Bugatti EB110: The First Modern Hypercar Is 30 Years Old (2024)

The Bugatti EB110 has always lived in the shadow of the McLaren F1, which was launched less than a year after the Bugatti and immediately usurped it as the most powerful and most expensive supercar in the world at the time. More than three decades later, the market still concurs. EB110s change hands in the low single millions, while the cheapest, nastiest McLaren F1 has long since become an eight-figure car.

This story originally appeared in Volume 22 of Road & Track.

Yet the EB110 is far closer to being the archetype for the modern hypercar than the McLaren. The Bugatti is a much more complex machine than Gordon Murray’s minimalist master­piece, using a quad-turbocharged V-12 and a pioneering all-wheel-drive system. Cars like the Porsche 918 Spyder and the Lamborghini Revuelto have more in common with the EB110 than with the F1.

The EB110 was packed with innovation. It was one of the first road cars to use a carbon-fiber structure and would have also gotten composite brakes if it had proved possible to make them bite at low temperatures. The gearbox and huge engine were mounted in parallel to save space. Together they sent power through an all-wheel-drive system that could direct different amounts of torque to each axle.

“We were pioneers in so many directions,” remembers Loris Bicocchi, the EB110’s former test driver, who nominates it as the highlight of a career spent developing supercars. “When we started work, a supercar with four-wheel drive didn’t exist. Lamborghini was working on the Diablo VT. Ferrari tried, but they didn’t succeed and had to stop the project. Bugatti was first.”

The EB110 was also novel as a supercar designed to deliver not just performance but usability, something rivals rarely considered. The Bugatti had power steering and anti-lock brakes, features lacking in its 200-plus-mph rivals, the McLaren F1 and the Jaguar XJ220. It was intended to be what Bugatti boss Romano Artioli described as a gentleman’s express.

“The EB110 is accurate and responsive when you push to the limit,” says Bicocchi. “But it is also easy to drive and very stable at speed. In the EB110 GT, we hom*ologated 212 mph; in the Super Sport, 218 mph.”

This at a time when a Porsche 911 Turbo could do 180 mph.

For Bicocchi, the ultimate proof of the EB110’s dynamic security came with a remarkable perform­ance at the Nürburgring, where the SS version lapped the 12.9-mile Nordschleife in a record-­setting 7 minutes, 44 seconds. It was a time that stayed close to the cutting edge well inside this century. “And this was on tires that were like stone compared to modern ones,” ­Bicocchi says.

In other areas, it took the world a long time to catch up with the EB110. Years after ­Artioli’s Bugatti had gone bankrupt, Bicocchi was brought in to work on what would become the Volkswagen-­era Bugatti Veyron.

“When I moved to Germany, what did I find?” he asks. “Four-wheel drive, four turbochargers, a carbon-fiber structure. I said, ‘We had those with the EB110, so what’s new?’”