Bugatti Type 51

Among the 201 Bugatti entries in the MotorJury library, the Bugatti Type 51 holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1931. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Bugatti Type 51 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1930s were the streamline decade, when aerodynamics entered body design, independent suspension spread, and grand-prix engineering began flowing into road cars even as the Depression thinned the industry. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Chevrolet Chevrolet Suburban, the Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz W15, the Lancia Lancia Artena — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Bugatti Type 51 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1.5-2.3 L 16-valve DOHC straight-8 engine, 130-185 hp; kerb weight is recorded at 750-850 kg; drive goes through 4-speed manual + reverse; the layout is FR. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Bugatti story

Within Bugatti's own catalogue the Bugatti Type 51 sits alongside the Bugatti 57 Galibier, the Bugatti 8-cylinder line, the Bugatti Centodieci, the Bugatti Type 13. The record names the Bugatti Type 35 as its predecessor and the Bugatti Type 59 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Ettore Bugatti, Jean Bugatti. Assembly is recorded at France: Molsheim, Alsace (Usine Bugatti de Molsheim).

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Bugatti Type 51 was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.