“They don’t make cars like they used to.”
How many times have we heard that sentiment? You could take it either way, really, inasmuch as it’s viewed as a good thing or a negative. But while cars are undeniably safer, more efficient, more refined and quicker than ever before, there’s still something tangible missing. As anyone with experience in these matters will no doubt readily tell you, even the most exciting new cars on the planet can seem a little, shall we say, dull when compared to those that were pounding the roads half a century ago.
But if you go back further still, to the earliest incarnations of the performance car, you can find unsullied driving purity in machinery that remains the property of the fortunate few. Cars such as the Bugatti Type 35 – a model so desirable and collectable that it has become out of reach for all but the world’s wealthiest and most patient enthusiasts. They need to be well heeled simply because the entry price into the Type 35 ownership club is extraordinarily high; and they require saintly patience even if the coffers are brimming with spare cash, because the cars rarely, if ever, emerge from private collections for sale.
So what to do? Is there a way into this club or others like it, when there are so few cars available? If you look at the photographs on this page, you’ll see that there is indeed a way to turn dreams into reality.
The Saudi car enthusiast and avid collector Faisal BinLaden has been fantasising about owning a Type 35 Bugatti for as long as he can remember; now he has one to call his own. A brand new, 1926 Type 35. And no, that isn’t a typo.
Before you go crying “fake”, hang on a second. This glorious classic automobile, which would turn heads that a Veyron (he owns one of those, too) could not, is nothing short of the real deal. In a world where we’ve become accustomed to poor replicas of iconic sports cars such as the Porsche 356, AC Cobra, Lamborghini Countach and various other pieces of exotica, copies of cars that in their original form are utterly wondrous are often recreated in forms that would have their original designers and builders reaching for a sick bag. But there are exceptions. Pur Sang, of Argentina, is one of the very finest.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. Instead, let’s take a look at why anyone would want to hand-build individual recreations (“replica” does this thing a disservice) of a car that first turned a wheel more than 90 years ago. Why, after all these decades of innovation and technical progress, would someone want to drive a car that spurts steam and hot oil from its orifices, with zero protection from the elements and a gear shifter that you need to reach over the door to operate? That’s easy to answer: Bugatti’s Type 35 changed everything – nothing was like it before or afterwards, and though they’re clichés in the lexicon of motoring journalists the world over, the terms “legend” and “icon” are wholly appropriate when describing it.
The Type 35, built by hand between 1924 and 1927 at Château Saint Jean in Molsheim, Alsace, (a town which, like Bugatti itself, has swapped between French and German jurisdiction over the decades) won more than a thousand races in its time. In its heyday, it averaged 14 wins a week. It won the Targa Florio for five consecutive years between 1925 and 1929 – it basically took on all comers and proved victorious, thanks to its power, pace and robust yet delicate construction. No wonder its desirability has never waned – can you think of a modern-day equivalent? Probably not.
Its engine put out 137hp (an outrageous number for its time) and it could reach speeds of between 210 and 225kph – again, incredible statistics for the 1920s. All this was when the Ford Model T was the car to own for the masses, who never got to experience much more than 40kph. It’s frankly insane when you stop to consider just how advanced this Bugatti was – the car as we know it had been around for only 20 years. This was rocket-ship territory, something like the equivalent of a car nowadays that could travel at the speed of sound while racing at Yas Marina. It came to represent a turning point in the history of the motor car.
As is usually the case with iconic classic cars of any vintage, these racers were never built in huge numbers – fewer than 250 Type 35s were made, along with 357 visually identical Type 37s. Many of these were raced, destroyed, or left to rot in barns or decay at the bottoms of lakes. So in the ensuing nine decades, prices for survivors have, unsurprisingly, reached the stratosphere – if, as previously mentioned, they ever come on to the market at all.
Those who do own Type 35s are mostly too scared to drive them because of their scarcity and incredible value, so the examples that are left are usually little more than static museum displays – something that hardly appeals to BinLaden, who, by his own admission, wants to “drive the hell out of it”.
So a recreation of a Type 35, at least on paper, makes a great deal of sense. All the style of the original, with modern mechanicals and proven safety technology – what could possibly be better? Or worse?
BinLaden’s Type 35 is not like that. It is, apart from its date of manufacture, identical to one that would have rolled out of Bugatti’s grounds in 1926, and that’s just how he likes it. Not for him the safety nets of electronic systems or even the refinement of power-assisted steering and an automated gearbox. He wants a Type 35 to be raw, uncompromising and brutal in the way it delivers the goods – just like an original was. Thanks to Pur Sang, he has exactly that.
Pur Sang translates from Latin as “Pure Blood” – a fitting descriptor for a hand-built sports car such as this. The level of authenticity at play here, despite everything being entirely new, has led Bugatti itself to get behind the project and all-but-officially sanction the cars, permitting a continuation of chassis numbers that follow the originals. It’s an incredible achievement, but how did this all come into existence? BinLaden is only too happy to share the story.
The company’s formation, he tells me, came about 31 years ago when Jorge Anadon, an expert Bugatti enthusiast and restorer who desperately wanted to buy one of his own, copied a Type 35 when he had it in for restoration at his Argentine workshop. He basically built the first Pur Sang Type 35 in his living room, and a business was born – a business that, first and foremost allows people to touch and experience something that’s otherwise unobtainable, even for people with limitless means.
Pur Sang’s approach to building these cars is no different to that of Bugatti, BinLaden confirms. “Everything it does – everything – is exactly as it was in the 1920s and 30s. And it all takes place under one roof,” he says. “They even make the tyres. It’s impossible to import anything for these machines into Argentina, so they make every nut, bolt, washer. Their foundry [Pur Sang even makes its own sand boxes for the castings] is used for the wheels, engine and gearbox casings; they turn their own aluminium dashboards; and they hand-beat the body panels into shape. It’s extraordinary and absolutely unique, what they achieve.”
But isn’t there something a bit disappointing about owning anything that isn’t the actual real deal? He says not, in this case, and that Pur Sang’s cars share the same imperfections the originals have – the tooling marks, the scraping marks on the engine blocks – everything the originals had is in these cars. So the flaws are there, but what about the benefits of this recreation? He says he can drive it as hard as possible and that it won’t fall apart, and when he does, the very soul of the original puts in an appearance.
As with originals, the Pur Sang’s engine is a straight-eight-cylinder, 24-valve, 2.3L unit with a supercharger, with the torque handled by a four-speed straight-cut transmission. As BinLaden points out, though, there have been one or two modifications for modern use.
“There is an electric starter motor, a [Ford] distributor and a modern fuel pump, housed within the tank itself,” he says. “But everything is hidden from view – it looks, even to experts, the same as the real thing.”
The one major difference between a Pur Sang Type 35 and a Bugatti original is the price tag. You can have one of these made for about $250,000 (Dh918,288).
“That’s a tenth of the price of a real one,” says BinLaden, “and that means I can use mine for anything I want, whenever I want – if I want to go to get my shopping from town, I can take this without worrying too much. It just makes sense.”
As for how he came to hear about Pur Sang and have his own made, two years ago he saw Jay Leno's example on the former chat-show host's car programme Jay Leno's Garage.
“I managed to get hold of Leno’s mechanic,” he recalls, “and I ended up talking with the man himself. On the basis of what he explained to me, I placed my order.”
He drives it “like hell”, too – as good as his word – and he can’t help but exclaim it’s the finest car he has ever driven. For a man with a collection such as his, that’s the highest possible praise, but it comes back to one unavoidable fact: they really don’t make cars like they used to.
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