Hezy Shaked, founder of retail clothing brand Tilly’s, is one billionaire enthusiast with four bespoke Bugattis, each one a creature. The W16 Mistral ‘Fly Bug’ is the latest and final commission in a series that began with the Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse ‘Hellbug’, continued through the Chiron ‘Hellbee‘ and the Divo ‘Lady Bug’, and now closes with a dragonfly. Built through Bugatti’s Sur Mesure personalisation programme, it is a one-of-one hypercar draped in a shifting, iridescent paint called ‘Dragonfly Blue’ and covered in an ellipse pattern that mimics wings in motion. For someone with Trypophobia – an irrational fear of circular shapes – this may prove to be a problem. Base price for a standard Mistral starts at around $5.87 million. This one-off will likely be in a different ballpark.
The canvas here is worth talking about. The W16 Mistral is the last road-going Bugatti to carry the quad-turbocharged 8.0-litre W16 engine, making 1,578 horsepower. Just 99 were built, all sold before the car was even publicly revealed. It succeeded the Chiron, which replaced the Veyron, and what follows it is the Tourbillon, a hybrid V16, a completely different machine. The Mistral is the end of something genuinely irreplaceable, and every one of its 99 owners knew exactly that when they signed.
Which is what makes this particular car so layered. The collector’s creative journey with Bugatti spans four models and a single recurring theme: the beauty of small creatures from the natural world. Each commission evolved the visual language. The Divo ‘Lady Bug‘ featured around 1,600 precisely arranged geometric diamond shapes flowing across the body. The ‘Fly Bug’ takes that idea further, with an ellipse pattern that grows denser toward the rear and dissolves into the darkness of the air intakes, like a dragonfly’s wing held up to the light.
The collaboration began with a direct conversation between the collector and Frank Heyl, Bugatti’s Head of Design, before passing to the Berlin-based CMF team. The result introduced three firsts for Bugatti. The Macaron oval badge, present on every Bugatti grille for over a century, was woven into a painted graphic on the car’s flank for the very first time. A multi-layered leather-over-Alcantara material was applied across both the door panel faces and armrests simultaneously, also never done before. And ‘Dragonfly Blue’ itself, a paint that shifts between blue and turquoise with the light, was developed from scratch for this car alone. Months of work went into this one car. But then again, it’s a collector’s vision spread across four machines that represent the best of Bugatti, so the wait, dare we say, has been well worth it.
