The W16 Mistral ‘Le Retour du Jeune Prince’, did not begin with a mood board. It began with a book. Alejandro G. Roemmers, renowned Argentine businessman, author, and most importantly, a devoted Bugatti collector also believed to own a Bugatti EB110 and a 1-of-10 Centodieci, had written his own literary sequel, The Return of the Young Prince, following up on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s beloved The Little Prince. The sequel envisioned the young prince returning from the moon to earth. When he sat down with Sur Mesure in Molsheim in October 2023, that manuscript became the blueprint.
There are car customization programs, and then there is Bugatti Sur Mesure. It is not about choosing a paint color from a swatch book. It is a deeply collaborative creative process, one that begins with a conversation and ends with something that has never existed before and never will again.
Previous commissions have drawn inspiration from art, architecture, personal heritage and even haute couture, each one a one-of-one expression filtered through one of the world’s most demanding design ateliers.
The design team at Molsheim, working alongside CMF specialists in Berlin translated Roemmers’ story into every surface of the car. The bodywork wears a bespoke copper and bronze colorway conceived to capture the warm glow of lunar light, its highly metallic finish shifting and deepening as daylight moves across the W16 Mistral’s sculpted flanks.
Silver stars were applied by hand across the rear bodywork and upper wing surface, an intricate, painstaking process of layering that required extraordinary time and expertise. Deploy the air brake and a hidden scene of the prince and the fox, the most iconic moment from Saint-Exupéry’s original tale, reveals itself.
Inside, the narrative continues. Two leather tones, Terre d’Or and Driftwood, create a cabin that feels warm and quietly cosmic. Moon motifs are embroidered into the door panels. Constellations are hand-stitched into the headrests. And at the center of the gear shifter, encased like a jewel, sits a miniature silver rose sculpted from a 3D scan of a real flower.
It’s a direct nod to the tenderness at the heart of Roemmers’ own writing. Beneath it all sits the 1,600-horsepower quad-turbocharged W16 engine, the last of its kind, powering a roadster built to be read as much as driven. Some stories are written in ink. This one does 282 miles per hour.
