The Bugatti Type 57S Atalante is one of the Bugatti entries the open record knows by name and by date — in 1937, and by little else. That is not nothing: a name in the catalogue is where a car's story starts to be recoverable.
How it came about
The Bugatti Type 57S Atalante number 57502, built in 1937 by Automobiles Ettore Bugatti, is one of 43 Bugatti Type 57S made and one of only 17 Type 57S produced with the in-house Atalante coupé coachwork. The car hit the headlines in 2009 when auctioned by Bonhams, after having been rediscovered in 2008, following 48 years of storage in a private owner's garage in Gosforth, England, with few people aware of its location.
Family and rivals
On a showroom list of its day it stood against the Volkswagen Beetle, the Lincoln Continental, the Chevrolet Suburban. Its Bugatti stablemates include the Bugatti 57 Galibier and the Bugatti 8-cylinder line.
The money
There is no federal ownership record for the Bugatti Type 57S Atalante — it predates the complaint database or was never sold in the United States — so MotorJury publishes no running-cost figure for it. For a car of this age the price is set by the collector market and the condition of the individual example, not by a formula.