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Man rolls $400,000 vintage Bugatti in race, goes for a pint

One of the risks associated with vintage car racing is damaging a rare, priceless piece of automotive history, but we're pretty sure that one recent participant is just happy to be alive. Edmund Burgess, of Lavenham, UK, was participating in the Prescott Speed Hill Climb in Gloucestershire, UK when, according to Car Buzz, the brakes reportedly failed on his 1924 Bugatti Type 13 causing it to go off course and roll over.
With an open cockpit on the car, all that was protecting Burgess were a helmet, goggles and a jacket, and while the video shows that his head came very close to making contact with the wall and ground, and that he was briefly trapped under the car, he fortunately didn't suffer any serious injuries.
Too bad the same can't be said for the Bugatti. The vintage racer, worth an estimated 250,000 British pounds (about $390,000 US), was heavily damaged, but the report says that Burgess is determined to get it fixed and racing again in just eight weeks. So what does a racer do after crashing his rare sports car and live to race another day? Probably the same thing we'd all do. Grab a beer. The video of the crash is posted below.

Vile Gossip: Ladies who launch

Jean Jennings has been writing about cars for more than 30 years, after stints as a taxicab driver and as a mechanic in the Chrysler Proving Grounds Impact Lab. She was a staff writer at Car and Driver magazine, the first executive editor and former president and editor-in-chief of Automobile Magazine, the founder of the blog Jean Knows Cars and former automotive correspondent for Good Morning America. She has lifetime awards from both the Motor Press Guild and the New England Motor Press Association. Look for more Vile Gossip columns in the future. The year was 2006. We were driving a Bugatti Veyron 16.4 across the Florida Panhandle from Jacksonville to Panama City, only because I couldn't convince Bugatti to let me be the first to drive its exotic powerhouse, the world's fastest car at that time, all the way across America. One gleaming example had arrived in time for the Amelia Island Concours d'Elegance, where the journos massed for their quick test drives out the front drive of the Ritz Carlton, down a short stretch of the A1A, and back to the Ritz. Not far enough for me. I wanted to take the Veyron in all of its 16-cylinder, 1,001-horsepower, $1.3-million-dollar glory on a coast-to-coast extravaganza of a road trip. Never hurts to ask. I asked. Once the Bugatti guys stopped hyperventilating, I explained that the coastal adventure would be contained wholly within the state of Florida, from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf of Mexico. My secret destination, however, was to be Vernon, Florida, home of the great Errol Morris' classic documentary about a town in the Panhandle with the highest per-capita population of citizens who'd blown off or whacked off a limb for insurance money. (Google "Nub City.") The Swiss head of Bugatti public relations thought it hilarious. He showed up in a van with a couple of German mechanics to follow us and a failed French Formula 1 driver to serve as my chaperone. I came with a photographer from Germany and one of the most infamous of bad-boy auto magazine tech editors, the irrepressible Don Sherman. Sherman had his own reason for going, and it had nothing to do with a Veyron to Vernon. Once we gave up looking for nubbies, he ordered me to veer south to the handgrip of the Panhandle, familiarly known as the Redneck Riviera. The Don was aiming to secretly execute the Veyron's first Launch Control blastoff in captivity.

Bugatti Gangloff Concept updates the rare Type 57 SC Atalante

Designer Pawel Czyzewski has taken a stab at what a new Bugatti coupe could look like. The Gangloff Concept lifts inspiration from the famous 1938 Bugatti Type 57 SC Atalante Coupe. That beautiful machine wore a body crafted by none other than French coach builder Gangloff, hence the concept's moniker. Wearing a few cues from the current batch of Veyron hypercars, including a familiar grille and cabin feel, the Gagloff is what the luxury coupes of our childhood dreams looked like. We dig the particularly brawny rear hips and split rear window.
While the LED headlights aren't really our bag of tricks, this concept has a heart-stopping profile. With those proud, arching fenders and eye-slit side glass, we certainly wouldn't mind seeing this machine in the Bugatti stable. Unfortunately, this design isn't officially affiliated with the French automaker, which means the Gagloff concept will remain pixels in the ether. Head over to CarBodyDesign.com for more information.