Madame Bugatti's T.57-C

Unfortunately, most of the photographs which the late Barry Swann had made were destroyed in a fire in 1971. Therefore there are only a few relatively low-quality ones with this article.

I really had no idea what I was taking on when I bought this car in 1961, (sold to me at a distance of 7,000km as a T.57). When it reached Malacca and I was able to raise the bonnet, I found it was a type 57-C "sans compresseur-melangeur", the drive having been blanked off, and a neat Molsheim repair to the crankcase (a plate with those cheese-headed studs) told its own story.

Evidently the engine had thrown a rod, which had gone through the crankcase on the blower side, wrecking it. Although over 600 T.57 chassis were produced from 1934 to 1940, the number of supercharged versions assembled between 1937 and 1940 probably did not exceed 40. My chances therefore of finding the correct supercharger as a spare, ie. not attached to a surviving T.57-C, were remote.

I slowly pieced together the history of the car, and visited Mon. Marco, the then managing director of Bugatti in Molsheim for further confirmation from the Factory records. Bugatti ceased car production around 1954 and were then engaged in manufacturing helicopter blades and other work for Hispano- Suiza, though they were also renovating Ettore's T.41 ('Royale') for Fritz Schlumpf in Malmarspach since he had secured a financial interest in the company. I visited him too, and looked round his amazing collection.

My car had been built for Madame Bugatti in 1938, and differed slightly from standard in that it had magneto ignition (Scintilla), and an expensive clock on the dashboard, and it was fitted with a two-door, four-seater 'Stelvio' cabriolet body which was painted in two-tone blue, and was very attractive. It also had the hydraulic brake system which became available that year, with seperate master cylinders for front and rear brakes; (didn't Jaguar claim this as a first some 25 years Later, I forget!). Certainly the Jaguar Mark IV produced just after the war had coachwork Looking very reminiscent of the ‘Stelvio’.

The second owner was the Molsheim dentist who ran it for many years, and I talked to Wurmser the ex-Factory race mechanic who was then running his own garage in Molsheim, and who maintained the car for the dentist.

I entered the car in the MSVCR vintage race in Singapore on the Thomson road circuit, but after a few laps the oil pressure suddenly disappeared, and though I dipped the clutch at once the damage was already done, and on stripping the engine I found, as expected, that the main bearings had run. They had been remetalled in the incorrect material, which had been adequate for the previous owner to motor gently to concours d'elegance events, but not for a sustained 5,000 rpm.

Close inspection of the engine and chassis revealed that although the prev- ious owner was a director of a firm of precision engineers and had claimed to have carried out a complete restoration, this had in fact been entirely cosmetic. Thus began a 3 and a half year total rebuild, which was to occupy me from 7-11 pm every weekday evening and all day on Sundays, assisted by a Chinese 'fitter' who very quickly adapted to vintage restoration work.

I have previously detailed the restoration for the Magazine, so will not go into it again here: suffice to say it was a Labour of Love as I intended keeping the car indefinitely, but eventually sold it to put my eldest boy through boarding school.

Since he appears to have applied this education to selling Japanese cars to bullock-cart drivers in Papua New Guinea perhaps I should have held on to it!

Molsheim did not have a blower, so I put out feelers in the U.K, and the U.S. and also with Bart Loyens in Luxembourg, for a long time without result.
Then one day I was talking to Tony Hutchings in the Paddock at Silverstone, and he told me that a man in Maidenhead named H.H. Thomas had been in the habit of making visits to Molsheim years back to buy up parts, but that he was still sitting on them, waiting for the prices to rise further. He said that he was pretty sure that Thomas had a T.57-C blower, but that he would never sell it to me.

1 dropped a line to Thomas asking whether he could help, and to my surprise received a telegram in reply reading "I have several, come immediately!"
The address was the Fernhill Esso service station, Maidenhead, and I drove down in my Morris 1100. There were three people in the office, one of whom wearing a cow-gown informed me that Mr.Thomas was out at present, but who after about half-an-hour announced that he was in fact Thomas, and that I Should follow him. He had evidently been waiting for me to ask what sort of a chap Thomas was.

He got into a Jaguar XK 150 and drove off at some speed, obviously expecting to leave the 1100 out of sight, but as I had just fitted a Shorrocks supercharger to the Morris I was able to hang on onto him. There had been a light rain and the road was greasy and he managed to spin the XK150 through 360 degrees in the middle of the road, but as the traffic was light he got away with it, and continued at much reduced speed.

We soon arrived at a large wooden shed in a side street which he unlocked, and inside was a mass of Bugatti parts. He tried to sell me a radiator I didn't need, and which in any case would not have fitted as it was too wide and had probably come from a T.46, and though he certainly did not have 'several' T.57-C blowers he did have one, complete with the conrect s/c inlet manifold and lubrication feed lines, and an incorrect triple-diffuser Zenith carburettor. I didn't want the carburettor since I had the correct Stromberg, but it was a 'job lot' and he wanted £300 for it.

In those days one could buy quite a respectable second-hand car for £300, but he knew I needed the blower and was unlikely to find another, so I had no choice but to pay up. I took the blower back to where I was staying, in Wolverhampton, and having earlier met up with Max Hill, owner of an O.M., T.43 and T.44 Bugattis, an AJS and the one and only 1929 Crouch-Helix, made use of his workshop to clean and examine the blower. (When Max was busy on week-days at his Piston Services Co. in Dudley, I had previously decarbonised the T.43 for him).

Neither of us could discover how to remove the gear from the shaft of the blower to enable its' withdrawal, and were loth to use any force. I took the assembly down to Jack Lemon Burton in London, who at first expressed his dislike of 'Colonials' and said he was prepared to give me only five minutes of his time, but who became interested in the problem and in fact I spent about half-an-hour with him.

It transpired that the hollow shaft was made of quite soft steel, and inside it was a tapered, hardened steel plug which J.L.B. called a ‘scotch key’, and this was driven in to expand the shaft within the gear, thus freezing it. An example of Ettore's ideosyncratic and unorthodox approach to design. Armed with this knowledge, it proved a simple matter to drive out the plug and remove the gear.

Ironically, some months after this my enquiries for a super-charger in the States turned up another one, owned by a Charles Downie, and I aquired this too for spares. It cost in dollars around what I had paid Thomas in sterling, including freight from the U.S., though it turned out to have a bent shaft, but this being soft was straightened without too much difficulty.

When the mechanical and chassis rebuild was done but with the body restoration incomplete, I ran the car in the vintage class at the Singapore G.P. week-end, but was given an impossible handicap. The officials must have antipated a phenomenal increase in power from the addition of the super-charger, whereas in fact the Roots type blower only gave a maximum boost of some 6 psi (0.4 bar) and an extra 25 bhp perhaps. Its' main attribute was to give greater flexibility to an already flexible engine. At this time I had still not arranged to connect the blower to the force feed engine lubrication system, and so temporarily rigged up a gravity feed from a tank strapped to the bulkhead, on the total loss drip-feed system.

The car was apparently timed at 117 mph down the straight so must have been well up to its’ pre-war performance, though since the body was incomplete it was lighter and the absence of front mudguards offered less wind resistance of course.

I knew the country roads around Malacca pretty well, and I was surprised to find that a partiqular bend which my A.C./Bristol used to take on the limit at 70 mph with its' independent all-round suspension, could be taken several mph faster by the Bugatti with its' beam axles, though rear tyre life with this type of cornering was about 3,000ml.

One characteristic of the super-charger was that after a long burst of full throttle, if one suddenly lifted the accelerator the pressure that had built up in the blower would activate the blow-off valve, producing a loud report. During 'confrontasi' as the Malays called their confrontation with Indonesia in the sixties, there had been an abortive landing by an Indonesian force in small boats near Parit Jawa in Johore, and they had landed in a mangrove swamp and floundered about for quite some time before being rounded up by security forces without a shot being fired.

However, the locals were still very much on edge, and when I was returning from Singapore late one night and approaching a brightly-lit crowded coffee-shop, the blow-off valve detonated like a pistol shot, and looking in the mirror I saw people running wildly out of the coffee-shop in all directions.

Stripping the original paint from the bodywork had been a major operation as it was so hard, and pints of paint remover and many sanding discs were used. After I had primed the bare metal, a local paint-shop applied thirteen coats of paint, the last two mixed with 50% varnish. After completion I was again returning late at night on a straight stretch of the coast road when a procession of water buffaloes began crossing the road some way ahead. As the car was travelling at around 90 mph there was no possibility of stopping in time to avoid them, so I aimed for a rapidly closing gap between the second and third buffalo and got through with only minor damage to the nearside front wing, but it meant another visit to the paint-shop.

I had always wanted to see a T.59 Bugatti at close quarters, so I wrote from Malacca to De Ferranti (the man who wrote a cheque to the British Government for Ml4 when he was accused of making excessive profits out of contracts for 'Blue Streak"), as I knew he was restoring one of the six made. He invited me to look him up at north Wales retreat, and on my arrival he said that he wasn’t sure what colour I would be as he knew several blacks with my name in what was then Ceylon. He and his wife were charming and hospitable, and spoke several languages.

The house stood in extensive grounds with manicured lawns sloping down to the sea, where his sea-plane rode at anchor in the bay. This he used to commute to London to beat the traffic, landing on a lake. The T.59 stood on a parquet floor in a centrally-heated drawing room, with flood lights trained on it from the four corners, and the restoration was about 75% complete at the time. De Ferranti thought it might be worth £2,000 on completion, a vast sum in those days.

What I had not expected was that he had another 16 cars in various outbuildings, among which were Al Capone's 16-cylinder Lincoln Zephyr, which was bullet-proof and had a compartment under the front seats for the sub-machine guns, a Phantom I Rolls fitted with a Phantom II body, a Bentley Continental which he said he bought because he was sorry for it, and a delightful little French veteran two- seater which the VCC had not yet identified. The latter we took out onto the grass and gave it some excersise, after which the lawns did not look quite so well manicured.

One cause for annoyance with my 57-C was the starter motor. This like everything else had been rebuilt, using Scintilla spares from Bosch in Switzerland, but it pivoted into the flywheel gear teeth with such a sensitive adjustment that it would jam on occasions, and there was no provision for using a starting handle. I never found a way of overcoming this problem, and once when collecting my Visiting Agent from Malacca airport suffered the indignity of having to be push-started by an amused airport ground staff.

If I were writing an instruction manual for the T.57 I would include the advice that to adjust valve clearances first remove the rear axle! Improbable? At the rear of the two overhead cam boxes were plates held by three cheese headed studs in each, and the engine was so close to the bulkhead that they could not be removed unless the engine was moved forward. To achieve this the gearbox must be seperated from the engine by moving it back, and to do this it would be necessary to move the rear axle back too. The 57 series engines were of course very much more reliable than the earlier roller-bearing crank engines, and with valve adjustment made by adding shims, as in racing practice, such adjustment was required only at extended intervals. In practice therefore maintenance was done at the Factory or a Bugatti agent at around three year intervals when the engine was removed.

When I eventually sold the car to Lew Gotthainer of New Jersey, he took it on a 3,000m rally within days of its' arrival by ship, and encountered no mechanical problems at all. Since I had originally no intention of ever selling the car I had aquired a large stock of new spares from Molsheim, including the last cylinder block and the last crankease they had, a set of pistons, valves, etc., etc., and Gotthainer did not wish to take over all of them. I therefore ended up disposing of many spares to Bart Loyens in Luxembourg, including the spare super-charger that he had promised to find for me five years earlier!

57516 at the Librairie Oberlin, rue des Francs Bourgeois in Strasbourg (Date unknown, maybe early 1950's, as it was then registered in the Vosges region), from BugattiBuilder.com