Bugatti has brought the Veyron back to life in the worst possible way: taking advantage of nostalgia

I confess: I have laughed at my parents.

Not once, many times.

My parents are those considerate boomers.

A generation that took the reins of our society when the century changed and we entered the 2000s. And the market noticed it.

In 2001 it premiered on RTVE Tell me how it happened. Three years later it was republished he One, Two, Three…. In 2009, a phenomenon was launched that now seems timeless: I went to EGB. That same year, Antena 3 put on television Course of ’63.

The look at the past does not only remain in Spain. The Police return for a new tour. Indy returns from the 80s to live an alien adventure in 2008. Guitar Hero puts us in the skin of the rock myths that had happened a decade or so before. Does anyone remember Guitar Hero Live? I doubt it and I think you already know the answer.

And here I am, tasting at night the first seasons of There is no one who lives herewhile I watch in horror as my friends search for tickets to another Love The Tweenties and Villafrío de Abajo faces Villafrío de Arriba in another exciting final of the Grand Prix.

I want to run away but the past catches me.

That past that brings us back to Andy and Lucas but at least brings us back to the best days of Crash Bandicoot.

A past from the day before yesterday.

I laughed at my parents but here I am, drooling over the new Bugatti FKP Hommage.

Of necessarily unnecessary tributes and cars

20 years.

What is 20 years? Enough, according to Frank Heyl, Bugatti Design Director, to “create what I consider the ideal and definitive Veyron.” What he’s talking about is the Bugatti FKP Hommage. We could say that it is the “last Veyron”. We could say that it is the final and last evolution of a legendary car. We could say it. If it were a Veyron.

The Bugatti FKP Hommage is actually a Bugatti Chiron disguised as a Veyron. The hyper-luxury company, through its even more exclusive division Program Solitaire wanted to pay tribute to Ferdinand Karl Piëch, who was the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche and took the reins of the Volkswagen Group for almost a decade after having held all types of roles in the company.

A key man in the company who was even more key for Bugatti. And Piëch was the one who gave the order to buy Bugatti and to make it a different brand, to give it back a glorious past, W16 via.

“He was a man who saw the impossible not as an obstacle, but as a challenge. His vision for Bugatti was absolute: 1,000 horsepower, 400 km/h top speed, all-wheel drive, and refined enough to arrive at the opera in a tuxedo or a dress,” defines Hendrik Malinowski, General Director of Bugatti to Piëch.

And to honor him, Bugatti has created a one offone of those unique units of your Bugatti Chiron. “The FKP Hommage celebrates this uncompromising pursuit of excellence, combining the timeless proportions of the original Veyron with two decades of engineering evolution,” reflects Malinowski about a luxury hypercar that comes with the latest evolution of the W16 engine and the 1,600 HP that the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport has.

To resemble the original model, Bugatti’s most exclusive division has dressed the Chiron in the outfit that the Veyron would wear today. Play with the proportions to maintain the essence of a car of which only 450 units were manufactured.

The request, of course, comes from a millionaire whose name we do not know. At least for now. But we can say something about him: he feels “melancholic sadness caused by the memory of a lost happiness.”

This is how the RAE defines nostalgia.

The question is what this loss has attracted a millionaire to convert one of the most technologically advanced cars in the world into another hypercar from just 20 years ago. What is the sense? Aren’t the 450 units of the original Bugatti Veyron unique because… they are unique? What is there to gain?

Nothing.

Since there is nothing to gain from updating an iPod when you have millions of iPods elder brother hand. It’s not a question of nostalgia. It’s a matter of the original product being there, just around the corner. We can’t miss him because he never left. You can’t long to go out partying singing Melendi at the top of your lungs because at less than 40 years old you are at the perfect age to continue going out partying and singing whatever you want at the top of your lungs.

It’s okay for nostalgia to get to us. But at least it serves to give new life to the product. Unless it serves to make accessible an object of which there are few left, they are difficult to obtain or expensive to maintain. It’s funny that Renault brings back the Five in electrical format. And it makes sense that now the Twingo It also doesn’t have a combustion engine. Or what Renault brings the car back to life Turbo like an electric beast.

As harsh as it may seem to a purist, even Ford Mustang Mach E It makes sense when it comes to bringing the driving sensations of a classic Mustang to an electric car. It is the same and, at the same time, very different.

But the automobile market is beginning to be dragged into a well of nostalgia that contributes between little and nothing. He Lamborghini Countach LP 800-4 It is interesting as a design exercise because it updates a mythical model. This Bugatti FKP Hommage only repeats what is already known.

The same is happening with the “serial” production of restomod. The trend of taking an old car and bringing it back to life by turning it into a modern car with a classic flavor makes sense within artisanal and personalized limits. But he loses them when production is mechanized as a product for millionaires.

Yes, a Mustang Mach E makes sense.

Just as it makes no sense to take an electric car that is not created by your own company and call it Ford Capri.

There are necessarily unnecessary cars. And others, unfortunately, just unnecessary. Although, even so, we end up drooling in front of the Bugatti FKP Hommage.

Photos | Bugatti

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