Bugatti has just built its final W16 Mistral, and somewhere in the Middle East a very lucky owner now has a falcon perched where the famous dancing elephant usually sits within the gear selector. Fitting, really, since the buyer wanted something closer to home than the elephant Ettore Bugatti immortalised over a century ago. Sur Mesure boss Jascha Straub and the Bugatti Riyadh team worked with the client to swap the mascot, add a hand embroidered falcon sketch across the door panels, and generally make sure this particular Mistral felt less like a factory car and more like a family heirloom.
The rest of the specification is like a greatest hits album for the marque. Finished in Pearl and Sparkle over Magnolia and Grey Carbon Matt interiors, the car carries Ettore Bugatti’s own signature stitched into the headrests, machined into the door sills, and reworked onto the engine cover where the usual Bugatti script normally lives. There’s a Lalique crystal armrest plate titled “Spirit of the Wind,” and a small dedication plate inside pairing the words “the last of its kind” with a silhouette of the car itself. It is, without question, the most sentimental way to end a production run.
What makes this send off matter is the engine underneath all that theater. The quad turbo W16 has powered Bugatti’s road cars for two decades, starting at 1,001 horsepower in the Veyron, climbing past 1,500 in the Chiron, and topping out around 1,600 in Super Sport tune, the same state of tune underpinning the Mistral. It’s an engineering dead end in the best possible sense, a configuration nobody else dared attempt at this scale, and nobody will again.
Its replacement, the Tourbillon’s naturally aspirated 8.3-liter V16, trades turbos for three electric motors and a 9,000 rpm redline, pushing combined output past 1,800 horsepower without a hint of lag. It’s a completely different philosophy, just with the same obsession with excess.
As for what this particular Mistral cost, official figures don’t exist, but with 99 units built and base prices already north of $5 million before Sur Mesure customisation, a bespoke, heritage-laden closing example like this one likely cleared seven figures comfortably, possibly into eight. Some send offs come with a plaque. This one came with a falcon.
