Índice para May 2015 em Automobile

Trip Notes Eat at Big Woods Pizza Company in Nashville. Try its signature pizza: Italian sausage, roasted garlic, and Asiago and mozzarella cheeses over marinara sauce. Visit Indiana University Art Museum. Designed by architect I.M. Pei, the museum features works by Ansel Adams and Jackson Pollock. And admission is free. Go to Nick’s English Hut in Bloomington and play Sink the Biz, a drinking game that features a bucket full of beer and an empty glass, a winning combination as far as we’re concerned. SOUTHERN INDIANA Indiana isn’t known for top-notch driving routes, but if you head far enough south, you’ll stumble upon State Road 45 in picturesque Brown County. Between nearby Bloomington (home to Indiana University) and neighboring Nashville is a 25-mile section of State Road 45 carved out…

When the editors of Automobile proposed that I name the 25 greatest car designers of all time, it seemed like a rather simple task. But after the first few obvious names, it became apparent that selecting just a couple dozen people from the thousands who have practiced the craft over the past hundred-plus years was impossible. Bear in mind that few of them are or were individual practitioners. For the most part, when you name chief designers, you are in fact referring to quite large teams of talented and skilled people, many of whom worked at various times for two or more of the major groups. So this is not—cannot be—an exhaustive list. Rather it names designers whose work was highly influential on the industry or has been highly impressive to me…

America led the world in terms of production design from the 1930s on, but design idea leadership was clearly European and, more often than not, Italian. GIOVANNI SAVONUZZI 1911-1986 Nationality: Italian Decades active: 1930s-1970s Significant work: 1947 Cisitalia 202, Ghia Supersonic series, 1963 Chrysler Turbine car SAVONUZZI, a trained engineer with a fine eye for line, essentially established the “Italian line” in the postwar period with his Cisitalia coupes, featuring a hood line below the front fender peaks. He established postwar supremacy of Italian design through his few Cisitalia sports-racing cars. Those led to the Pininfarina Cisitalias, and his Ghia Supersonic series of coupes set a style for numerous derivatives, including the Volvo P1800 and the VW Karmann Ghia. He did some of the most extreme show cars of the…

Two recently retired design leaders were powerful influences in the industry and mentors to many of the best designers practicing today. BRUNO SACCO 1933- Nationality: German (Italian-born) Decades active: 1950s-1990s Significant work: 1989 Mercedes-Benz SL AS A CHILD, Sacco was enthralled by Germany’s Märklin electric trains. He decided early in his career, which began at Carrozzeria Ghia, that he wanted to work at Mercedes-Benz. Taken on by the venerable firm in the mid-1950s, he worked in research and engineering before taking over the design department. Considered by his peers as “the designer’s designer,” he oversaw the styling of all Mercedes-Benz production models, including the trucks that were the financial mainstay of the company. Like Earl, Pininfarina, and Bertone, he formed numerous highly successful designers who work all over the world…

It’s less than an hour into the Rolex 24 at Daytona International Speedway, and Brad Kettler already looks bored as he lounges on a cushioned bench in front of a fat-screen TV in the cab of an Audi Sport customer racing big rig filled with roughly $2 million in racing car parts. For the better part of three decades, Kettler served in the trenches, working as a mechanic, crew chief, race engineer, and technical director for teams that raced various Le Mans-winning Audi prototypes. But this year, he’s in charge of Audi Sport’s customer racing program, supporting a pair of privateer R8 LMS cars, and he doesn’t have anything to do unless something goes wrong. “At Le Mans, there’s no time to rest. It’s all boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,”…

Car design before World War II was steeped in French culture. Designers all over the world, including Americans like Howard “Dutch” Darrin, benefited from the Parisian ambience. Nationality: French Decades active: 1910s-1940s Significant work: 1912 Turcat Méry, Chevalier René de Kny’s Panhard Ski, 1922 Hispano-Suiza Type H6B Ski􀀀 Torpedo JEAN-HENRI LABOURDETTE 1888-1972 IN THE BEGINNING quarter century of car building, no one really knew what an automobile ought to look like. Many were quite literally horseless carriages, and formal inspiration came from locomotives, ships, even houses. Labourdette, a master of horse-drawn vehicle design, created what might have well been the very first truly beautiful automobile in 1912: a “skif” body on a Panhard et Levassor sleeve-valve chassis. From his boat-related skifs, Labourdette went on to build some of the earliest…

England is the home of the most extreme styling variations in the automotive world. For every magnificent Jaguar XK-E hit, there are three or four equivalents to the Lea-Francis Lynx. For every Range Rover, there are dozens of Austin A-30 absurdities, taller than they are wide. SIR WILLIAM LYONS 1901-1985 Nationality: British Decades active: 1930s-1970s Significant work: 1935 SS Jaguar Airline Saloon, 1948 Jaguar XK120, 1968 Jaguar XJ6 sedan LYONS had an iron will, an iron fist, and a delicate aesthetic sensibility. That’s a hard-to-find mix of characteristics that served one Blackpool boy very well. Lyons worked essentially with a favored panelbeater who would make up full-size shapes in metal and put them together under Lyons’ direction. But the best Jaguar design ever, the E-type, was the work of aerodynamicist…

Modern designers enjoy less creative freedom than their predecessors. Blame crash regulations, focus groups, and a cutthroat business environment. But these names—not yet cast in stone—stand out. FREEMAN THOMAS 1957 – Nationality: American Decades active: 1980s-present Significant work: 1995 VW Concept One, 1995 Audi TT, 2005 Chrysler 300 ONE WAY of looking at Freeman Thomas’ work is to say that he is the industry’s leading cartoonist. His tiny of and sketches inspired the Audi TT, the VW New Beetle, and the Chrysler 300. Thomas’ first design job was at Porsche, a heady beginning for a young designer enamored of the brand. He has headed both the Chrysler Pacifica and the Ford Motor Company advanced design studio in his native California. RAUL PIRES JR. 1970- Nationality: Brazilian-Italian Decades active: 1990s-present Significant…

North America is Maserati’s largest market. How many cars did it sell here last year? 14,690. Marketwise, that’s microscopic. Yet for Maserati, that’s huge, representing a year-to-year sales increase of 110 percent. The man holding the Maserati trident is Harald Wester, the 56-yearold German who ran Ferrari’s R&D department before becoming boss of Alfa Romeo, Fiat Abarth, and Maserati. AM: Big sales boost last year. Is Ghibli turning more people on to the brand? HW: Just compare a brand like Maserati to something else that starts a bit below $70,000. Maserati is a real alternative, and if that’s not a temptation, what is one? AM: Elaborate, if you would. HW: Look at the impact, the elegance, the sound. Driving other cars is like wearing a uniform. Who cares? Nobody sees…

I WOULDN’T WANT TO BE IN A cult—who wants to teleport of to planet Amazia with 37 bald-headed Crocs wearers, anyway?—so why would I want to be in a cult car? Yet there I was, zinging through the gears of a 2015 Mitsubishi Evo MR, a turbocharged sports sedan that couldn’t scream “cult car” any louder if Eraserhead were driving it. And I got to thinking: Evo devotees love their rabid, all-wheel-drive pressure cookers, but why the cult label? At home, I carefully scanned the Evo options list: There is no “Pathological Narcissist Mode.” Turning to the Webster’s dictionary that I’m pretending to have, I note that certain uses of the word “cult” refer roughly to “something most people don’t like at all but a few people like a whole…

Car design changed from being an individual artisan’s craft to an industrial function at a fixed point: June 23, 1927. That was when chairman Alfred P. Sloan Jr. hired Hollywood custom car builder Harley J. Earl to create the General Motors Art and Colour department. GM was first, but every car manufacturing company today, every brand, has in-house design capability, altogether employing thousands who can properly call themselves “car designers.” Over the decades, tools and methods have changed, but the premise remains the same as Sloan and Earl had concluded: A company can sell more cars if it makes them better-looking. 1893-1969 HARLEY J. EARL Nationality: American Decades active: 1910s-1950s Significant work: 1938 Buick Y-Job and 1951 General Motors Le Sabre concepts EARL WAS the first of all of today’s…

The Austro-Hungarian Empire produced many legendary engineers—Ferdinand Porsche and Hans Ledwinka among them—but just one world-class body designer, Austria’s own Erwin Komenda. ERWIN KOMENDA 1904-1966 Nationality: Austrian Decades active: 1920s-1960s Significant work: 1938 Volkswagen Berlin-Rome racer, 1947 Cisitalia GP, 1948 Porsche 356 SAY WHAT YOU will about the highly profitable truck and sedan maker that is Porsche today, the cars that made the firm’s reputation were all shaped by just one man. The company’s revisionist story line attributes the legendary 911 model, now in its 51st year of continuous production, to a grandson of the founder, equally legendary Ferdinand Porsche, but the iconic aerodynamic shapes of the first production Porsche road cars, the 356 series, and of the following 911s all came from the mind and hand of Komenda. He…

1979 Porsche 911SC: SOLD AT $25,300 S/N 9119200749 LIGHT METALLIC BLUE over black sport interior. 172-hp, DOHC 3.0-liter, fat-six; five-speed manual. Sunroof, air-conditioning, Fuchs wheels. Optional chin spoiler, foglights, and Turbo-type rear spoiler. Good paint, trim, and detailing; nice interior. Signs of wear are visible on most surfaces. Overall, a used Porsche. Some say the three scariest words in the English language are “Porsche at auction.” But with Porsche 911 prices dramatically on the rise over the last three years, can you pay too much? Yes, you can. Buy on condition, not price, as necessary improvements can be expensive. As a result, a car priced $10,000 higher can easily be the beter buy. This example was a bit high for its present state, but a nicer one could demand much…