Everything is adorable when it’s smaller: animals, desserts, you, me.
And the same goes for vintage race cars like the Bugatti Type 35.
In its heyday, the steed was a stone cold killer. It took the ‘26 Grand Prix World Championship and the Targa Florio five years in a row. It raced an average of 14 races per week. It graced the podium at more than 1,000 races. And so Ettore Bugatti decided to gift his second son Roland a replica T35 children’s moto for his fourth birthday.
The response from the one-off ride was so overwhelming that they decided to put the little beast into a 500-run production, debuting the Bugatti Bebe Type 52 at the 1927 Milan Automobile Show. But what went for a rich $250 in 1926 is still fetching a handsome price today. After a 1926 Bebe sold at Gooding & Co’s Pebble Beach Auction for $110,000 in 2008, a 1930 Type 52 Bebe pulled in $99,000 at Paris’s Retromobile earlier this week … for which one man will be the proud owner of a tiny 150-pound electric ride (one of just 100 still intact today) that’s six feet long and plugs away at a top speed of 12 mph.
This article was featured in the InsideHook newsletter. Sign up now.
