A Car of Great Symbolic Power

Paris, January 2026 in Writing

A few days before Christmas, aged 95, my father quietly left us, like a candle snuffed out. His gentle death followed a life lived to the full, true to his motto “sound of mind, sound of body”. He had never agreed to retire and spent his last day in his workshop getting orders ready for delivery in time for the holidays.

A few days before Christmas, aged 95, my father quietly left us, like a candle snuffed out.

The last time we had spoken, two days previously, he had gleefully shared his latest trick to boost productivity at his precision mechanical engineering company, a business he had run without interruption for seventy years. In a world seemingly ruled by technology, he was living proof that you are never too old when your head, heart and hands work as one to help you realise your dreams.

How best to share the feelings aroused by this loss? Let me recall a day we spent together in May 2023. We were on a family outing to Valliquerville, Normandy. Off to see an exclusive car that had once been a big part of our family.

How best to share the feelings aroused by this loss?

The car, a Bugatti Galibier chassis no. 57210, was made in Molsheim in 1934, just four years after my father’s birth. Numbered 25, it is one of eleven left today, out of forty-one originally put on the market. According to its current owner, to own a Bugatti is literally to be an extraordinary person.

To own a Bugatti is literally to be an extraordinary person.

You need a streak of madness to agree to devote yourself to tending the flame of the pioneering designer-cum-automotive engineer Ettore Bugatti and the Alsatian company he founded in 1909. To let yourself be enthralled by a fast car from a bygone era. And to assume stewardship of an automotive gem to be preserved for future generations.

In 1960, my father, a young man with a passion for engines, fell in love with the Bugatti after seeing it in a garage on the banks of the Seine, in Paris. It would be hard to overstate his elation when, his business having taken off, he was able to purchase his dream car. He drove the Bugatti back to Denmark between 21 and 23 December that year. It was his best ever Christmas present to himself.

He was able to purchase his dream car.

That two-day drive to the Danish border, across France and Germany, is a story I know by heart. Conditions were unusually harsh in the winter of 1960, and he had to drive his unheated car with the window rolled down because he had to keep scraping ice and snow off the windshield. Bundled up in a biker’s suit, he managed to keep the cold and exhaustion at bay with regular stops to stomp his feet and rub his arms.

Once in Copenhagen, he parked the car in a garage across the street from his workshop. His plan was to use his talents as a mechanical engineer to fix up the car and bring it up to code. He dreamt of driving the Bugatti on the streets of Copenhagen and taking part in the Danish Bugatti Club’s events. What he did not know yet was that he was about to meet my mother and trade the carefree life of a young bachelor for the pressures of fatherhood.

What he did not know yet was that he was about to meet my mother and trade the carefree life of a young bachelor for the pressures of fatherhood.

And so, by the time I came along, eighteen months later, the Bugatti was already a member of the family. One that stood still in the garage, like an inanimate older sister. My father would speak fondly of it to me, praising its qualities. In fact, “Bugatti” was my second word. I learnt it as he held me in his arms in the evening, before bed, pointing to a picture of a car of the same make on the wall of our apartment. Rummaging through old family photographs, I can also see now that my first toys were not dolls, as was common for little girls in those days, but … Bugatti toy cars!

Like an inanimate older sister.

The Bugatti has always been part of my unconscious. It felt central to our sense of ourselves as a family when I was growing up. The peerless perfection of its engine (as he saw it) epitomised my father’s love of mechanics. And it probably spurred my younger brother’s love of fine cars. Born five years after me, he ended up settling in Southern California, a part of the world that owes its high concentration of luxury cars to its affluence and gentle climate.

The Bugatti has always been part of my unconscious.

Our Bugatti meant something a little different for me when I became an adult. Having little interest in cars, let alone engines, I saw it as a symbol of French sophistication and elegance. Of a lifestyle I soon began to covet. And of France, the host country that welcomed me when I was a young woman looking to build her own life story.

I saw it as a symbol of French sophistication and elegance.

Thirty years later, without so much as a word to my brother and me, my father suddenly decided to get rid of the Bugatti. And just like that, a big part of his – and our – history was gone.

The conditions of the sale made me suspect foul play. After the initial wave of shock and grief, I understood that letting go of the car freed my father from feeling he had to fix it up. That just wasn’t what he dreamt of anymore. It was the right thing to do, but he came to regret his decision. Eventually I realised that he would not be able to move on without reconciling himself to the loss of the car. I decided to help him.

I understood that letting go of the car freed my father from feeling he had to fix it up.

Our family trip to Normandy was meant to heal his wounds. The idea was to get my 93-year-old father to make the journey from Copenhagen to Paris in order to let him see what had become of “his” Bugatti. Following various resales, the car was now back in its home country, France, the country where he had seen it for the first time. On that beautiful, emotional day, my father saw that his old dream had come true: the car had been restored, and he was able to listen to the purr of its engine and take it out for a last ride. When at last he parked it on the banks of the Seine – in Seine-Maritime, not Paris this time – he knew that the Bugatti had been given a new lease of life and would survive him.

He was able to listen to the purr of its engine and take it out for a last ride.

For the sixty years it spent in our Denmark garage, still as Sleeping Beauty, the Bugatti was a big part of our lives. Today, it is its fine new owners who, like my father before them, dedicate themselves to caring for this exceptional part of our mechanical engineering heritage.

Like all Bugatti owners, my father had a streak of madness, assuming stewardship of this unique feat of engineering in order to pass it on to others. Our Normandy trip was a necessary step, healing the wounds opened by the sale of the car. It brought him closure, and he no longer felt the need to bring it up in conversation in the years that followed.

Like all Bugatti owners, my father had a streak of madness.

As for me, I am glad I was able to act as a bridge between France and Denmark, bringing my father and the Bugatti back together. That special day helped me to grasp the symbolic power of that car and turn my lingering sense of disappointment into a story laden with meaning. Forever engraved in my heart is the photograph that we took of my father standing next to the car on the banks of the Seine – and placed on his coffin at the funeral.