Frank Heyl, Bugatti's director of design, discusses his passion for high-speed driving and the music he enjoys while working on hypercars, contrasting his current role with his earlier experience designing for Skoda.
“I love driving above 300kph and listening to Firestarter by The Prodigy," remarks Frank Heyl . Bugatti 's director of design might have told people this before, but it's unlikely that anyone will ever respond: "Oh, me too.
" Not only would you need to have had enough exposure to such exorbitant pace to build up a love for it, but you would also need to be so comfortable travelling at around 190mph to even register what music were playing in the background, let alone enjoy it. But when it's your job to design 16-cylinder hypercars, it surely helps to be comfortable with such outrageous levels of speed and noise. Heyl has been at Bugatti for nearly two decades, arriving in time to help shape 2010's 268mph Veyron Super Sport and eventually taking over from his long-serving predecessor, Achim Anscheidt, as chief of design for both Bugatti and its EV sibling brand, Rimac, in 2023. But he hasn't always breathed such rarefied air. After graduating from London's Royal College of Art, German-born Heyl landed a job as an exterior designer at Skoda, where he helped to shape the Czech budget brand's hatchbacks. The first project he worked on was the humble Rapid, a Fabia-based liftback, the concept for which was coincidentally designed by Jozef Kaban, who penned the basic design of the original Veyron before leaving Bugatti for Skoda the inverse of Heyl's journey. Conceived "for those who, let's say, couldn't afford an Octavia", the Rapid was a utilitarian and relatively spartan mobility solution that could hardly be further removed from the multimillion-pound missiles that Heyl is charged with dreaming up these days, but the programme nonetheless taught him a valuable lesson about the creative constraints of corporate reality. "I found myself fighting for a slightly more expensive wheel bearing, which would have cost 50 cents more per corner," he reminisces, with a fond smile that you imagine is at odds with his mood during those heated meetings. "It would have added €2 to the cost of each car produced, and I lost the battle for 10mm more offset on the wheel for a better stance. I didn't succeed and, in the end, the car was a little narrow because of that..." Unsurprisingly, Heyl doesn't have those kinds of arguments any more, being a designer of cars that can be worth a thousand times as much as a Rapid, but that's not to say that he and his team take a flippantly profligate approach when it comes to their conception. "I have different kinds of arguments about financials," he explains. "Ultimately, we only build 80 cars a year, so that's not a lot of cars to recover our financial investments. And obviously we have a responsibility towards the brand and towards its employees to make the future secure. “All our business cases are actually calculated, believe it or not, with a very sharp pencil. It's not like NASA: 'take me to the moon, whatever it costs!' It's very much a business that needs to function and be financially sound as well." So while the boardroom might be booked out for discussions about "whether to use gold foil or machine a part from a solid block of aluminium instead of using something cast", the prevailing objective, though it may seem, is corporate sustainability. Unsurprisingly, Heyl doesn't have those kinds of arguments any more, being a designer of cars that can be worth a thousand times as much as a Rapid, but that's not to say that he and his team take a flippantly profligate approach when it comes to their conception. Longevity, in fact, is at the heart of everything Bugatti does and it's not just about keeping the company afloat in the future but also ensuring that the hyper-exclusive hypercars it creates can draw a crowd for decades to come. Last year, Bugatti united its monstrous new Bolide track car with the legendary Type 35 at California's Laguna Seca circuit to celebrate the storied racer's centenary, and Heyl says that despite the prevailing juxtaposition between the two cars, they are linked in having each been designed to transcend trends and eras. Heyl says that "timelessness is key" above all else for Bugatti: "These cars, once built and hopefully never crashed might be around for 100 years-plus, long after we're all gone. So what kind of a challenge does that pose to the design? The design has to be timeless." It's impossible, of course, to know how tastes and design practices will evolve, so the best way to 'engineer in' timelessness is to omit anything that will inherently date the car. Take the new £3.2 million Tourbillon: it has just one diddy touchscreen, and even that is hidden away when not in use. "I'm sure we could have invested the same amount of money that we invested in a crystal glass, machined from solid aluminium centre console into a very nice 8K screen," says Heyl. "But 8K resolution in 10 years is just not going to be that impressive any more. It dates a car very quickly. "We need to step away from those things that date cars very quickly and invest in those things that will last, like the experience of driving a Bugatti, which appeals to your human senses." Perhaps it's not a surprise, given this predilection for intricacy and appreciation of engineering as an art form, that Heyl is a self-professed 'avgeek'. That's someone who admits to being more than a little excited by aviation, with a deep-seated knowledge of different aircraft types, the stories behind their conception and the mechanisms that keep them in the sky. You won't see him standing at the side of the M25 fastidiously noting tail numbers of Airbus A320s as they whizz overhead towards Heathrow, but he does express a profound respect for the sheer engineering might that keeps them in the air. His favourite? A silly question to ask the man who counts the 305mph Chiron Super Sport and 1775bhp V16-engined Tourbillon among his many magnum opii. "I'm a huge fan of Concorde. I have tonnes and tonnes of books I've studied. Unfortunately, I never got to fly in one, but when I used to live in Chelsea, the Heathrow flight path would be right over my house and you could tell a Concorde flying over your house from all the 747s and 767s..." What most enraptures Heyl about the legendary supersonic airliner is that it was "basically created without using much computing power; it was all drafting boards and paper drawings", meaning its formidable capabilities and iconic status are testaments to what can be achieved by real human genius an ethos that strongly influences his own people-first approach to management, 56 years after Concorde first took flight. But there is a more obvious parallel to be drawn here: "If you look at any other aircraft of the time going supersonic, you would have to wear a g-suit. In Concorde, you would just be lounging and sipping your wine." It's hard to ignore the similarity there to the modus operandi of a modern Bugatti. The Veyron was famously designed and engineered according to the exacting demands of the late Volkswagen Group supremo Ferdinand Piëch: a 1000bhp hyper-cruiser that could exceed 250mph yet also elegantly transport two VIP occupants to the opera in the evening without cramping or creasing anything. The end result was that "you can drive at 300kph in a Veyron with one hand", Heyl remarks. So, then, a burning question for one of very few people in the world who have experience of both endeavours. What do you prefer: designing a £10,000 car that a million people will buy or one car that will sell for more than £10 million? "It's a tough question," replies Heyl. "Every time I see a little Skoda Rapid drive past me and there's a happy family inside it, I smile. I actually regret that I didn't buy one myself back when it was new, when you could still order my spec: I would have had a Monte Carlo in grey and with the red details on the seats. "I always look at used cars and never find this particular one, so if anyone out there has one the saloon version, because that's the one I designed, please let me know. I might be interested." What’s in his garage? Frank Heyl's eclectic personal car collection has no Bugattis, but there are gems such as an Audi S6, an E92 BMW M3 and a Porsche 911 GT3. Yet he speaks most adoringly about the least likely member of the fleet: a minty 1987 Jeep Cherokee. Imported by his father from Canada when new, it's still in regular use today, featuring in regular video updates on Instagram, in which Heyl talks his 100,000 plus followers through the maintenance jobs he carries out at home. It's a fuel pressure regulator replacement next. Stay tuned.
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