Mate Rimac’s nephews just skipped the world’s most exclusive waiting list, and they did not even need a driving licence to do it. In a new Instagram reel with the caption “The cool uncle role is getting real…”, the Bugatti Rimac boss is seen buckling into a Tourbillon, next to his two young nephews, and taking them for a spin. What will make this even more memorable for them is that this is not even a production car. The Tourbillon in question looks very much like one of the development mules used for testing and validation, because the real customer cars haven’t started rolling out yet. They may well be the only 8-year-olds in the world to have ever ridden in one.
It’s not these kids’ first rodeo, either. Classic Driver reported that he routinely lets enthusiastic kids hop into his high-mileage Chiron, a car he has affectionately nicknamed Cro-Bug. What makes this particular clip juicier is the number plate. By the end of the reel, you can spot ZG PP-1009 on the car, a Croatian registration where “PP” marks it out as a transferable plate, the kind manufacturers and dealers slap onto test and demo vehicles.
The same plate has done the rounds on Tourbillon prototypes spotted around Zagreb before, and Mate himself has openly called similar cars he has driven a “Tourbillon prototype” in earlier posts. For Mate, this is also a rare chance to share a car he’s personally involved in the development of with the next generation of the family.
Road & Track previously tagged a dark, exposed carbon development car as VP1, short for Verification Prototype 1, when it turned up during winter testing in Croatia. Whether this exact car is VP1 is hard to say with certainty since transferable plates hop between vehicles, but it clearly belongs to the same prototype family. The Tourbillon packs a naturally aspirated 8.3-liter V16, three electric motors and a 25 kWh battery, for 1,800 horsepower combined. It is Bugatti’s Chiron successor and one of the most technically ambitious cars ever to leave Molsheim.
Bugatti has sold out all 250 examples of the Tourbillon, at roughly $4.5 million each, yet the company has not publicly documented a single customer delivery so far. Again, to drive the point home, these two kids got to ride in an 1,800 horsepower, V16 hybrid prototype before a single one of the millionaires who wrote the cheques did. Being family clearly still beats being first in line.