Man who bought Bugatti Veyron with broken gearbox for $1.2M spends weeks calling Bugatti only to be met with devastating outcome

This man had spent weeks calling up Bugatti about his Veyron with a broken gearbox, only to be met with a disappointing outcome.

Mark McCann had spent $1.2 million on this supercar, but the gearbox had proved to be tricky.

Weeks of attempting to get ahold of Bugatti had proved fruitless, so he was left with little choice.

He’d have to enlist some outside help to get the job done.

This Bugatti Veyron had a broken gearbox, but Mark McCann wasn’t giving up on it

When Mark McCann purchased this $1.2 million Veyron, he knew he was dealing with a high-end car.

After all, this used to belong to a Middle Eastern prince.

Having started life as a standard Veyron, it was transformed into a Pur Sang model to the tune of $440,000.

This car needed a lot of work from the get-go, as it came to McCann in pieces.

A deteriorating interior, damaged aluminum body panels, and missing hardware were just some of the problems on his plate.

But all of those issues were small fries compared to the gearbox.

It had been left severely corroded after residue material had built up inside.

A lot of back and forth had led to one disappointing conclusion – Bugatti couldn’t replace this.

And to make matters worse, McCann was reportedly having a hard time getting ahold of someone at Bugatti.

“The obvious solution would be to buy a brand new gearbox, but after weeks of calling Bugatti, they won’t even give me a price,” he stated.

“So, that means we’re on our own. We’re going to have to fix this mess without Bugatti’s help.”

Could this gearbox be fixed?

With the help of Pascal, a Dutch engineer known as ‘The Dutchman’, McCann set about getting the gearbox back into working order.

Pascal utilized CAD drawings and custom manufacturing to replicate the Veyron’s bespoke clutch plates and gaskets, in a bid of overcome the hurdle presented by Bugatti’s seeming radio silence.

They managed to get ahold of Rob Barnes, a former engineer at Ricardo.

Ricardo is the British firm that originally designed Veyron’s gearbox.

It was from Barnes that McCann would get another serving of bad news – the gearbox isn’t a mere set of gears, it was a complex hydraulic system.

Barnes warned that new clutches undergo a ‘bedding-in’ process where carbon fibers break off the surface. In a factory setting, these fibers are caught by specialized filters on a test rig.

If Barnes were to bolt the gearbox back into the car himself, it wouldn’t go well.

The car would drive, the fibers would clog the hydraulic valves, the cooling oil flow would stop, and the clutch would be thermally destroyed in under a minute.

This flushing requirement set McCann on a mission to find a test rig, but that wouldn’t come cheap.

He was quoted figures of up to $666,577.

So by video’s end, this is the current status of the project – the gearbox has been reassembled and cleaned.

But with seemingly no way to safely bed-in the clutch and flush the system out, things had essentially ground to a halt.

This pushed McCann to make an appeal to his viewers – he wanted to hear from someone who had a high-speed test rig.

There was evidently still work left to do on this Bugatti Veyron. Watch this space.