Bugatti Mistral

Mistral at a glance

The Mistral closes the W16 era that began with the Bugatti Veyron and continued with the Bugatti Chiron. The full range is in the Bugatti catalogue.

The last W16 Bugatti

Bugatti revealed the W16 Mistral on 19 August 2022 as the last road car to use the W16 engine. All 99 cars were sold at once, at €5 million each according to Wikipedia, and customer deliveries began in early 2024.

According to Top Gear, the car is named after a French wind. The design team was led by Achim Anscheidt, Bugatti's head of design, with Frank Heyl and Florian Westermann.

Technically the Mistral draws on the Chiron: it shares the engine, the drivetrain and the basic layout of the cabin. Wikipedia stresses, however, that it is a separate roadster rather than a Chiron cabriolet, with its own body. Top Gear describes the mechanicals as based on the Chiron Super Sport, with a new coachbuilt body on top.

Design

The exterior is new and was shaped for aerodynamics, Top Gear reports, through months of wind-tunnel work. At the front, four diagonal light strips form the headlights. At the rear, the lights are shaped as two arrows pointing towards the Bugatti badge, and there is an air brake at the rear.

The engine breathes through snorkel intakes placed just behind the seats. Top Gear notes that the cabin is noticeably calmer at speed than a Porsche 911 Targa, and that the exhaust gives the W16 a louder, more characterful sound than in the Veyron.

Inside, the Mistral uses the Chiron's cabin with one notable change: the gear lever. It carries a small sculpture of a dancing elephant set in amber, a design by Rembrandt Bugatti, the brother of the company's founder Ettore Bugatti.

Engine and performance

The engine is the 7,993 cc W16 with four turbochargers, the same basic unit as in the Chiron. In the Mistral it produces 1,177 kW (1,600 PS) at 6,700 rpm and 1,600 Nm over a wide band from 2,000 to 6,000 rpm. A seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox and permanent all-wheel drive put the power down.

The production cars are electronically limited to 420 km/h, and that was also the figure Bugatti first quoted as the open car's top speed.

The roadster speed record

In November 2024 Bugatti test driver and Le Mans winner Andy Wallace took a Mistral to 453.91 km/h, a world record for an open-top production car. According to Motor1, this was about 35 km/h faster than Bugatti had expected. It was Wallace's second major record for the brand: in 2019 he had driven the closed Chiron Super Sport 300+ to 490.48 km/h. For open cars, the earlier reference points were the Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse (about 409 km/h in 2013) and the Hennessey Venom GT Spyder (about 427 km/h in 2016).

The run did not take place at Volkswagen's Ehra-Lessien track, where the Veyron and Chiron had set their records, but at the Papenburg proving ground in north-west Germany, near the Dutch border. Its straights are about half as long as Ehra-Lessien's and its banked corners are tighter. Top Gear reports that Wallace drove six laps, building up through 449, 451 and 452 km/h to the record, with speeds measured by onboard GPS. The car ran on Michelin tyres and wore "Mistral World Record Car" logos.

The conditions were far from ideal. Engineers expected the cold, damp November air to cost the engine about 30 kW (40 hp) at the end of each run. Wallace reported moisture building up on the windscreen, crosswinds from the access bridge over the straight and a pull to the left where the road flattens under that bridge. "You've got to be really careful you don't touch a barrier," he told Top Gear. Bugatti could no longer use Ehra-Lessien because the company is now a joint venture between Rimac and Porsche, while the track belongs to the Volkswagen Group. The owner of the record car is the only person who owns all of Bugatti's earlier World Record Edition cars — the Veyron, the Vitesse and the Chiron.

Programme Solitaire and special cars

The Mistral is also linked with Bugatti's Programme Solitaire of one-off cars. The first, the Brouillard of 2025, is a closed coupé named after one of Ettore Bugatti's horses. In January 2026 Bugatti followed with the F.K.P. Hommage, which honours Ferdinand Karl Piëch and the original Veyron: it uses the Mistral's chassis with a new body shaped to resemble the Veyron, new headlights and exhausts.

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