Bugatti must pair charisma with performance, says new design boss

Bugatti recently named a new design director, promoting from within after a long-standing figure stepped down. Former director of design Achim Anscheidt retired last month after 19 years at the company, with Frank Heyl stepping up to the top job, himself a 15-year servant to Bugatti and deputy to Anschedit since 2019.

Heyl began his career as an exterior designer in the late noughties and more recently played a leading role in shaping models including the Chiron, Divo, Bolide and W16 Mistral. Speaking to Car Design News from Pebble Beach, he explained the importance of maintaining a long-term vision for the brand, how Bugattis are “shaped by speed” and spoke of the “joyful” relationship with engineering.

Car Design News: You’ve been at Bugatti since 2008. How has the approach to design evolved during your time with the company?

Frank Heyl: The process has come a long way. I started using Alias version 9.0 on a silicon graphics workstation. So I consider myself a digital native when it comes to 3D – modeling my own designs when I was still a senior designer. I also very much enjoyed the clay process, especially the art of taping. While I still remember having a lot of fun sculpting the Veyron Super Sport and other projects from clay in symbiosis with some of the most incredible clay modelers, the game has moved on. The software and hardware have become considerably more sophisticated. And so have the users. By now, through the art of the digital sculptors’ expertise, the transition from initial idea to 3D is so quick, it enables us to explore many more themes in much less time. This is why we do the entire process in digital.

Looking ahead I see huge potential in AI. In the near future I think this will be like the step from manual marker sketches to Photoshop. Imagine a design studio without Photoshop today. So far however I have only observed AI-based design work being a recycling of shapes that already exist, somehow rendered into pretty pictures. We are not in the pretty pictures drawing business. A sketch is merely a tool to solve a complex problem.

The designer’s actual job to come up with original ideas will remain untouched by this tool. But the topic is highly interesting. It feels a bit like Alias version 9.0 when what you want is version 2024. But I am sure also the rate of progress will be exponential and AI will become an essential tool if not even a creativity multiplier for designers. I find it particulary interesting to see combinations of language models and diffusion models like super-prompting Midjourney with ChatGPT.

CDN: There will clearly be a wider range of responsibilities moving up to design director. But how would you describe the ‘heart’ of the role – what will be your primary focus?

FH: The most interesting part is to maintain the overall vision. The string of thought that leads the brand into the future. This is a multi dimensional, interdisciplinary undertaking that on one hand goes far beyond the design of the next product, branching out into the most pioneering technologies and material sciences, as well as respecting the herritage of the brand and a deep understanding of its main contributors that have shaped history to create the nimbus that we perceive as Bugatti or Rimac today.

At the same time it is very much about the core essence of the next product in terms of the integration of purpose. Beauty comes from the aesthetic of purpose. And the purpose can be many things. Let’s take speed as an example. Speed is a byproduct of power and efficiency. Yet just a powerful drivetrain thrown into the most aerodynamically efficient body doesn’t necessarily lead to a breathtakingly beautiful product that will stand the test of time and go down in the history books as the most outstanding Bugatti. After all it is about creating products that have a soul, that have a certain charisma – an attitude, a personality, a character – that speaks to us.

We like to say ‘shaped by speed’ when we describe the Chiron Super Sport. Yes there is something about the sheer brutality with which that machine hammers on beyond 300 mph but there is more to this. If you just simply mash all the ingredients together, it doesn’t necessarily result in a product you fall in love with. As much as buying a Bugatti is more an investment into an asset than a car purchase, ultimately it is also a very emotional thing. Your heart needs to tell your mind that it is worth spending millions for it. It is the art of not only fulfilling the purpose but to tie it in to a story. If the car tells a story it is authentic. And our cars need to be authentic because only like this they can be timeless. And they need to be timeless because they will be enjoyed by automobile connoisseurs for decades and get passed on from generation to generation.

The art of integration plays a vital part in this aswell. What sounds like a mundane word actually has a rather complex meaning. It is about understanding the inner workings of all the key aspects – concept, drivetrain, electric, chassis, body or aero – and to understand the experts in each of those fields to create the next level. To pioneer, to redicule what was believed possible until today and to come up with a compelling design that weaves all these aspects together, staying true to the brand DNA through every fibre.

Focus is important too. It is not worth trying to create the car that is best at everything at once. So it is vital to have a strong vision and a firm understanding of what you want to achieve with the next product. For this it is also important to have a strong bond with the other departments and to agree a clear focus for each project beforehand.

At Bugatti Rimac the design department reports directly to or visionary CEO Mate Rimac. I can not emphasise enough how much the next-gen Bugatti and Rimac products benefit from this simple organsational circumstance. Like this, the design department can influence the concept and package from the very beginning to come up with the purest design, incarnated to the highest degree. That’s why it is no over exaggeration to say that for a company to be truely successful with their products, design needs to be at the centre of the development process.

CDN: Your first project as design director will be the successor to the Chiron. Can you tell us anything about how that design process is going?

FH: It is the accumulated knowledge of the Veyron and Chiron programmes that is our foundation. This is a sky high platform to start from. It is the pioneering spirit that made the Veyron the first production car to exceed 250 mph. It is the blood, sweat and tears that we went through to get the Chiron to exceed 300 mph. But it is the style in which these accomplishments where achieved. The exceptional quality. The individualisation options. Nothing is too expensive, nothing is too beautiful. A Bugatti is primarily a luxury car that also happens to be the fastest. Ettore Bugatti once said: “If comparable, it is no longer Bugatti.”

The upcoming Chiron successor is an off-the-white-page, no compromises automobile that will demonstrate the highest level of integration of any Bugatti product ever made. It will be the most extraordinary driver experience, a peice of art and automobile couture. And it will still be some time before I can really talk about it, but I am very much looking forward to the unveiling.

CDN: Bugatti is about “speed, luxury and elegance” and a lot of that comes down to the relationship between design and engineering – how would you describe that relationship at Bugatti, I assume you work very closely?

FH: It is with the greatest joy that I can whole heartedly say that never before have we had such an innovative, pioneering and uncompromising group of engineers like the one Emilio Scervo has put together at Bugatti Rimac. It is an honour to work in this environment. We at Bugatti Rimac also take great pride in the fact that we regard the development crew as one team. I like to keep low hierachies and to put free thinking, creativity and skill before rank. It is a matter of the problems that we are solving every day not to divide the team up into to a classic “them against us.”

Our designers need to understand all the technical aspects of the development process, just like I expect our engineers to understand aesthetic aspects, may they be proportion, surfacing or graphic related. Since the formation of the joint company between Bugatti and Rimac, we have managed to take this team culture to a level that I hadn’t dared to dream of before.