This ‘Lady Bug’ Bugatti Divo’s epic painting took two years to complete – Robb Report

Ettore Bugatti once said, “If it’s comparable, it’s not Bugatti anymore.”

One hypermotor collector took the idea literally and adapted the expertise of the French brands to the ninth grade to create a Divo like no other.

The distinctive four-wheel drive car, dubbed Lady Bug, has a truly unique color used by its creepy namesake. The American customer instructed Bugatti to create “a strict geometric pattern consisting of diamond shapes in a unique color contrast” to distinguish his Divo from the 39 others that will eventually be on the way.

This does not appear to be an easy achievement. In fact, the project took about two years to complete and was so stressful that at one point Bugatti almost threw in the towel. The most difficult was to apply exactly the striking pattern. Every time the design team tried to apply the diamond stencil to the bodywork, it twisted thanks to the car’s contours, curves and ribs. The digital graphics created in CAD basically just do not translate IRL.

“Due to the nature of the project, where a 2-D graphic was applied to a 3-D sculpture, and after numerous failed ideas and attempts to use the diamonds, we were close to giving up and says: ‘We can not meet customer’s request,’ ”Jugg Grumer, head of color and decoration at Bugatti Design, said in a statement.

Fortunately, Bugatti did not stop. Instead, the designers carefully adjusted every 1600 of the 1600 diamonds to match the Divo sculpture. Again, this was a cumbersome task because only one demarcated shape or small flaw meant the entire design had to be destroyed. After this meticulous work was completed, the final pattern was applied to 20-foot films that would eventually be applied to the vehicle’s body.

In early 2020, the team tried to transfer the films to two test cars to ensure the application was as seamless as possible. After being confident, they applied the films to the customer’s actual sports car and then counted countless days checking that each diamond was just right.

Finally, Lady Bug was ready for a splash of color on her shell. As expected, Bugatti did all the painting by hand and it took a total of two weeks to complete. The team developed two special metal tones – Customer Special Red and Graphite – to achieve the striking contrasting effect. And finally Lady Bug was ready to fly.

The Divo, which has a W-16 engine with four-liter 8.0-liter turbo accelerators, delivers 1,500 hp and 1,180-foot of torque, and the Divo costs $ 5.4 million plus options. (Imagine what two years of design work this gent would bring back.) The hypermotor is limited to only 40 examples and delivery is scheduled to be completed within the first few months of this year, though it’s hard to imagine any model has the same impact as Lady Bug.

“The attention required to detail and the fact that we had to follow a zero-defect strategy on the final car gave us tremendous respect for the project,” Grumer added.

It also has our respect.

Check out more photos of Lady Bug below: