Back in late 2020 Bugatti took the motoring world by storm with the debut of its all-new state-of-the-art hypercar, the Bugatti Bolide. Appropriately translating to “fireball,” the Bolide represented the exclusive carmaker’s next evolutionary step in ultra-high-performance vehicles, with the track-bred model packing a quad turbocharged 8.0-liter W16 engine that puts down over 1,800hp and offerred 0-60mph times of just 2.17 seconds. And after finally revealing the production-ready prototype back in April of this year, Bugatti is now giving us an even more detailed look at its forthcoming hypercar model by pulling the cover off of the Bolide’s cutting-edge carbon fiber tub.
As you can probably tell from the appearance of its radical bodywork design, the Bolide was engineered from the ground up to offer world class speed and performance, with the entire idea behind the car being to deliver a vehicle with the capabilities and lap times of an LMDh racer. It isn’t only their speed and performance that the Bolide aims to emulate, as Bugatti’s engineers have also set out to achieve the same level of safety and protection that’s afforded by the endurance racers campaigned at Daytona and Le Mans.
In order to achieve this goal, Bugatti has bestowed the Bolide with a carbon fiber monocoque that it says has been developed to the same extremely stringent standards that the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile requires of LMH and LMDh race cars. The tub features a circular-shaped safety cell that sports a pointy nose cone and a single intake scoop capping off the top. This state-of-the-art carbon fiber structure allows the Bolide to shield its occupants from the extreme forces often generated when LMDh racers wreck at approximately 200-mph speeds.
While Bugatti thus far hasn’t announced any plans to actually enter any LMDh racing series, the Bolide is still expected to debut next year as a 2025 model year vehicle.
