I Built the Bugatti Powertrain. Then I Built a Coffee Bar.
I led the team that built the Bugatti Tourbillon powertrain. A power outage in Šibenik asked a question I could not put back. This is the full account.
The car cost several million euros. We built it for people who already owned everything. And somewhere on the Dalmatian coast, when the grid went down and the screens went dark, I sat in front of the Adriatic and asked a question I could not put back:
What am I actually building here?
That question ended a career I was proud of. It also gave me something I could not have found any other way.
The Machine Before the Question
I did not start as someone who liked coffee. I started as a kid in Graz who took mopeds apart in garages and refused to ask for help until the thing worked again.
That stubbornness went through Formula Student racing at TU Graz, a year as a paramedic in the Austrian Alps at nineteen, and eventually into the automotive industry. AVL, where I ran powertrain testing including a MotoGP project. Valeo Siemens, where I was technical project manager for the Mercedes and AMG EVA2 electric platform. Then Rimac Technology, Zagreb, 2022.
The brief at Rimac was clear: lead powertrain development for a scalable platform feeding the successor to the Bugatti Chiron. The car that became the Bugatti Tourbillon.
The program was called AXL_SC1. Three products derived from it. My team at peak: 120 engineers spanning procurement, manufacturing, industrialization, quality, and logistics across multiple countries. The customer was Bugatti.
We delivered. The Tourbillon exists. The BR1 powertrain inside it exists because of the work my team built from 2022, and continues to develop today.
On any objective measure: peak of a career.
A Blackout in Šibenik
I was working remotely. Dalmatian coast. The Adriatic in front of me, and on my screen: a powertrain for a car produced in a few hundred units, destined for buyers who could already afford anything.
The power went out.
Not just locally. A grid failure took out much of Dalmatia and into Bosnia. The screens went dark. The machine sounds stopped.
In that silence, a question formed without warning:
What am I actually building here? An expensive toy for people who already have everything.
I want to be precise about what that question was and what it was not. The engineering was extraordinary. The team was world-class. I am proud of the Tourbillon program without reservation. But the question was not about quality. It was about proximity.
A decade of increasing technical complexity. Increasing organizational scale. And a shrinking number of people actually served by the work. The most sophisticated vehicle I had ever touched was destined for fewer buyers than a single apartment building holds residents.
The question would not leave.
Thailand Changed the Variables
In 2025, during gardening leave from Rimac before joining Munich Electrification, I went to Thailand for Muay Thai training. Fourteen years of the sport, trained to instructor level at Master Toddy's Academy. A return to the source. I found something I had not planned to find.
Surin Beach, Phuket. A coffee truck. A Suzuki Samurai, converted. Two women running it with the ease of people who genuinely love what they are doing. Cold brew, espresso, coffee that had no business being this good in a vehicle this old and this perfectly placed.
I stood there longer than expected.
The coffee was good. But what stopped me was not the coffee. It was the whole picture. The vehicle. The location. The directness of it. Two people, a truck, a product, and a place worth going to. No organization chart. No stakeholder matrix. No intermediary between the thing being made and the person receiving it.
I took out my phone and texted Vanessa.
"I want to do this. Our version. In Croatia."
Why Croatia. Why the Samurai.
Neither was a deliberate choice. Both were the only logical conclusions.
Vanessa and I built our lives in Zagreb during the Rimac years. Croatia became home the way a place becomes home when you choose it actively, not by default. Pag Island was already part of the geography we knew: limestone karst landscape, salt flats, the Bura wind off the mountains, the Adriatic in every direction. Roads that deserve something interesting being driven on them.
The audience we are building for already comes here. The 25-to-44-year-old who has worked through the specialty coffee scene in Vienna, Amsterdam, Munich, and Berlin, then drives through one of the most visually extraordinary coastlines in Europe and finds the same options available at any service station. The gap is not accidental. Nobody has solved the logistics of bringing serious equipment to serious locations.
The Suzuki Samurai solves it. It is a compact 4x4 designed for real terrain, not the soft-road styling of modern crossovers. Small, capable, honest, aged into the kind of cool that only comes from a thing being exactly what it is. A La Marzocco espresso machine inside a Samurai is not a design statement. It is the precise answer to a logistics problem: maximum refinement inside maximum raw capability.
That contrast is not for effect. It is the thing itself.
What Most People Get Wrong
People hear "project manager quits Bugatti to open a coffee bar" and read impulsiveness. A burnout call. Someone who snapped.
The opposite is true.
Everything that made the Bugatti program possible applies here. A decade of understanding how to engineer something correctly: the tolerances, the failure modes, the gap between what should work in theory and what actually works under real conditions. Those instincts transfer directly to building a mobile espresso setup that runs reliably in a Dalmatian summer with limestone dust on everything.
And the decade of telling the same story to Vanessa and friends, refining the same idea across cities and career phases, is exactly what a product development cycle looks like. Thailand was not the starting gun. It was the moment ten years of iteration found the right form.
What looks like impulse from the outside is usually preparation that did not announce itself.
The Practical Takeaway
Purpose does not come from the complexity of what you build. It comes from proximity to the person it serves.
I built a powertrain for a car that a few hundred people in the world will own. The engineering was harder than almost anything I have done. The satisfaction of delivering it was real. But the feeling I am after is simpler.
Hand someone a coffee. Watch their face change.
Cafe on the Roast is the intersection of a decade of engineering instinct and everything my parents modeled at a dinner table in Graz: a physiotherapist who understood the body as a system under load, and a leadership coach who understood the mind the same way. Both of them spent careers helping people reach something they could not reach alone. I absorbed that without knowing it.
We are in it now. Finding the right Samurai. Building the setup. Developing the coffee program. Documenting the entire process as the brand itself.
The Samurai won't be parked on a city high street. It will be perched somewhere on Pag Island with white stone and blue water and the Bura coming through, brewing something worth the drive.
That is the why. That has always been the why. Launching 2027.
Markus Reinprecht, Co-founder of Cafe on the Roast. Building a mobile specialty coffee bar in a Suzuki Samurai on Pag Island, Croatia, with Vanessa Reinprecht.
