Bugatti gets you into an exceptionally small club. Owning the only Vincerò or Vivere in existence reduces that club to one person.
The styling will inevitably divide opinion — MANSORY cars usually do — but there’s no denying the logic behind the project.
At Pebble Beach, a standard exotic car isn’t particularly exotic. And,turning up with the only one on Earth, solves that problem rather effectively.
