Bugatti Veyron Centenaire Achille Varzi – Celebrating Racing Heritage

The Bugatti Veyron is one of the most iconic hypercars ever made, but surprisingly I wasn’t even aware of this Veyron special edition called the Centenaire edition until recently, when I came across and bought a Veyron in the Forza Horizon 4 game in the same color combination as one of these cars, more specifically the Centenaire Achille Varzi.

The story of Veyron Centenaire editions is actually quite interesting. In September of 2009 at the Villa D’Este Concorso at Lake Como in Italy, Bugatti decided to pay tribute to four legendary pre-war era racing drivers who all raced Bugatti cars by unveiling these Veyron Centenaire editions. Achille Varzi was one of them, a well known and successful Italian driver who raced mostly for Bugatti in the 1930’s and won several races including Monaco in his career. Sadly like majority of drivers from that era, he didn’t survive his racing career and was killed in a practice accident in 1948.

Each of the four Veyron Centenaire editions came in a dual tone color combination of silver in a chrome like finish with the racing color from the respective countries of the drivers. Besides Italian red for Achille Varzi, you also have blue for French driver Jean-Pierre Wimille, beige for German driver Hermann zu Leiningen and dark green for British driver Sir Malcolm Campbell.

I’ll admit red is my favorite color so naturally I tend to get biased towards it on cars but I feel in this case the way the dual tone chrome silver and dark red color combination has been done here on the Centenaire Achille Varzi, it actually suits the Veyron quite nicely and it’s a nice change from the black and orange dual tone or solid blue that you normally see on a Veyron.

The Bugatti Veyron and it’s special editions are becoming increasingly harder to spot and the Centenaire Achille Varzi is no exception. Asides from its debut at Villa D’Este, the only other photographed spots I could find of Centenaire Achille Varzi was back in 2010 when it was seen in Monaco.

There are a lot of Veyron special editions that were made so it’s understandably hard to keep track of them all. However, the Centenaire editions definitely come across as some of the most interesting and significant, especially knowing the backstory behind these cars and the historic racing heritage they pay tribute to.

Featured Photo Credit: Christophe Chanterault