Bugatti built 99 Mistrals. One of them, wearing 321 miles on its odometer and still carrying the factory plastic on its scuff plates, is heading to the auction block at Monterey Car Week through RM Sotheby’s. The estimate sits between $7.5 million and $9.5 million.
The original window sticker read $6.055 million. That means the owner stands to pocket somewhere between $1.4 million and $3.4 million in profit for the trouble of barely driving the thing.
The car was specced with $369,000 in options, painted in a two-tone combination of Italian Red and Nocturne over a matching Italian Red and Beluga Black leather interior. Red brake calipers peek through black wheels. It looks like a Bugatti that actually wants to be noticed, which is saying something for a brand that rarely needs to try.
Under the sculpted bodywork sits the 8.0-liter quad-turbocharged W16 shared with the Chiron Super Sport 300+, producing 1,578 horsepower and 1,180 lb-ft of torque. Zero to 60 in 2.4 seconds, zero to 124 in 5.6, top speed rated at 282 mph. None of those numbers have been tested by this particular car, given its featherweight mileage.
The Mistral’s appeal is less about what it can do and more about what it represents. It is the final Bugatti to carry the W16 engine, the motor that defined the Veyron era and carried the Chiron through its entire production run. The Tourbillon, Bugatti’s next chapter, swaps the sixteen cylinders for a hybrid V16 developed with Cosworth.
Different philosophy, different lineage. The W16 is done. The Mistral was its funeral march, open-top and screaming.
At 99 units, the Mistral is considerably scarcer than the Chiron, which Bugatti produced 500 of. Limited production combined with “last of its kind” status creates a formula the collector market has rewarded consistently. Think of the LaFerrari Aperta, the Porsche 918 Spyder, any final-edition anything with a credible engineering story behind it.
The question is whether $9.5 million represents the ceiling or just the beginning. Monterey in August has a way of loosening wallets, especially for cars carrying the kind of provenance a near-zero-mile, end-of-line Bugatti offers. A roofless, rarer, more dramatically styled sibling of the Chiron Super Sport 300+ should perform at least as well on the secondary market.
What makes this sale revealing is the speed at which it’s happening. Bugatti only recently wrapped Mistral production. The car hasn’t aged into collectibility — it was born into it.
Buyers who secured allocations at MSRP knew exactly what they were holding. Some of them drove their cars. This owner drove 321 miles, kept the plastic on, and called an auction house.
The listing is live. Monterey is weeks away. And somewhere, a billionaire who missed the original allocation is already making phone calls.
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