While Bugatti ensures anonymity for all clients who commission automobiles through its Sur Mesure customization division, the owner of this particular creation might just be the world’s wealthiest entomologist. The W16 Mistral “Fly Bug” is fourth in the owner’s collection of fauna-inspired hypercars that also includes a Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse “Hellbug,” Chiron “Hellbee,” Divo “Lady Bug”—the latter featuring an intricate, 1,600-piece diamond pattern.
For the “Fly Bug,” the collector worked with Bugatti Head of Design Frank Heyl directly to reinterpret the motif—an ellipse pattern that spreads across the exterior, growing denser toward the rear of the car and darkening around the air intakes. The pattern is highlighted by a bespoke “Dragonfly Blue” colorway that shifts between blue and turquoise depending on the light and angle of view—much like a dragonfly’s wings.
The theme continues into the cabin, where an exclusive multi-layered application of leather over Alcantara was used to mirror the exterior’s elliptical motif. The pattern is especially noticeable on the door panels—Bugatti notes that this is the first time Bugatti has applied a graphic pattern across both the door panel face and the armrest area, a process that required close collaboration with the Bugatti engineering team to ensure the material sat perfectly across the curved surfaces.
Within the gear selector of the Sur Mesure Mistral, the famous “Dancing Elephant” appears as a reference to the legacy of Rembrandt Bugatti, the brother of founder Ettore Bugatti whose animal sculptures first adorned the Type 41 coach car and have appeared on several special projects since, including the Bugatti Factor One road bike.
According to Bugatti, incorporating the ellipses into the brand’s “Macaron—a pattern that typically appears within the car’s horseshow grille—was one of the project’s most demanding tasks. The owner of the Fly Bug wanted it woven into the ellipse graphic on the car’s driver’s side flank—while it looks like a relatively simple element, much care was given to find the optimal scale and position so that every Macaron detail was reproduced faithfully.
“With the W16 Mistral ‘Fly Bug’, we have completed something that is genuinely rare: a collection of cars connected by a single creative vision,” Heyl said. “Each commission has pushed our Design team further, and this one is no exception. A bespoke color developed from scratch, a Macaron integrated into a painted graphic for the first time in our history, and an interior material application we had never attempted before. We are very proud of what the team has achieved here. But none of it would have been possible without the trust our customer has placed in us across all these projects. His passion for our hypercars, and his belief in what Bugatti Sur Mesure can do, is what makes work like this truly worthwhile.”
