The Italian Jobs Part 4: Saved From the Crusher

The car pictured below is yet another Corvette (sort of) in our series of Corvettes bodied in Europe, and joins the Kelly Corvette in our pantheon of annoyingly desirable Chevies.  But it was denied Corvette status for awhile owing to the fact that it's kind of un-Corvettelike in some departments like the body (built of steel by Pininfarina in Italy) and engine type (it's a two-rotor Wankel built under NSU patents by GM) as well as engine placement (close to the middle of the chassis).  Oh, and the whole assemblage is built on a Porsche chassis; almost forgot to mention that…

Anyway, in a spasm of Revisionist History at GM about a a third of a century ago, it was decided that XP-897GT was an inconvenient reminder of GM's expensive experiment with rotary engines just before the first fuel crisis, and should be sent to the crusher.  Fortunately, a future Jaguar design chief named Geoff Lawson was working at GM's Bedford Truck Division in Luton, England when the order came through to crush a steel-bodied Corvette. He called his friend, automotive historian Tom Falconer, who was able to arrange a meeting in Detroit with Chuck Jordan, then the GM styling chief and someone Falconer had previously encountered during a book project.  And so the unique Corvette two-rotor was spared from the crusher…

The car had been produced in a 6-month crash program to demonstrate GM's new rotary engine concept, and the engine was transversely mounted ahead of the rear wheels, and driving them through a prototype automatic transmission being developed for the forthcoming X-body cars like the (pretty forgettable) Chevy Citation.  Owing to the short development time, GM decided to build the car on a modified Porsche 914-6 chassis, which offered a couple of advantages beyond saving time, like sturdiness and great brakes.  Pininfarina, which had been trying for years to get more special projects from GM, built the body.  The car was finished in April 1972 and displayed at car shows the next year.  Like the Avanti featured in an earlier post, the XP-897 probably owes a lot of its visual freshness to the collapsed schedule.  The overall forms are clean, spare, easy to read, and mostly reinforced by unfussy attention to detail.  Tom Falconer still has the car, has repainted it in its original shade of red, and replaced the unobtainable GM two-rotor engine with a Mazda 13B rotary driving through a Cadillac transmission.  Corvette enthusiasts voyaging to the Mother Country still knock on his door to see it...

And XP-897 had offspring of a sort.  Apparently GM's Opel Division in Germany was two years late in getting the memo about abandoning the rotary engine, and designed its own mid-engine GT-W around a rotary (the "W" is for Wankel).  After rotary engine development was halted, the Wankel was replaced by a 6 liter V8.  Also called the Geneve (it was displayed at Geneva), the Opel GT-W features concealed headlights, eliminating the one distracting feature on XP-897 (those deep light tunnels) and deftly integrates the gill-like vents for the front-mounted radiator with a tidy attempt at a 5 mph bumper (remember, it's 1975).  Not sure if Pininfarina built this one, but there are clear references to other Italian designs, like the dropped window sill and belt line crease echoing Giugiaro's seminal Mangusta of nearly a decade earlier.  At the rear, the Geneve was even cleaner than XP-897; it seems like nothing could be subtracted or should be added…

If there's a lesson in Geoff Lawson's refusal to crush XP-897, or in Opel's not noticing (or pretending not to notice) that their Wankel car project had been cancelled, it may be that it's a good idea to cheerfully ignore stupid orders.  History may thank you someday...

Photo credits:

Top:  General Motors

2nd:  General Motors, reprinted in corvettes.nl

3rd:  General Motors

4th:  General Motors

The Italian Jobs Part 3: Another Eurovision Corvette, or Maybe Two

It's late 1962, and you're Battista Pininfarina.  You'd like to get some more design work from the Americans, to follow up on those Nashes (including the Healeys) you did in the early 50s and the Cadillac Broughams you built for GM in '59 and '60.  You've just seen previews of the new Corvette Sting Ray, and while you think it's okay, you also think you can do better.  So you persuade GM's head of styling, Bill Mitchell, to send you a new Sting Ray chassis and you assign the job to a young American on your staff, Tom Tjaarda.  This blue car is what he sketches out for you.  It makes its debut at the 1963 Paris show as the Corvette Rondine.

And while the car attracts respectful and sometimes admiring attention on the show circuit (especially after the reverse-slope backlight and raised deck shown below are replaced with the more harmonious window and deck shown above), it does not result in any new jobs from GM for PF...at least, not in the decade we're talking about.  So what do you do?  

Well, you have an assignment from Fiat to design a body for the upcoming 124 Spider.  And you give that project to young Tjaarda as well, and sure enough, when the Spider takes its bow in 1966 it features the same belt line crease kicking up to form a rear fender ridge, the same handling of the volumes formed by the trunk and rear fenders, and also a split rear bumper.  This Fiat becomes the longest-lived of any PF design except for the Alfa Romeo Duetto which appears earlier in the same year…

So maybe, you're thinking, it's time for PF to give the big six-cylinder Alfa 2600 a new lease on life as well.  So you ask for some fresh thinking from Tjaarda and his co-workers in the studio.  And they come up with something sleek and shapely, first as a spider…

And later as a glassy coupe…

But observant types, especially the ones who write for car magazines and maybe also the ones who run Alfa Romeo, notice how this car looks like nothing much more than an elongated and cleaned-up Sting Ray…

…reconfigured for a European tour after hanging out in the World of Tomorrow, with the faux air vents scraped off, the fender-top blisters smoothed and blended back into the fender sections, and with the knock-off alloy wheels replaced by simple perforated Alfa discs.  But still with the strong horizontal crease enveloping the whole car, with flip-up headlight doors like the Rondine (on the Sting Ray the whole light units flip) and with split bumpers like the GM design.  Because you're Pininfarina you never miss anything, and you've seen that horizontal plane dividing upper and lower body volumes earlier on the original Corvair, a design which Europeans will take even longer to get over than they do this Corvette.  But that's a story for another day…

Photo Credits:

Color shots of 1963 Corvette Rondine:  wikipedia

Black & white Rondine:  Pininfarina

Fiat 124 Spider:  imcdb.org

1963 Alfa Romeo 2600 Pininfarina Spider:  carbuildindex.com

Alfa Romeo 2600 PF Coupe:  Pininfarina

1963 Corvette Sting Ray:  General Motors

The Italian Jobs Part 2: The Kelly Corvette Was the First Postmodern Car

By 1961, there had already been an example or two of what we'd call "retro cars" today, like the 1956 La Salle show cars from GM, designed to recall the flamboyant designs of the 1930s. Some British manufacturers were still making designs from the 1940s (the Morris Minor) or the 1930s (the Morgan) but these weren't retro cars, and there wasn't anything postmodern about them. They were just obsolete designs made with old tooling.  The postmodern attitude goes beyond mere nostalgia for the long ago; it asks us to look at familiar forms and patterns with new eyes, and allows us to appreciate things which may be too new for nostalgia, but perhaps are just old enough to be out of fashion.  At the Paris Auto Show in 1961, crowds were stunned by the appearance of the Kelly Corvette on the stand of renowned coach builder Vignale.  But, appearances to the contrary, while the car was indeed a material product of Alfredo Vignale's workshops, all of its design, from overall concept to the tiniest obsessive detail, came from Wisconsin.  In 1960, an industrial designer named Gordon Kelly, whose day job was at Brooks Stevens Associates in Milwaukee (and whose customers included Studebaker and Kaiser Willys), bought a new Corvette and designed a body which signaled the arrival of the postmodern car, nearly 30 years before Mazda gave us the Miata, and 35 years in advance of Audi's TT.  The freshness and bold simplicity of the resulting design, which still startles onlookers, may owe its origin to the fact that this was not a project for a client; from the outset it was to be Gordon Kelly's personal car.

It was clear to many observers, including to this writer, then sketching cars at the back of 6th grade social studies class, that Kelly's real inspiration, his point of departure, had been the Ferrari coupes penned by Giovanni Michelotti and built by Vignale in 1951-52.  And it seemed that the motivation behind this was not nostalgia, but genuine admiration for the best aspects of those Ferraris.  As evidence, I'd cite the fact that by 1960, the Vignale Ferraris were mostly forgotten, tired used cars, and Kelly could have bought one for $4k to $6k, expensive but much less than he spent on this Corvette.  And I'd note that in his design, Kelly doubled down on the signature features of the Vignale designs.  These include the pronounced curvature of the unadorned surfaces, the sense in which the exterior skin is tightly stretched over the structure and machinery, and the emphasis on the wheels as a design element, which is aided by placement of the wheels unusually close to the edges of the car in both plan and side elevation.  And of course, by selecting Vignale to build the car, Kelly insured that the ideas in his drawings and model would find a sensitive expression in metal...

The front view shows how the grille opening echoes the egg crate oval of the Ferrari; at the same time the shape is modernized by having its boundaries follow a simple section through the bodywork.  Note also that at this point, the section through the forward part of the hood is a simple oval.  Unlike Vignale's Ferrari 340 and 225 shown below, the fenders do not project above the hood line. At the A-pillar, Kelly's windshield more nearly fills the arc of the roof, and the side windows are a glassier interpretation of those on the Ferrari.  The profile of the car on the wall underlines the purity of those curves.

Moving around to the rear, we can see that Kelly has emphasized the roundness and unity of form by erasing the boundary between the roof forms and rear fender forms.  Instead of the roof and fender following stacked ovoid sections as on the blue Ferrari 212, here Kelly merges the two forms, and links the front and rear wheels with a crease which fades aft of the wheels.  This detail, along with the long wheelbase / short overhang proportions, anticipates the work of Nissan's and Audi's design studios forty years later.  It's as if Gordon Kelly has found a hole in the space / time continuum and calmly walked through it.  Other features show a straightforward practicality; the substitution of the glassy hatch for the small trunk lid, and the tidy recesses for the trunk latch, license plate and tail lights are simple and sufficient.  The 8-lug wheels express finned alloy brake drums (obsolete even in '61 but pretty).  The black rubber shapes which form bumpers replaced the bright metal exhaust outlets which doubled as bumpers when Kelly first showed the car. Happy with his handiwork (and Vignale's), Gordon Kelly kept this car for the rest of his life...

When I was a 12 year-old aspiring designer who had just read Raymond Loewy's book, I ranked early 50s Vignale Ferraris with Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water as nearly perfect man-made things.  Tiny, lightweight and simple, their design attitude seemed to say, "We don't have time for styling; we're going racing."  But Gordon Kelly showed how seeming perfection could be used as a springboard for new explorations.  In his obsessive pursuit of his dream, he found the benefits of the quest embodied in Loewy's dictum: never leave well enough alone.

For a video drive in the Kelly Corvette, go to:

http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/classic-cars/videos/a28127/coachbuilt-corvette-is-like-driving-a-van-gogh-work-of-art/

Photo Credits:

Top:  Corbin Snyder Photography / corbinsnyder.com  

Note:  Mr. Snyder did the photos for a forthcoming book on the Kelly Corvette entitled "Driven by a Dream."

2nd:  Vignale

3rd (340 MM coupe) & 4th (225 coupe):  the author 

5th:  coachbuild.com

6th: the author

Bottom:  tabloidcar.com

The Italian Jobs: Corvettes in Italian Suits

This is the first in a series on cars most people have never heard about: Chevrolet Corvettes that were bodied in Europe (mostly Italy).  These cars, a tiny minority of the nearly 1.6 million Corvettes produced from the first year (1953, when Chevy managed to sell only 300) through 2015, are a subset of yet another exclusive category…that being Corvettes with metal bodies. Our first example was actually built in Switzerland by Ghia Aigle, an offshoot of the better-known Torinese Ghia.  For a good while before WWII and afterwards as well, Switzerland offered duty-free imports of foreign chassis as long as they were bodied by a Swiss coach builder.  The subject car is a rebodied '54 Corvette, meaning it has the unloved Blue Flame Six under that scooped and streaked hood, and was featured as shown (hmm, salmon pink with gray accents and orange interior) at the 1957 Geneva show.  Giovanni Michelotti gets most of the credit (and blame, too) for the design.  One can only dimly imagine the design brief, maybe something along the lines of, "My wife doesn't know that I blew our new car budget on a used Corvette, so please disguise it as a '56 Plymouth Savoy business coupe…"

Later on, this alloy-bodied car was updated (by Michelotti again) with radiused rear wheel cutouts and a "fin delete" package.  With the added vent panes and reworked metal in the front fenders it almost seems a different car, but the records say there's only one.  It looks better in silver gray (a bit like a giant Triumph Italia, no coincidence), but apparently the remodel did not extend to plunking a small block Chevy V8 in place of the anemic Blue Flame...

Lack of power is not a problem with our next examples.  These are the three 1959 Corvettes bodied at the request of Texas racers by Scaglietti, the same outfit that built many of the legendary Ferrari road racing cars in the 50s and 60s.  Gary Laughlin, Jim Hall (later of Chaparral fame) and Carroll Shelby wanted something lighter than a stock Corvette, but with the Chevy's cheap, reliable power.  As the resulting alloy-bodied cars were to be raced against Ferraris (see last photo) in the SCCA, Old Man Ferrari made his unhappiness known to Scaglietti, and the cars took over 2 years to deliver.  When you compare them with the Ferrari 250 GT Tour de France in the last photo, you'll see that none of the draftsmen at Scaglietti had to put in much overtime scheming up new ideas.  They are pretty, though…And one happy aspect of the Italians pulling the plug on this operation is that it may have led, however indirectly, to Shelby shoehorning a Ford V8 into the lovely lightweight AC Ace roadster to make the Cobra.   

Photo credits from top:

Top & 2nd:  corvettes.nl

3rd:  corvetteblogger.com

4th & 6th:  conceptcarz.com

5th:  petersen.org 

They Don't Build 'Em Like They Used To...

That would apparently apply to car industry execs as well as cars.  The more I reviewed the Studebaker story, the more I was struck by what an extraordinary guy Sherwood Harry Egbert was.  The Studebaker board of directors, wanting to diversify and nudge the company out of the car business, picked the 40-year old McCulloch (industrial engines) exec for the job early in 1961, thinking that someone from outside the car industry would be ideal.  And Egbert had a track record of getting results.  After 2 years of junior college, he'd worked construction pre-war and taken on managing a crew of 800 to build a plant for Boeing, then won a Bronze Star with the Marines in the South Pacific during the war.  When he got to Studebaker, he studied the car operation and fell in love with it, moving his wife and 5 sons to the lodge at Studebaker proving grounds near South Bend (that hedge spelling "Studebaker" in the aerial shot isn't a hedge…it's 5,000 pine trees).  Within 18 months of taking the job, he had:

1.)  Spearheaded the redesign of the Hawk, contracting it to Brooks Stevens Associates, and gotten the redesigned and retooled car into production within 10 months.

2.)  Brainstormed with engineers and Loewy's Avanti design team* in a crash program to create a distinctively new performance car, and gotten it into production in about the time it takes General Motors to introduce new Chevy paint options (or discover an ignition switch failure and then cover it up).  Egbert's hands-on approach out at the proving grounds had real results:  The reason some of the switchgear is above the windshield header is that Egbert, a pilot, liked it there. And the one design flaw the car shares with the E-type Jag (a too-vertical windshield angle) is that way because Egbert bumped his head getting in and out of the prototype...

3.)  Subcontracted redesign of the bread-and-butter car, the Lark, to Brooks Stevens and gotten that extensively revised body design into production by summer of 1963.

These initiatives involved epic battles with the Studebaker board, and the fight took its toll on Egbert's health.  The directors proved that their hearts were firmly lodged in the same oblivion as their heads by firing Egbert as he was recovering from cancer surgery, on November 24, 1963. Egbert went on to found an industrial consulting firm in LA, and died at 49 in 1969.

*For a more detailed discussion of the Avanti, see "Lines of Influence",
the post from 2/17/16.


Photo credits from top:
1.)  South Bend Tribune
2.)  Wikipedia
3.)  Autoweek
4.)  carstyling.ru
5.)  Raymond Loewy as published
on theavanti.net

Roadside Attraction: Clifton's Cabinet of Curiosities

Clifton's was a project initiated in 1931 by an eccentric millionaire named Clifford Clinton (Clifton was a contraction of those names) and eventually became a chain of 8 cafeteria-style restaurants, each with its own theme, serving Californians during the darkest days of the Great Depression. The second facility, known as Clifton's Brookdale but now renamed Clifton's Cabinet of Curiosities, opened in 1935.  That construction interval says something about the scope of the project. Clifton's occupied 5 floors of a new building, and was designed as a destination restaurant.  It was also the largest cafeteria-style restaurant on the planet.  But unlike today's destination restaurants, Clifton's had no fixed prices, just a policy of letting clients pay what they could afford.  It shared this philosophy with the other restaurants in the Clifton's chain, which featured neon signs urging customers to "Pay What You Wish"; no one seeking a meal was turned away.  At the height of the Brookdale Clifton's 75-year run, it served 15,000 customers a day.  But surprisingly, this mission did not result in austere, Soviet-style architecture.  Clifton's was a predictor of both Disneyland and Las Vegas.  Among the restored features you'll find inside are murals of wild and scenic California, nature dioramas, stuffed wildlife including a lion, plaster of Paris mountains, a faux redwood tree four stories tall, a bar counter impacted by a bronze meteorite, and a floor with fossilized dinosaur eggs.  Viewed against the current vogue for spare, clean-lined Mid-Century Modern, Clifton's may seem like over-the-top kitsch, but let's remember that when it opened, average families could not afford travel, and many considered themselves lucky to afford food.  Fully 80% of home mortgages were under water during the Great Depression's deepest abyss.  Clifton's Brookdale kept its doors open for 75 years, closing in 2010, by which time it was serving around 2,000 Los Angelenos a day.  It was the last surviving link in the Clifton's chain...

Clifton's was purchased in 2010 by developer Andrew Meieran, someone with large ambitions and deep enough pockets to fund a 5-year restoration (that's right; it took 2 years longer to restore than it took to build) and the restaurant occupies four floors of the building, as it did in its heyday.  Some serving areas, including the bakery, were open during the long renovation process.  The new chef, Jason Fullilove (you cannot make this stuff up), a graduate of a trendy haute cuisine outfit in Malibu, found a file with original recipes, and has revived some of them, including the famous Clifton's Jello.  The "pay only what you can" policy is gone, but one policy which has been made a permanent fixture is the requirement to choose 10% of all hires from graduates of local shelters for survivors of abuse and homelessness.  And there have been a lot of hires; Clifton's 5th floor kitchen occupies ten thousand square feet and employs 50 cooks.

Photo credits:

Top:   thirstyinla.com

2nd:   ladowntownnews.com

3rd:    lamag.com

Bottom:  urbandaddy.com

Lines of Influence Part 2: Avanti Antecedents

As outlined in yesterday's post, a crack team of industrial designers managed to get a new car from clay model to drivable test cars for the NYC Auto Show in a year.  This effort is even more remarkable when considering the coordination required to acquire tooling, fabricate molds for fiberglass bodies, and line up suppliers for the myriad components that go into a car.  What Studebaker had as a starting point was a sturdy and reliable V8 which could form the basis of a performance car.  And what Raymond Loewy had was a collection of notions about where car design might be headed, notions he had explored in two previous concept cars which he'd also used as daily drivers to evaluate ideas.  Some of these ideas appeared in the first sketches produced by the sequestered Palm Springs design team in 1961.  The first obvious source of ideas was a special BMW 507 coupe bodied to Loewy's design by tiny French coach builder Pichon et Parat in 1957.

Cars did not look like this in 1957.  Among the ideas which appeared 5 years later on the Avanti are the bumper which surmounts a simple, curved air intake and the asymmetrical raised portion of the hood which houses the logo (in the case the blue and white BMW roundel).  The oblong headlight units were prototypes made available by Sylvania and were not approved for use on US highways; on the 1964 version of the Avanti (roughly the last 800 cars built) and on the later Avanti II a similar effect was achieved by placing an oblong frame with glass covers over conventional round headlight units.  Here the arc of the fenders over the front wheels flows down and over the bumper / grille assembly, providing continuity of form.   This car might have been a bit happier with concealed headlights, especially as these units were illegal anyway...

In both views of this car, it's easy to see the genesis of the horizontal crease linking the front and rear wheelhouses.  On this BMW, however, it arcs over the rear wheels and wraps around the tail, linking the curved wheel arches to the echoing wrap of the rear window.  As on the Avanti, the body wraps tightly around the wheels, and the wheel openings are not concentric with the wheels. But here the thrust of the openings is forward rather than rearward.  Two features clearly visible here did not make it onto the Avanti.  One is the pronounced wrap of the door openings into the roof, designed to ease entry into the low cockpit.  The wrap-over doors did appear, however, on the Corvette Sting Ray coupe for 1963.  The other is the sharp ridge formed at the junction of the upper and lower rear fender surfaces.  Richard Teague employed this sine wave / ridge combo on the early 70s AMX3 show cars for American Motors.  In its uninhibited curvilinear exuberance, Loewy's futurist design also looks backward, to the teardrop coupes designed for Talbot Lago chassis by Joseph Figoni in the late 1930s.  Raymond Loewy was very much aware of those cars…

In 1959 Loewy commissioned Motto of Turin to build his design for an aerodynamic coupe on a Lancia Flaminia chassis.  At least in its rear three-quarter view, it provided more links to the themes that were used in the Avanti.  Note the clean, tapered tail with short overhangs, blade-like bumper, horizontal tail lights and generously curved window.  The boundary layer airfoil above that window was an advanced feature, and only appeared on production cars much later. In this view, the Lancia Loraymo is a more restrained design than the BMW.  

From the front, an early attempt at energy-absorbing bumper grille unit with outrigger lights spoiled the effect...

Loewy, who never hesitated to experiment with new ideas, was equally ready to discard ineffective ones, and somehow never let go of a good idea.  It was this persistence in pursuit of lightness, safety and efficiency which was echoed in the title of his book, "Never Leave Well Enough Alone", and which led to consulting work for NASA as well as work on Air Force One.  It also seems to have infused the thinking behind Studebaker's last new production design, one which outlasted the company by a quarter century.

Photo credits:
BMW coupe and Lancia Loraymo:  Raymond Loewy Associates
1938 Talbot Lago teardrop coupe:  Stylepinner.com
Studebaker Avanti:  Studebaker Corporation