The Bugatti Type 55 is a sports car produced by

Bugatti Automobiles Ettore Bugatti was a German then French automotive industry, manufacturer of high performance vehicle, high-performance automobiles. The company was founded in 1909 in the then-German Empire, German city of Molsheim, Alsace, by the ...

from 1932 to 1935. It is a road-going version of the Type 51 Grand Prix car. A roadster, it had a wheelbase and weight.

History

The Type 55 was introduced at the 1931

Paris Motor Show The Paris Motor Show () is a biennial auto show in Paris. Held during October, it is one of the most important auto shows, often with many new production automobile and concept car debuts. The show presently takes place in Paris expo Porte de V ...

and that particular car, chassis 55201, was subsequently purchased by the Duke of Tremoille. It was available starting in 1932 and was produced until 1935, with the last car being delivered on July 30 of that year. 38 cars were produced in total. The majority of Type 55s had factory bodywork designed by Jean Bugatti, with 16 of the 38 wearing 2-seater roadster bodies and another 7 wearing coupe bodies, both of his design. Of the other 15, 11 were bodied by outside

coachbuilder A coachbuilder manufactures bodies for passenger-carrying vehicles. The trade of producing coachwork began with bodies for horse-drawn vehicles. Today it includes custom automobiles, buses, Coach (bus), motor coaches, and passenger car (rai ...

s and the other four are unidentified. None of the factory bodied cars had doors which made them far less practical than the cars bodied by external coachbuilders, most of which did have doors. The Type 55 was often criticized by reviewers for its lack of practicality and for being deafening to ride in, due to a combination of noisy mechanicals and straight cut gears.

Specifications

The Type 55 is powered by a detuned version of the Type 51's 2-valve DOHC

straight-8 The straight-eight engine or inline-eight engine (often abbreviated as I8) is an eight-cylinder internal combustion engine with all eight cylinders mounted in a straight line along the crankcase. The type has been produced in side-valve, I ...

engine with a Roots-type

supercharger In an internal combustion engine, a supercharger compresses the intake gas, forcing more air into the engine in order to produce more power for a given displacement (engine), displacement. It is a form of forced induction that is mechanically ...

. It produces at 5000 rpm. Differences from the Type 51's engine include the addition of a camshaft driven AC mechanical petrol pump and a modified supercharger drive. The compression ratio was also lowered by the use of a larger compression plate (the Type 51 used a plate). The car's 4-speed

manual transmission A manual transmission (MT), also known as manual gearbox, standard transmission (in Canadian English, Canada, British English, the United Kingdom and American English, the United States), or stick shift (in the United States), is a multi-speed ...

came from the Type 49 touring car and featured straight cut gears. The car also wore the signature Bugatti eight-spoke aluminum wheels.

References

55 24 Hours of Le Mans race cars Cars introduced in 1931 Cars discontinued in 1935 {{Classicprw-auto-stub