The proportions of this Ferrari 250 GTO are not right, but this little car has the taste of authenticity, proof that a work of art emerges as soon as you awaken a child's imagination.

Veyron, Chiron, Piochon

Christophe Piochon, president of Bugatti Automobiles, isn't going to tell us the story of a racing car straight out of the Molsheim factory. He's going to talk to us about the making of his little Ferrari.

Between 1987 and 1988, after school, I would meet my grandfather in his garage. Like in every town in France,  Grandcamp-Maisy in Calvados was adorned with election posters, and adult conversations flew back and forth between the two sides of the political spectrum. At twelve years old, I cared nothing for the political squabbles, and for me, my grandfather Henry was the only man who could give meaning to the qualities touted in the slogans. "Quiet strength," "courage and willpower"—that was him.

One only had to look at her hands, and a whole life story could unfold. Once skilled in the trade of sheet metal worker at Renault's competition department, calloused to a fault, they worked the shapes with a chisel, and her fingers, etched by labor, gripped the hammers that struck the sheet metal. I watched them for hours.

It was a time without the internet, without smartphones. A time when we dreamed while looking at photographs of big cars in a postal calendar, the postman's almanac.  My mother, who was a postal worker,  they distributed them every year, going from door to door. 

One day, my grandfather told me to choose one of the cars from the calendar and offered to make a model of it. I fell in love with the 250 GTO.

We needed a sheet of 0.8 mm metal. We found it on an AX door. So there I was, a blank piece of metal in front of me, and over the many hours I spent with it, I would discover all the tricks of the trade of sheet metal work. I think I spent all my free time during those years in the dim light of that garage, surrounded by antique furniture where my grandfather kept his tools and all the secrets of his craft. In that den filled with the smell of welded metal, my grandfather instilled in me the necessity of patience and precision for each stage of construction, and above all, he allowed me to believe in my own creative abilities. It certainly took a lot of imagination when I compared the sheet of metal to the picture of the Ferrari on the calendar page, but thanks to him, I understood that mistakes and imperfections always mark the path to perfection. This heritage is undoubtedly not unrelated to the fact that I now gravitate in the world of automotive excellence, even if I am not fooled by the many flaws of this childish attempt at car manufacturing.

From my first internship and my first job at Volkswagen as a quality engineer, and later during the development of the Bugatti Veyron, I  could  to put into practice all the willpower and work ethic instilled in childhood. 

I was incredibly lucky not to have discovered any tutorials on TikTok or Instagram, nor any trendy YouTubers to give me the illusion of knowing how to do things and make me too lazy to actually try. I was fortunate enough to have the time to dream, that time when imagination runs wild, that time when you invent the gestures that will allow you to create the shape, perfect a weld, and test its watertightness. I was fortunate to have a grandfather who gave me his time, and it was so natural for me to give him mine. 

Nothing initially predestined me to work in the automotive industry, and even less so for a manufacturer as prestigious as Bugatti, coming from a modest background where my father, like the majority of my classmates, had left school to become a fisherman.

In my childhood village, it was rare to want to learn German. It was rare to prefer automotive engineering to the world of the sea. And it was even rarer to choose only German car companies to send your first CV to and conduct phone interviews with, because it was unthinkable to pay for a train ticket for nothing! I received two positive responses, and my grandfather saw me leave for Germany. I hope he was able to see what happened next from his vantage point in the sheet metal workers' heaven and that he's strolling beside me today as I walk through the Bugatti workshops where our brilliant technicians work on these legendary machines! 

On the back of this photo, my grandmother Renée had scribbled  "A future CEO." She was right.

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