Hypercars are so named because their only purpose is to be over the top. And of all the hypercars, few are quite as hyper as track-focused Bugatti Divo. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Veyron and Chiron, but the Divo is the top-dog over at the little French rocketship maker’s garage. If the nearly $6-million price tag didn’t make this thing exclusive enough, one owner decided to get a custom paint job that Bugatti nearly had to refuse to do because it was so hard to get right. 

The Bugatti Divo “Ladybug” is all the way turn’t up

Besides Bugatti’s staggering performance specs, the ultra-lux French company is also known for extravagant, custom interiors and paint schemes. Bugatti is happy to fill these custom orders because they also don’t mind charging for them. According to Roadshow, regardless of Bugatti’s immense resources, it nearly pulled the plug on this complex paint job. 

The finished product looks great and all, but it’s hard to see what made this paint job so difficult to execute. Bugatti revealed the car on Tuesday and made very clear how hard it was for them to get it just right. Apparently, the geometric diamond pattern and the color contrast were nearly impossible to get on the car and still look good. 

What made this Bugatti paint job so hard to do? 

The Bugatti Divo is not a simple shape. Laying this diamond graphic along the sides of the “Ladybug” proved to be very difficult. Every time they tried, the diamonds would distort and twist and eventually get really ugly. As Roadshow puts it, “Essentially, what the team cooked up in the digital world of CAD hardly translated to a physical car in reality.”

Color and Trim Chief of Bugatti Design, Jörg Grumer, said, “Due to the nature of the project, where a 2D graphic was applied to a 3D sculpture, and after numerous failed ideas and attempts to apply the diamonds, we were close to giving up and saying: ‘We cannot meet the customer’s request.'” 

To fix the distortion problem, designers who worked on the project had to go into the design and manipulate each of the 1,600 diamond shapes individually. Bugatti also made a point to say that messing up even one of the diamond shapes by even so small as a millimeter would ruin the entire look of the design. After the designers got it right on the computers, they had to put it on 20-foot long sheets to lay it over a test car to see if the 3D version actually worked. 

The “Ladybug” did come together without a fight

Bugatti had to transfer each diamond to a sheet of transfer paper to get it on the car. To really drive the point home, the workers had to individually place each of the 1,600 diamonds onto the Divo by hand. 

After the diamonds were placed, Bugatti still had to paint the Divo. Of course, unlike most carmakers, Bugatti didn’t roll the “Ladybug” through a robotic spray booth; the painters took two weeks to spray it by hand. 

Bugatti won’t even say how many hours the job took. Regardless of the time and money, Bugatti needed to make a show of it because it’s what brands like this are all about. The excessiveness and over-the-top effort are all apart of the hypercar package, and Bugatti knows that. The finished product isn’t nearly as valuable as the exclusivity of the attention and dedication the customer gets. It is all a show, but it’s a really good one.