Bugatti is a storied brand with a significant amount of racing heritage. Sadly, the French manufacturer, now owned wholly by the Volkswagen Group, has not been present at many starting lines as of late. Keen to change that, Florian Dobe, an exterior car designer in Munich, Germany, created his vision of a race car: the Bugatti Arrow project.
“I started this little project to learn the Blender 3D software, kind of learning by doing,” Dobe tells Form Trends. “The aim was to define a next-generation Bugatti expressing their racing genes, with two seats and potentially electric.”
Dobe says he chose the Bugatti brand because of its extreme performance and looks: “I wanted to create my own take on this brand, developing the proportions, stance and attitude with extreme sections. I tried to achieve an iconic look through simple yet powerful shapes and graphics.”
In its heyday, Bugatti was known not only for racing victories but also recognized for the design of its cars. The automobiles were devised in a very artistic manner and paired with unsurpassed engineering prowess for the time. They also featured an amazing level of detailing, which has been praised at many Concours d’Elegance since.
Dobe’s Bugatti Arrow project pays homage to this heritage in a tasteful yet contemporary way, developing flowing, sensual surfaces that are combined with technical elements to achieve the performance levels required of the carmaker’s products.
The designer is also a hobby photographer, so he used a few photographs he took at Silverstone as an environment. He later revisited the renders in Adobe Photoshop to develop the design theme “with a bit more of a product-design approach,” he says.
Overall the Bugatti Arrow is a sweetly expressed take on the potential future of the Molsheim-based brand. And given the 2018 announcement that the LMP1 tier will be replaced by the LMH (Le Mans Hypercar) class at Le Mans this year – enabling entry to manufacturers that build 20 street-legal units of their cars – Dobe may well have a winner on his hands.
