Ettore Bugatti, born in Milan to an artistically distinguished family, moved to Molsheim — then part of the German Empire — in 1909 to establish his automobile company. The cars he produced were renowned for the extraordinary care given to both engineering and aesthetics: engine surfaces were hand-scraped flat to avoid the need for gaskets, fasteners were secured with intricately laced safety wire, and the springs passed through forged openings in the axles rather than being bolted on. Ettore's famous dismissal of Bentley cars as "the world's fastest lorries" reflected his conviction that weight and inelegance were the enemies of performance. This philosophy shaped the works racing programme at every level.
The centrepiece of the Bugatti works team's success was the Type 35, introduced at the 1924 French Grand Prix at Lyon. Although the debut was compromised by poorly vulcanised Dunlop tyres, the car's potential was immediately apparent. Over the following years the Type 35 — produced in several variants with different engine capacities, supercharger configurations and body types — became the most successful Grand Prix car of its generation. It won over a thousand races in total, achieved the Grand Prix World Championship in 1926 after winning 351 races and setting 47 records in the two preceding years, and at its competitive peak was averaging fourteen victories per week across European events of all levels.
The works team campaigned the Type 35 and its derivatives with exceptional consistency in the Targa Florio, the demanding Sicilian road race that wound through mountain passes and village streets. Bugatti won the Targa Florio five consecutive times, from 1925 through 1929. The 1929 Monaco Grand Prix — the inaugural running of what would become the most famous street circuit in the world — was won by a privately entered Bugatti Type 35B driven by William Grover-Williams, underlining how thoroughly the marque dominated the era even beyond the works effort.
Jean Chassagne was the master engineer and racing driver who developed the Type 35 and drove it at its first race. Louis Chiron accumulated more podium finishes in Bugatti cars than any other driver of the period, becoming so closely associated with the marque that decades later the revived Bugatti company named a concept car in his honour. Jean-Pierre Wimille emerged as the works team's final champion driver, winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1937 with Robert Benoist and again in 1939 with Pierre Veyron — the latter victory achieved with a single car and minimal resources, and representing the last great moment of the original Bugatti works racing programme.
Bugatti's engagement with endurance racing ran in parallel to its Grand Prix programme. The 1939 Le Mans victory, with Wimille and Veyron sharing a Bugatti Type 57 tank-bodied car, came under increasingly constrained circumstances: Ettore Bugatti's son Jean, who had taken on much of the factory leadership, had been killed in August 1939 while testing a Type 57 near the Molsheim factory. The loss of Jean Bugatti removed the intended successor to Ettore's leadership at the worst possible moment.
World War II devastated the Molsheim works and the company lost control of its property. Ettore Bugatti died in August 1947, bringing the original era definitively to a close. An attempted postwar revival produced the Type 251 mid-engined race car — designed with input from Gioacchino Colombo — but it failed to perform and the racing effort was abandoned.
The Bugatti works team's pre-war record remains exceptional by any measure. The combination of technical sophistication, aesthetic philosophy and competitive success it embodied had no direct parallel among its contemporaries and set a standard against which subsequent grand prix constructors measured themselves. The Type 35 is consistently cited as one of the most important racing cars ever built, and the marque's five consecutive Targa Florio victories stand as one of pre-war motorsport's most dominant sequences.