Bugatti Reveals W16 Mistral ‘Fly Bug’ Hypercar for Collector
Drawing inspiration from the dragonfly, the one-off custom hypercar is now part of a four-car bespoke collection designed & built for a single customer...
The Bugatti Sur Mesure program at the Atelier in Molsheim has now completed four custom commissions for a single collector, with each of the four cars united by a single thread: the beauty of the natural world and the fauna that surrounds us, company officials stated in a press release. The W16 Mistral “Fly Bug” is the latest creation in that collection, which also includes the Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse “Hellbug,” the Chiron “Hellbee” and the Divo “Lady Bug.” The W16 Mistral “Fly Bug” finds its inspiration in the dragonfly.
The project began with an exchange of ideas between the collector and Frank Heyl, Bugatti’s head of design. From there, the Color, Materials, Finish (CMF) team in Bugatti’s Berlin Design Studio—which includes color and material creatives, graphic designers, material specialists, visualizers and modelers—worked to distil the customer’s vision into a distinct design direction, noted the release.
How Bugatti’s CMF Team Shaped the ‘Fly Bug’ Design
The creative direction was guided, in part, by the collector’s established preference for a signature motif: a visual theme that could evolve naturally from one car to the next. For the Mistral “Fly Bug,” the team developed an ellipse pattern that spreads across the exterior, growing denser toward the rear of the car and fading into the darkness of the air intakes.
The W16 Mistral “Fly Bug” is finished in a bespoke paint developed specifically for this commission, the company said. Named “Dragonfly Blue,” the color shifts between blue and turquoise depending on the light and the angle of view, reflecting the shimmering quality of the dragonfly’s wings. The same color is carried through to the wheel rims, matched as closely as possible to the body despite the different materials and paint systems involved.
The integration of the Bugatti Macaron into the ellipse pattern was one of the project’s most demanding technical tasks, the team said. For the first time, the iconic oval emblem, present on the marque’s horseshoe grilles for over a century, was woven into the ellipse graphic on the car’s flank at the customer’s request. Achieving it required carefully finding the right scale and position so that every detail could be reproduced faithfully.
First-of-Its-Kind Interior – Leather, Alcantara & Precision
The aesthetics of the exterior continue into the cabin. An exclusive multi-layered material was developed for the interior: leather laid over Alcantara in a geometric pattern, color-matched to “Dragonfly Blue” and given a three-dimensional quality through a specialist finishing technique. The ellipse pattern is transposed across the door panels, adapted to suit the geometry of each component. Bugatti says this is the first time it has applied a graphic pattern across both the door panel face and the armrest area, a process that required close collaboration with the Bugatti engineering team to ensure the material sat perfectly across the curved surfaces.
Within the gear selector of the Sur Mesure Mistral, the famous “Dancing Elephant” takes its place: a reference to the legacy of Rembrandt Bugatti, whose animal sculptures form an enduring part of the marque’s heritage, and a reminder of the owner’s appreciation for the natural world.
Months of Work & a Car Collection Connected by a Single Vision
From final design sign-off to a finished car, it took the Bugatti teams months to bring the W16 Mistral “Fly Bug” to life, the company said.
“With the W16 Mistral ‘Fly Bug,’ we have completed something that is genuinely rare: a collection of cars connected by a single creative vision,” said Heyl. “Each commission has pushed our Design team further, and this one is no exception. A bespoke color developed from scratch, a Macaron integrated into a painted graphic for the first time in our history, and an interior material application we had never attempted before. We are very proud of what the team has achieved here. But none of it would have been possible without the trust our customer has placed in us across all these projects. His passion for our hypercars and his belief in what Bugatti Sur Mesure can do is what makes work like this truly worthwhile.”
