With the coming of war in 1914, Ettore Bugatti buried three racing cars under the cellar of his home, gathered his family, and fled to Italy. From there he went to Paris and started designing again. The French government needed aircraft engines, and Bugatti, like Rolls Royce and Mercedes, turned his talents in that direction. He built a straight-eight-cylinder engine, and then a double-eight with two crankshafts geared to the propeller, allowing a machine gun to fire through the hub. The single-eight was taken to America and produced in Elizabeth, New Jersey, at the rate of twenty a day. In American planes these Bugatti engines powered many air miles. This would seem like standard cooperation between allies, and it was. But it led to an interesting development. The factory that turned out these engines was managed by the Duesenberg brothers. Within six months of the war's end, a group of Duesenberg cars appeared at Indianapolis. They sported the first straight-eight engines of that type in America. No one claims they were copies of the Bugatti, but no one denies its influence on them.
After the war, Bugatti returned to Molsheim, exhumed the buried racing cars, and resumed production. In 1923 a strange tank-shaped machine sported the Bugatti insignia, one of the few models that did not have the famous horseshoe-shaped radiator shell. This beetle-bodied car had two important innovations: aluminum wheels with integral aluminum brake drums and a front axle hollow in the center but solid at the steering pivot where strength is required.
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