REQUIEM FOR A DREAM

The Bugatti 100P was a beautiful blend of art and engineering.

- PETER GARRISON

THE LEGENDARY BUGATTI 100P racer was a collaboration, begun in the late 1930s, between Italian-French car builder Ettore Bugatti and French freelance designer Louis de Monge de Franeau. The original aeroplane, its development interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, never flew. It now resides in the EAA museum at Oshkosh.

De Monge was an imaginative fellow who designed a number of unusual aeroplanes. If his designs share a single common trait, it is the same sort of sleek streamlining that he brought to the Bugatti project.

The general arrangement of the 100P was somewhat similar to that of the Bell P-39 Airacobra, which was hatched at about the same time. The Airacobra's single 1,100-hp Allison engine was mounted behind the pilot, driving the propeller through a thick driveshaft passing under the seat. The 100P had two 8-cylinder, 450-hp Type 50B automotive racing engines, set one behind the other within the central fuselage. The reason for using two engines, which greatly complicated the design, was that Bugatti was committed to his own engines, and one of them would not have provided sufficient power to drive the aeroplane to an impressive speed.

The engines drove coaxial, contra-rotating props on the nose through long driveshafts passing to the left and right of the pilot. The coolant radiator, located in the aft fuselage, took in air through the leading edges of the horizontal stabilisers and exhausted it through louvers in the wing root fairing.

Often praised as one of the most beautiful aeroplanes ever designed, the Bugatti had a peculiarly "artistic" form, a sort of Art Deco flavour, with a slender, perfectly streamlined spindle for a fuselage and dramatically tapered, nearly triangular wing and tail surfaces. The empennage was in the form of a Y; the short ventral fin housed the tailwheel.