MARCO, Pierre.

An employee of Bugatti for almost forty years. He started work with Ettore in 1919 and was recruited to the factory race team in 1920*. Obeying team orders he finished fourth driving car no. 7 in the Voiturette race at Brescia on 8th September 1921, lead home by his three team mates. He competed in a type 35 at the Trois Epins hill-climb near Strasbourg and was the factory “repair superintendent” pre-WW2 but was relocated to Bordeaux where he was responsible for stock control. In August 1947, he returned to Molsheim where he became general manager. He estimated that the war damage inflicted on the factory would have cost 1.5 million Francs to repair but that only a tiny proportion of this amount was received under the terms of the Marshall Plan. The plant was directed by a management group comprising himself, Roland, Ébé, Lidia, Genevieve and a representative of her two infant children. He negotiated contracts for general engineering work from the French Navy, Gantois, Holwegg and from SNCF for stocks of railcar spares. Later, machining was undertaken for Citroën. He made an ill-considered attempt to revive the twenty year old type 57 design as the type 101 and, with Roland, squandered further massive sums on the Colombo-designed Grand Prix type 251 driven once only at Rheims by Maurice Trintignant. There were bitter recriminations following this fiasco and Marco’s alleged theft of company funds to carry out extensions to his private house. Under pressure from Roland he eventually left the Bugatti firm in 1958. He died in Molsheim on 29th September, 1979 aged eighty-three. (In his obituary (B.42/4/12) Hugh Conway described him as “an important and useful henchman of Ettore and Jean”).