Drive by an automaker’s factory or offices and you’ll likely see not only the staging areas, but also the employee parking lots filled with the company’s own vehicles.
That’s less often the case among the staff of exotic automakers, who seldom make the kind of salaries they’d need to take home one of the supercars their company produces. So what do employees at a company like Bugatti drive? In Achim Anscheidt’s case, a vintage Porsche.
Anscheidt is the chief designer at Bugatti. He has been for the past twelve years, having previously lent his pen to parent company Volkswagen in Spain and in Germany (after an earlier career as a motorcycle stunt rider). During the week, he drives a VW Golf GTI. But on the weekends he’s all about his stripped-out 1981 Porsche 911 SC.
Though both are sportscars made under the expansive Volkswagen Group umbrella, Anscheidt’s 911 and the Chiron he designed could hardly be more different. Where The Chiron weighs 4,400 pounds, Anscheidt’s 911 weighs just 1808 lbs. Where the Bugatti packs an 8.0-liter quad-turbo sixteen-cylinder engine sending 1,500 horsepower to all four wheels through a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission, Ansheidt’s Porsche is powered by a 3.0-liter six sending 290 hp through a rear-drive five-speed manual. And that’s after Achim tuned it: the original made just 180 hp, rising to 204 by 1981.
The Bugatti is complicated, in short, where the 911 is simplicity itself. And that’s just the way the designer likes it. In fact, he designed it that way. Read more about Anscheidt and his Porsche in the full article from the company’s Christophorus magazine, check out the photos in the gallery below, or watch the video at bottom that Drive put together a few years ago.
Photo Gallery
