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It befitted the grandeur of Ettore Bugatti that he offered private motorists the same standard of equipment as his own racing team. No other major car manufacturer created such equality of opportunity for production team drivers and customers as a matter of course. 

Sometimes the Patron took fairness to a degree that he later regretted. One such example was the Monaco Grand Prix in 1930: in this year, for the first time, drivers were permitted to race without a passenger on board. This gave privateer René Dreyfus the idea of filling the empty space with a 30-litre fuel tank and installing a corresponding device to allow a fuel refill without stopping. Dreyfus won the race without making a pit stop and with a lead of 21 seconds. The first five places were all claimed by Bugatti models, but Dreyfus won ahead of all the production team drivers. And the factory could have used the new, more powerful 2.3 litre engines for its own racing team, but for reasons of fairness decided to settle for engines that were the same as those used by the privateers. 

The victorious Dreyfus also used different tyres and spark plugs to those of the offical Bugattis. Despite being generous at heart, Ettore Bugatti was not at all amused. When René Dreyfus came to introduce himself in Molsheim a few weeks later, the Patron refused to see him. It took two and a half years before René Dreyfus was finally accepted into the Bugatti racing team.