Type 37/44 cylinder blocks now available from our new patternwork, £2,600 fully machined plus VAT. Also available fully assembled with valves, guides, springs etc., £3,308 per cylinder block, plus VAT.

Type 35 cylinder blocks, fully machined £2,500 or fully assembled with valves, guides, springs etc., £3,190 plus VAT.

Type 51/55 cylinder blocks fully machined £4,800, also available with hardened valve seats for running on unleaded fuels.

Type 46 cylinder blocks available fully machined, price on application.

Brescia. Last year seemed to be the year for working on Brescias for us. After never having done much work on these cars we were called on by a prominent Brescia owner and enthusiast who wanted to take his Brescia to the Sicily Rally. In something like eighteen weeks we turned a rolling chassis without a body and needing a myriad of details finalising into a driving car. It only started the day before it left for Sicily but performed faultlessly on the Rally with hardly a spanner having to be laid upon it.

Brescia No. 2. We rebuilt the engine on James Diffey’s Brescia and gave him advice on many other parts of the car. The first time he used the car was on the Welsh Trial and again it performed faultlessly. James was the first Brescia home and won his class, a performance he very nearly repeated on The Lakes. At the Wescott driving test he was only beaten by the handicap, taking fastest time on almost all the tests. We are now working at developing the car further over the winter, taking another look at the cam profiles in light of what we had found so far. While we were doing James’s engine we also sorted out white metalling the banana tappets and also a process for reclaiming worn tappets, which on average cost £25 (cheaper than buying new ones).

So 2004 will always be thought of as our year with Brescias.

Parts sales last year went incredibly well. I am amazed how many people in the VSCC are building GP cars. It seems a whole new generation are becoming interested in Type 35s and 35Bs, which can only be good news for the club, even if the Hill Climb is doing its best to alienate Bugatti owners.

The 75^th Anniversary Celebrations, centred around the International Rally, seem a long way off now, and even watery Prescott seems like it must have been fun. A trip into London to celebrate that initial meeting of Madely, Ambrose Varley and G M Giles was well supported by Bugatti owners and held at the RAC Club, an impressive building on Pal Mall which has a modus operandi which belongs to a different age, an age which Bugatti owners to this day hold dear, with its, to quote the President “… decent, polite, good tempered behaviour and sportsmanship between members…” (Bugantics, Spring 2004)

In the real world times have changed, things have moved on. After visiting the RAC Club, a few of us ventured onto Simpsons in the Strand, where it really all began, walking through a London which is marked by the 24 hour culture and the lack of tolerance this brings.

I have been a member of many members clubs over the years, most of which are based around marques which have current models, and perhaps in line with the ‘me generation’ this brings, there is little sense of a club run for and belonging to its members. Luckily, perhaps because Bugatti is a pre-war phenomenon, our club seems to have kept this without the need for dress codes or mobile phone bans that the RAC Club uses to hold back the tide.