Achim Anscheidt may be the director of design for Bugatti, but the first part of his morning commute takes place on a bicycle, not in a whining supercar. One recent Thursday, Anscheidt, wearing a dark suit and sensible blue tie, chained his modest brown 10-speed to a railing by Berlin's central train station, stopped for a cappuccino on the concourse, and then caught the 6:33 express to Wolfsburg, a little over an hour away, for another day's work shaping the future of one of the world's most storied automobile marques.
"It's such a jewel of a brand, and such a delicate subject," Anscheidt explains in the dining car, referring to his intensely secret charge: developing new paths for a company thrillingly soaked in racing heritage from the 1920s and '30s. Legendary Bugattis, like the 1924 Type 35, which racked up more than 2,000 racing victories, and the achingly lovely Type 57 models, forged new and unforgettable links between style and power. Today, the firm manufactures just one masterpiece—the Bugatti Veyron, the world's fastest production street car, a 16-cylinder, quad-turbocharged, 1,001-hp monster, which goes from standing to 60 in 2.5 seconds and, not long after, reaches 261 mph. At the Frankfurt auto show in September, Anscheidt helped unveil the Veyron Pur Sang, a raw and even faster version in unpainted aluminum and carbon fiber. Priced at $1.9 million and available in a limited edition of five, the Pur Sang sold out in 24 hours.
"My job is to create presentations about the midterm future of Bugatti," Anscheidt says as the Berlin suburbs give way to green German countryside. "Do you make money with this idea or do you create an icon for the brand? Does the company remain a jewel and stay small or does it grow?"
The son of a world champion motorcycle racer, Anscheidt grew up traveling around Germany among screaming engines. It's a shock to hear that this calm, soft-spoken 45-year-old once flourished as a professional motorbike acrobat, wowing crowds all over Germany with leaps, wheelies, and even—with a roll cage bolted to the bike—a forward flip. "It's all technique," Anscheidt casually explains. "You overpower the wheelie, basically. It wasn't so dangerous once you had it right."
He broke his leg once, but otherwise escaped a busy decade of bookings unharmed, even when he was the support act for Tina Turner. At 28, however, Anscheidt asked himself whether it was possible to grow old gracefully as a stunt motorcyclist and decided it wasn't. He had already begun studying automobile design during winters in Stuttgart, and Porsche, impressed by his promise, sponsored him to attend the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. It was there, he says, that he learned "how to handle design and the art aspect in relation to industry." His inspirations included the impressionistic car illustrations of Dexter Brown, Steve McQueen in Le Mans, and the ink drawings of Ken Adam, the production designer for the classic Bond films. In 2005, after a stint at Porsche, Anscheidt was working at the new Volkswagen design studio in Potsdam, near Berlin, when he was asked to "look at the future of Bugatti," which had been purchased by VW in 1998.
