The greatest victory in Bugatti history came in 1939, when the factory's underfunded single-car team, with Jean-Pierre Wimille and Pierre Veyron at the wheel, defeated the pride of European racing, including Delage, Lagonda, and BMW. The winning Type 57C "Tank" was the same car that Jean was driving when he was killed. (Ettore had forbidden Jean from racing.)

"It's very sad," says Kruta, as we walk through the museum. "Jean was the responsible son, and his father was very cool to him, very domineering. We have many letters between them and it's all very businesslike, hardly any affection expressed between them. Never, 'I love you.'"

Whether it was the cars, the racing glory, or the family intrigues, the name Bugatti came to have a special hold on the automotive world after World War II. It was, after all, the dominant team in grand prix racing at its most deadly and romantic. The cars managed to synthesize Art and the Machine, as foretold in innumerable futurist manifestos. Bugattis were also quite rare. In three decades, the factory built fewer than 8,000 cars, and many of the most desirable were destroyed during the war. Every now and then collectors would claim to have found this car or that, fata morganas of car collecting. It all gave the Bugatti name the same kind of cachet that Stradivarius has for music lovers.

In fact, VW's resurrection of Bugatti followed another. In 1988, the entrepreneur Romano Artioli rebuilt the company from scratch, constructing a state-of-the-art factory in Campogalliano, Italy, to produce a stunning supercar called the EB110. Less than a decade later, in 1995, having produced just 140 cars, Artioli's company went bankrupt.

VW's 1998 purchase of Bugatti was engineered by then chairman Ferdinand Piëch, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche and every bit the eater of scenery that Ettore Bugatti was. Piëch's dream was to put the world's finest car brands under one roof. That same year, he arranged to take control of Lamborghini and Bentley, two other faded beauties of European performance and style. None of this seemed unusual at the time. In the nineties, Ford bought Jaguar, Aston Martin, and Land Rover, while BMW bought Rolls-Royce.

The rap on Piëch was that he overreached. He promised that the new Bugatti would be the fastest, most powerful, most expensive car ever made. It was Piëch who set the well-rounded parameters for the Veyron: 1,000 hp and faster than 400 kilometers per hour (248 mph). Such a car would eclipse the McLaren F1's long-standing and seemingly unassailable production-car speed record of 240.1 mph.

"Piëch was maniacal," industry analyst Peter DeLorenzo told the Los Angeles Times. "He was one of the great engineering geniuses of the late-20th century, but he proved that brilliance on the engineering side doesn't necessarily transfer to managerial vision."

And yet, to the extent that the Veyron is an extravagantly wasteful triumph, it's not Piëch's alone. Bernd Pischetsrieder, who replaced Piëch in 2002, had a chance to pull the plug on the Veyron project, which at the time was in a state of chaos: The development cars were too heavy and there were problems with the engine, the fuel pumps, the cooling. Most of all, there were the irreconcilable aerodynamic demands of a car that had to have high downforce for proper handling, but low downforce (less aero drag) for top speed. One car suffered an embarrassing mishap in one of its early public previews.

Pischetsrieder doubled down. He dismissed the project's chief engineer and brought in wunderkind Schreiber, who perfected the car's novel speed-adaptive aerodynamics: At low speed, the rear wing is retracted. At 137 mph, the dual-plane rear wing deploys on aircraft-grade hydraulic struts and the body lowers to about a 3.5-inch ride height. In order to achieve top speed, drivers use a special second key to set the aero surfaces to a minimum angle of attack, while the body lowers to a ground-skimming 2.5 inches.

All brilliant, and all costly. The extensive reworking of the Veyron took two years longer, and many more millions of euros, than expected.

Again, a reasonable question is, why? If Piëch's intention was to highlight VW's engineering genius, why not slap a VW badge on the nose and be done with it? Why resurrect this maledicted brand?

"Our average customer already has about 30 cars," the historian Kruta says. "The last thing they need is another car. These people are interested in human beings. They only become interested in a car if there is a personal touch, a story to be told." And no auto company has ever had a better backstory than Bugatti.