Ferrari F40 or Lamborghini Countach? Talking car design with legendary designer, Frank Stephenson

well welcome to a new harry's garage video and as you can tell this one's going to be a little bit different because in a moment frank stefferson is arriving now he is a car designer you might well know some of the cars he's done he's infamous in the industry i've known him for around 20 years and his cv includes cars like the bmw x5 and the new mini when he was at bmw he then moved over to ferrari maserati to be director luca monsemado got him in and he ferrari f430 was one of his the maserati mc12 i thought he did ferrari 599 but he's not on his cv i saw on wikipedia so i'm going to ask him about that one he then did a new fiat 500 he went over to fear to head up their creative design office and then moved to mclaren and there did i was there around for the launch of the 12c and also the mclaren p1 as many others mclarens as well now he's coming in the garage and i'm really quite excited about this one because we're going to just talk about car design today where it's heading electrification what's that going to do and just the way we seem to have this russian doll sort of syndrome that i just don't understand the chinese effect on design and i'm thinking of the bmw 4 series and that sort of thing but we're also going to discuss these two cars the ferrari f40 and my cuntache and just decide which is which i'm going to be in the cuntache corner and uh frank one of his hero cars is this ferrari f40 it's going to be great fun we borrowed this from the hairpin company so i'm very grateful to have this here he's arriving in a moment and i think this is going to be quite a lot of fun well fantastic here frank and i got you an f40 as well just to have a little poke around yeah it's a bit of eye candy harry i mean you don't really see an f40 every day do you like and you're quite keen on these aren't you i'm a designer i'm hugely keen on the f40 i think it's probably the i mean we we speak about it as being iconic i think it's legendary i mean it goes much further than just being like icon um it's it's a ferrari i mean it's a proper ferrari it's in the day you know it's still a bit raw and um you know there's there's not a lot of stuff done to the car to make it look beautiful it's just uh uh and in that sense it's a work of art because it's so purposeful it is extreme that's almost the thing i'm going to challenge you on this car from a fun point of view obviously i've owned the contact i've had this 10 years now this is 1987. that i think is 1987 this particular car and these were sort of out i remember this was the motor show car of london motor show 1987 and they said we didn't get that many people on the stanzas we normally get the crowds because they brought an f40 along and that was the star of the 1987 london motor show so they're just different cars so i did look at getting one of these um well many moons about 2005 i looked at them my difficulty with this car i always think i mean it is wild i cannot criticize it in any sort of way but basically it's a race car isn't it yeah i think it's got a lot of racing pedigree in the design but as you said they're both from the same era i mean 87 this came out in 87 that's an 87. um that this one was the star of the show i don't really i mean i i get it because you know ferrari has that kind of cachet to it yeah but at the same time i think they're in their in their own right both cars both cars that merit that kind of uh you know position in history and car design they're they're totally opposites which is interesting because they're both italian yeah you know and you recognize both they're not confusing for another car brand they're italian and as italian as it gets you know super extreme and super super racy also at the same time but one for me is versace and the other one maybe it's a little bit more i don't know armani or something it's a little bit tighter like in a suit the thing about contact is it was around for an awful long time so this was actually designed in 1970 71 gandini was actually sitting down and penning it yeah and it came out production form 74. so there is actually 12 years between the design of these two cars and yet we're still talking about them now aren't we we're still going well oh yeah i think probably in terms of sports cars the best representations of their age of that era because obviously yeah the 70s was when they made the big jump with the countach which by the way is interesting you know the where name i i do and you speak fluent italians are you probably there yeah but he's a little bit harder than that which is a dialect yeah turin dialect but it kind of i mean kuntak said properly obviously uh is is the same word as dale damn in english so uh when the engineers saw it obviously yeah that's a little pretty pretty cool stuff i say yeah you said it differently well i i put a at the end of it so it's pretty much it so it's not proper telling is it so how is it how do you say conscience yeah a little bit and you think the italian that's what italian that's how the the guys who worked on it were always right oh wait couldn't pronounce it from now on then oh you learned something okay yeah but and it's also betony versus pinotherina yes yeah and i always thought batoni were always a bit more edgy somehow kind of three and there was a fine uh yeah they had more fluid fluidity in their design language but i think um gandini and the guys who worked on this project uh basically it was it was almost an exercise in looking for a new language a new design language yeah i kind of think it's for me i i like the design it's that wedge look and it's crisp and hard and uh you know there's not a lot of transitions of one shape to another shape it's basically just a hard wedge pretty much and if you look at it you could almost think you could design the car by folding paper you know it's kind of like origami design where you start to fold paper you get hard edges but i tell you one thing harry if i had to wash both of these cars i'd have more fun washing the f40 than i would that couldn't touch i'd come out with a few slits it's industrial design it's more i mean it's almost going away from that beauty that that purity we had of all the cars in the 60s it was you know this is not sophia loren that that is tending towards sulfur and this is more brutal more hard edged and it's almost trying to make us great jones should we say absolutely yeah yeah it's definitely more aggressive and uh it's got a shock value to it immediate shock value this thing we look at it today we're still shocked and you know shock and awe but you imagine back in the day when somebody saw this after just having seen the mirror come out yeah this was kind of uh probably for them in that age thinking is this really a lamborghini and of course we've settled into it it's become known as lamborghini's new design language this is still current today in terms of how lamborghini treat their their design language um but everything evolves obviously the f-40s uh is probably not recognizable today to somebody who's looking at it for the first time as a child or something probably not today's of today's language but the kuntak has held held its ground i think in terms of design for a long long time the bit i can never get over is when i actually see the size of it the length it's way smaller than you imagine it yeah the size of a today's ford fiesta or actually a 911 is pretty um at 2.7 rs i was out with one the other day with this basically the same size yeah but you look at a fiesta and you've one glance and you've seen the car this car here in that small you know footprint that it has there's a lot going on that keeps your attention glued you're always finding something new on a on a car like this it's almost like you know 10 chapters it's not a short story but uh well the one i always love is this line here yes that is not a straight you think it's as blind but it flows up and down it flows over the top arch down the door comes back up it does absolutely love that it is but one of the things i kind of miss if i had but it wouldn't suit the car if i if i would have looked at this car my first impression was it doesn't have that typical coke bottle silhouette that a lot of cars do have just to accent the uh you know like the wheels are pushing out uh sideways out off the uh on the track so it's very straight along the side yes from the from this uh from the top view it's very straight you look at it from the side and you got that nice combination of a curve with a wedge i mean there's hardly any curvature in the from the front up to the top of the windscreen it's almost you know ruler straight edge straight so it's uh very linear in that sense very flat i mean typically you look at the ferrari roof line you see a lot of curvature here it's almost as flat you can make it flat as you get yeah yeah another one as an owner is the viewer i love i can't stand them with the wing now because you miss the design gandini's brilliance if you look down is this sort of arrowhead this sort of the way it does this yeah and you miss it all if you put the wing on it oh yeah yeah it's it's uh it's kind of like covering up uh the parts that like they do on modern motorcycles they cover up the uh the best parts yeah you kind of want to see the engine in here if you can actually look through it and see that's the one next time yeah polycarbonate when you move over to the f40 that's the bit that really gets me absolutely i mean that was probably they didn't think of it in that day it was it was probably complicated to figure out how to do it but they did do it with the uh the f40 a decade later almost let's go and have a look at sure yeah i'm i'm deeply jealous of this because it's i mean it's got such mechanicals to show off and yeah it was just brilliant yeah it was a great solution you got to get heat and that that's a lot of horsepower a lot of engine heat that gets built up there so ferrari came up with this brilliant concept of getting the air out and we call it heat soak because obviously you're in a stop lighter in some position where you're idling away and the heat still has to get out of it so it can just come straight out evacuate it that way but it's at speed it also flows directly out um i think yeah that's really i wouldn't say they missed a trick with the kuntak but i think this really really sets the f40 off i don't think is this the first time we've ever seen this like you had early ferrari testarossa and they had the carburetors did yeah the trumpet yeah yeah it's not the first time they exposed engines i mean properly exposed it uh probably not but the way they've actually treated it here where it actually looks like you know an element that they really want to show to the to the viewer because this is this let's face it it's the heart and soul of the car isn't it it's the twin turbo chargers it's ferrari everywhere uh magnesium bits and pieces you want to see the mechanical parts of this car that's really what it's all about yeah and the dump valve as well yeah yeah it's all on the show it's art on wheels and that's yes yeah and and regretfully these lexon covers here came out of the factory very clear like this which is fantastic yeah but with bit of use it's kind of like when your pipes turned blue gold purple these would turn a little bit hazy-ish yellow hazy-ish which which look good i love the look of that i mean it obviously it's wear and tear but it gives it that really you know yeah that used to look that this thing has been pushing the limits yeah and then because you there's this 1987 so then they started using was it ferrari 360 was the first to use a glass engine cover yeah 360 had it uh and where it was a bit flatter it wasn't yeah you know kind of kind of raised up like this it was a bit lower on the back so when you were designing f430 was it you're just going to do this did you try and enlarge it did you address the engine uh yeah well we had to put a lot more effort into designing the bits and pieces of the engine that you would actually see through there right because that was you don't need to make it in in plexiglas or uh polycarbonate or lexan whatever but because you're gonna put things on show then you have to be sure that the elements here it didn't really matter it's a racing engine it's beautiful as it is but as we got through different eras of design detail became much more important and things like that became even more critical even to the point where exhaust pipe finishes were important every little piece of the design becomes an element yeah and you try not to overcook it or overdo it but still everything is on on display so yeah with the 430 the engine bay treatment was a lot more a lot more effort gone into it i would say was there ever any conversation on doing on a ferrari 599 a sort of engine on shade well i would i mean you're right there harry one of my dreams is to get a car out that has the front engine or the front mid engine as the 591 was uh on display so why not do the same thing in the front of the car but you didn't it wasn't a chance to do it then it would never got discussed that's why it's it's the 599 probably isn't as sporty as as as that kind of car right would be that you would do it you would oh right you'd want if they that financial gta or something you'd want yeah if you get into a performance version where you maybe you know you're changing the design of the uh the bonnet and you're increasing the the naka duck as we call it the intakes on the front um then you could probably do it but as a normal serious vehicle it probably would have been too aggressive yeah it would have been on steroids that way we got to watch it in that segment yeah but what's interesting also i think harry about the two cars as you mentioned earlier the footprint of these two cars is actually a lot smaller than people normally would expect it to be when they see it live for the first time it really comes across as yeah it's very compact yeah yet it's the proportions which make this car because although it's you know it's not as low as the kuntak it's a little bit higher this one here but what really makes the the uh the size impression of this car is the rear end the width of it on on that small footprint that it does have yeah this is almost a presence isn't it yeah it's two meters wide in the back it's rare to see a car that has that that width to the back end and uh i always love this yeah just stunning i remember following a f50 round spar and i just just wanted to carry on for him from would you not harry i preferred this car not to have any mesh at all in the back imagine that yeah i mean why do you have the mesh yeah there's no reason for mesh i'll tell you what the reason for mesh is yeah why and i've always tried to fight any car that's had you know a design i've worked on where we've had mesh in the back i've tried to kill it simply because um you're blocking hot air the reason for the message to get hot air out so every little filament of that mesh is blocking air and you can gain a lot more square centimeters if you eliminate the mesh the only problem is marketing says well what if somebody comes along sticks their hand in there and burns their hand on the exhaust pipe or something but those are precisely the kind of people we have to eliminate from the gene pool because i would never put my hand inside yeah an area like that to try to protect something so yeah meshes are heat meshes and you didn't you made a point of that on the mclaren the p1 wasn't it because that was all yeah yeah i really fought to the end try to get the the marketing guys to to not force us to put mesh on but yeah obviously it's compromising yeah i don't want to go into too much detail on the design of the f40 because you're going to do a separate film on this for your channel sure frank stevenson yeah which you've got to watch i must say it's a fantastic detail in there particularly the one in the bmw uh four series i really enjoyed but yeah yeah you're very diplomatic yeah very good sometimes but i would say that it's weird it's bit ott isn't it or is it allowed no it's not ott i mean it's ott in the sense that yeah you don't see anything like this today but i'll tell you what ott is for me but they had a reason for doing it you remember the uh daytona charger yeah the uh super b oh that was crazy that was probably that was out there yeah yeah but the only reason it was up that high was not for aerodynamics it was because the tailgate had to open i don't know how old it was he had to keep raising it and finally they got the height right but it was only to be able to tell you that i didn't know it was just clean air it is clean air it's like an old can-am style car that had the wings weighted and things but but it is dramatic i think the they've done it really nicely here there's no reason for the height to be any higher than where it's at it works perfectly it's an amazing piece of design i mean it just comes straight out of the body side yeah in this car as opposed to the countach which is very straight down on the sides yeah this has got that sexy italian hips you know that coke bottle sweep to it it's an interesting way to look at the design because the fenders have just pulled straight out and they don't even meet the body sides which is kind of interesting because it allows the uh here yeah that's really clever that's f40 you look at that like you just need one little hint of a photograph and you know it's in f40 when you see that that's a bit that's a bit boring isn't it just a door like that i mean you know why they have an uplift door and you know yeah pizzazz about it but there's something about doing this with a wood girl that i yeah yeah and you don't even get a door handle on the inside you get that cord that's focused that's like how much light weight can we build into the car so there's no frivolities on this car does it oh i just noticed that is actually a point you've got the same door latch as a contact that's the same anchor point and if you look at where the door latch is height wise it's actually the same as it could right down there yeah it's uh interesting a lot of people when they close the door the f40 they push it in the wrong spot you need to push it on the bottom half of the door properly so oh there's a special way to open and close of contact awesome yeah yeah but yeah i'm sure that's identical all right yeah yeah i mean what other car out there that is in this price bracket where you get you pay more for less you know yeah that well i can't get over how stripped out it is because yeah my my issue with the f40 again is if i say uh to my wife i said god let's go out uh tonight let's take the f40 i'll just get a slap but i'd say i'll do that in the contact oh yeah all right then that noisy thing but if you would tolerate that well this is just well this is a bloke's car isn't it really yeah i mean the only i think the only special thing you can get with this car's air conditioning which it really needs well there's no radio in here this is this is more about the the fun driving there it's not about where you're going you know not your destination as they say right so in that sense if you're going to look for that visceral we call it oftentimes visceral experience yeah i just i mean this card does it for me it just uh yeah i want to check that door i'm sure that is the same latch on here we're not making your life very easy but having no light but uh it's the same one same supplier oh no this i think it is well it's covered up there but anyway the same thing there we are but there is a little bit more luxury going on in there i've got my cd changer and radio and i've got my air conditioning standard etc speakers speakers loads of speakers yeah lots of speakers sort of laid in there but yeah very different but a bit crude do you know that i missed that one off there yeah it's not on there yeah yeah so obviously still wind up windows though it looks more cozy more comfortable absolutely first impression is you're getting more for your money on this interior i think you you can be a bit bigger if you're an f40 owner i think there's a size limit on a contest yeah i mean look at the look at the roof how low it is compared to the f40 when you put the two together that you start seeing the differences in the proportions of the cars but that oh that's how you close a contact door you have to push if you if you try and close it on the top with the temptation here this is soft aluminium and you make it look pebble dash so you do it wavy but again here you see the the commonality that these two cars is the way they took air in this is very professional isn't it yeah look at the intake the knuckledups yeah and a lot of people think well that's just an interesting shape but there's actually a scientific reason for maximizing the amount of air going into an opening and it's the lack of drag isn't it as well i think from that isn't it yeah yeah it causes a bit of a pressure change too and so it pulls the air in very well the other lovely thing i think on the contest which isn't on their 40 is they painted them black i hate puntas in black because you miss all the details of where all the black is on the internet etc i mean i would only have a car in black if i didn't like the design of it because black will actually make the design look a little bit smaller more compact and it hides all that really nice sensual definition we tried to get into the surfaces but black is yeah it's one of those colors that uh for me if uh you're not proud of the car then you you should basically make it make it uh black i didn't know that yeah yeah yeah but uh one of the other cool things i think of this era which we don't see anymore regretfully we don't see any more of the pop-up headlights yeah and i always loved that because it gave such a nice finish to i mean they have their normal headlights but then the pop-up ones are very special yeah it just gives them eyes i think yeah it's just as good looking with the lights up or down but you know just give a uh how they've finished them yeah i'll show you the alarm in a minute because like that's very special as well how they did the flip up flips beautifully done the other reason why you should buy a contraction on an f40 is i can i can go over speed bumps and things like that i think you can get a lift system with these this is a good option i think yeah and i've got a proper boots as well and you know you've got some silly boot at the front again stuff wet in there and things like that yeah i've got a spare wheel yeah you're thinking negatively definitely have to travel light when you're going with an f40 well i look forward to your video because you'll tell me much more secrets yeah yeah this car is them i mean for me it's still amazing to see it i just love seeing that little bit of waviness to the surface because obviously they're you know the carbon fibers that's it that's one of the secrets you can uh notice in something like this which is on the contest engine lid as well actually i'll see the weave on that as well yeah but yeah i'm gonna move away from these because i'd love to talk about other things bigger picture design issues even those these are great fun to talk about yeah one of them i just want to go back to the 70s this time and just look at the crazy thing with the kuntas and the aspardas you you know this is a lamborghini even though they share nothing really on the design there's some wildness isn't there something else beyond the fact that it's got the same grille or something yeah you couldn't yeah you're absolutely right you nailed it there harry they're both lamborghinis and you know it right away but for me it's a little bit obvious why it's a lamborghini especially what makes the two of them connect um you don't get cars typically from this era with a lot of flat surfacing and this is about as flat as a pancake as it from a designer point of view it's about as flat as a pancake um whereas also on the kuntak you have you have that very planar design language and the one thing that really sets off these cars lamborghinis from other cars i think is the amount of in design we call it tumble home so i've talked about it before but it's that lean in of this angle here isn't it yeah and it's pretty extreme on a lamborghini the only way you can really do that comfortably is by bringing the waistline out so you're going to have to begin with a very very wide car so if you look at this car as a gt car it's it's wide it's low it's wide very flat and i think if you look at certain elements um i mean if you know the mirror you'll know that this section here right through the middle is very mirror-like they've only embellished it with this this fitting here finisher and they're giving a little bit more luxury maybe but the lamborghini this stands out with the kind of intakes they're still using for knuckle dots and also painted yeah yeah yeah it sets it off really well so it gives a bit more yeah it was typical in the day to paint things black to make it look a bit sportier i guess you could say um but it's definitely a lamborghini and from that era you know the the round headlights were a big thing everybody was doing it lamborghini did it in a very simple way i also love the way there is just no surround around these they just put the four headlights there just we want air so just no point blocking it off yeah and what's interesting is you don't have a grill on the car per se you know every manufacturer is out there trying their hardest yeah to establish a look with the grill of the car lamborghini said you know forget that we're just going to put a basic opening in the front of the car yeah to do the design yeah but it's maximized which is great because that's the way to make the uh the most intake possible is don't even worry about a grill so low and wide yeah black treatment means that this is a gt because there's no tumbleweed it's bolt upright etc we're here well it's very british also it's very proper yes make way make way we're coming through yeah yeah i i can never get over how many rolls right there is a statement it's funny this car looked enormous in its day and now oh yeah it's quite dainty doesn't it but yeah you know in in size and you know size of that it is it is a big car i mean even for the day it was long i mean the first thing you notice about it is the acropolis hanging off the front you know it's just uh do you need a girl to be like that yes um yeah it's it's uh it is quite something i yeah and just the amount it's one of those cars they just built up and they had no idea what it would weigh at the end of the day i don't think they cared just make the engine bigger exactly yeah it wasn't six and a bit later was it f7 yeah yeah was it it wasn't weight to performance it was just if it's if it's heavy let's just give it more horsepower or more power yeah absolutely so yeah and then well behind you the jaguar yeah coupe this is william lyon's car he had a very flowy knife he loved design as well and he always wanted to do a coupe version of the xj and there it is yeah um i mean that today is modern because you get rid of the b-pillar and that suddenly becomes a structural issue which i mean i wouldn't say the car is the safest car to flip over but at the same time they had the guts to do it and it and it stands out for the beauty of it and there's almost an italianness into this car i don't know maybe it's french also in a certain way but there's i mean lions and uh malcolm sayer yeah were geniuses both of them working together and i think uh they just came out with shapes from the 50s and 60s that were just mind-blowing for me still i still think it was a wonderful show when have you ever seen a door handle that elegant you know yeah no actually i would say the royals voice is quite nice it has a yeah it has a little tail handle yeah anything but they paid a lot of attention to the details they certainly did yeah but but is am i right and saying there was more freedom perhaps for be a car designer there was less legislation so i'm guessing yeah yeah it was a time to be a car would you yeah they were i mean designers you know through the era we've become more not dull but we've had to pay attention to regulations and things more which kind of puts a a restriction on how free and how daring you can be with your designs it's a bit of a shame but sometimes the challenge the fun part is that challenge of trying to find the solution it's not an obstacle it's not a problem it's just a challenge and in the days you know in the 60s and 50s it didn't matter and you could design whatever you dreamed of you could design it and uh that's when they were a lot more sculptural the designers were often trained in art institutes there wasn't really a design school to to go to study automotive design so they were basically just coming from the artistic profession and they were very sensitive to to that kind of surfacing and uh and beauty natural beauty yeah and who better than the italians yeah you know the cars showed it always annoyingly good at it weren't they but you it always used to get me that it was like a label with a pinaforina on a ferrari but i can remember when i first met you i think you'd just gone to ferrari maserati and designed crete and what was your title there can't remember creative director sorry concept director concept yeah director of design i spoke to luca montezuma about it and he was his take on it he says design is key to fry's king we have performance that we design we should be doing it more in-house it was his argument because it's our it's our crown jewels it's our dna was his reason for dropping pinaforina well yeah i'm bringing it in-house yeah that's that's definitely part of the answer the other part of the answer was that pininfarina i think was getting spread a little bit too too thin in that that time period in the night late 90s early 2000s it was getting so many food was gaining a lot of contracts from around the world to do it and it wasn't that they let go obviously ferrari was the crown jewel for them to be able to say we we designed ferraris but the effort was starting to get sidetracked a little bit you know their design teams were working on a lot of different products and projects and so what happened was i think the quality level started to slip a little bit especially what montezuma told me was more worried about the interior design and you know ferraris have always been the car to have but the quality wasn't always the best and um you know you had to be hopeful that your car wasn't built on friday or monday i guess but at the same time if you got a good one it was a great design performance wise and everything but there was a slippage that most people that know ferrari deeply could say yeah that's probably the case that was starting to worry montezuma a little bit which was the one that did that because i would have thought 550 was all right and then before the 550 perhaps i think i mean there were cars in the 90s that weren't put together very well i don't want to single out them because the owners might say oh yeah okay but at the same time i think uh there was a bit of slippage there and he it wasn't like he wanted to bring design totally in-house at that stage it has become like that but he needed somebody within within the mark within the brand to be able to tell peony because they were basically having to accept pinning farina designs without anybody really particularly able to argue against you know from a design background you know try this do that oh okay and although montezuma you know uh likes art likes design and all that he doesn't have that that last little bit of finesse and detail that designers are trained for yeah and so uh he wanted somebody on his side i guess you could say okay that represented the brands so when you were there right we know the cars that really have your name stamped on it yeah mc12 obviously uh f430 599 um the super america when i worked with uh yeah that was 575. sorry the 575 super america where we did the roof yeah yeah yeah that was uh yeah the 599 was working with pinion farina and we had the new concept on the c-pillar which worked really well jason castrato was working on that um incredible designer young guy that didn't even need to fit he's one of those kind of students that why do i need to finish my four years i can just start working right now so you started as a intern student or i just wanted to he didn't do great uh gran turismo did he was that wasn't yes he did yeah so that's he was stunning oh yeah absolutely stunning he's working now i think he's a head of ford concept in detroit or in california not sure but he's doing very well he's moved on done some other things on his own but now he's in that position so yeah he's done he's worked with saab i don't know if you know the concept card that they did um but yeah so the 599 was an interesting uh new direction obviously when we first did it it was i mean we thought the uh the 612 was huge because that was when i first started um and that is obviously the the largest ferrari i think that we've ferrari's ever built and that's strange flanks it had doesn't it so in a curve a difference getting used to it yeah yeah but um then the 599 came out and and from a visual point of view the 599 was something like an american supercar you know huge yes wasn't as big but it did have that size impression to it that most of the time you couldn't recognize a ferrari being like that that was just another almost further reiteration of how far can you take the ferrari design language they pulled back obviously from there f12 went smaller yeah they made it again we decided okay we're a little bit bigger than we should be at the moment we've got to get back in the gym and start working out again and by then you'd actually move to fiat aren't you yeah yeah that was one of the uh moments in my life where there's another i mean just going to ferrari was was incredible it was like you can't you can't ever even dream of being talking about working at a company like that you know it's as high as it gets it's it's where do you go from there um but yeah then going from i referred to as going from heaven to hell because fiat in 2000 mid-2000s were dire straits and you know they needed something really quick well you told me that montezuma called you who says we need to rescue fear that was yeah that was the basic wasn't it that well it was him saying you know it was a friday night i was flew not feeling very good but he told me on monday you're going to fiat and i don't ask questions so i thought i screwed up i thought i'd done something really bad and he was punishing me but it was mark keone that was just brought in and said look i know numbers i don't know much about design or engineering or anything like that but from the numbers we know that we're going to be tanking in 10 months if we don't have something out there that makes some money for us and so yes the 500 came out of that program there you must be pretty proud of the 500 though yeah i can't can't not be because basically it took fiat from the bootstraps and lift them up so make a impossible task to come out with something that could be that successful in 10 months oh it's unreal oh yeah it still is my daughter has one so i the only thing she's done extra to she's decorated the dash so it has a dual dash so yeah something that you couldn't get yeah it's very customized yeah but yeah so which which would you pick as your favorite from mini or uh v8500 which is all of those i would like to choose well i would pick a current fiat 500 a barth or 595 or something like that because it's just it's just a blast that car doesn't scare you i mean throw it grab it by the the neck and just throw it into corners and have a lot of fun with it um whereas the current mini i wouldn't do that with i wouldn't wouldn't trust myself or the car but the original mini when it came out in the cooper s version or the uh yeah it was it was unique i think they they hit it on the head right away with that first cooper s nice yeah i just love the way that yeah it was like a visor how far away the windscreen was with you and it was just a renovation yeah my wife said it was the best car in the world because she felt 10 years younger every time she got in it so uh that was isn't that what happened with the first original mini with people it was like the it car no matter where you where in life you found yourself you were you were in a mini and you were somebody yeah and you were liked but yeah they're both they both still look good today which is surprising so really great they kept kept their youth yeah there is a story about the exhaust on that original mini when you first showed it 2001 no thought had gone into it and there was a mad panic it was actually a beer can oh yeah yeah absolutely harry that was the the truth what happened was on the night before the presentation we were in a hole in the wall little shop where we were building making the full-size clay of the mini we finished on the thursday going into the friday around midnight so four modelers and myself and a head modeler and uh the car this was october 95 and we were looking at it and obviously five years before launch it was one of the 15 proposals for the 21st century mini and uh of course five years before you're thinking this looks pretty pretty pretty advanced a pretty science fiction for a new mini uh very futuristic yeah it was a long development cycle five years to get it on the road and i remember uh around midnight we'd finally wrapped it up the car was looking absolutely fabulous it looked real from you know 20 feet away or so you could say that's a that's a real car and so we were celebrating the modelers got some drinks in they started taking their shots and around 4 am they were completely wiped out and i had to get home because i still went you know six hours before the presentation so i had one last look around the car to make sure everything was stuck on properly and ready to go and i froze behind the car when i realized there's there wasn't an exhaust pipe on the car it had windscreen wipers door handles lug nuts everything you could imagine but it was missing an exhaust pipe and i kind of freaked out because i'm thinking i thought we thought of everything so i went up to colin the chief modeler and um this is funny because he was we were in munich and he's drinking uh beer but it wasn't german beer and i said colin look uh i've forgotten about the exhaust pipe we need to get one on really quick and he said well look it's just a car model it's only a clay model we don't really have to go that far i said no call us the original mini had this amazing exhaust pipe coming out the back of it we have to do something something to show that and he said well look it's they're they're on their backs they can't can't work they're completely out of it and i'm not going to start making a an exhaust pipe for you at 4 am as he takes another swig from his bud and i said okay i'll do it i took his budweiser can cut cut it in half threw away the top polished it off so you had this alloy looking bottom half of the can and took the the bottom out and so it had a hole in the bottom with that nice ribbed section there we shoved it in the clay and we started laughing our heads off because maybe we're slightly drunk but we're just thinking this is the most amazing looking exhaust pipe that we've ever seen so i said okay let's just leave it let's go into the show with this and so the next day the car went went through really well it was pretty unanimous and then uh chris bengal comes comes up and says frank uh this is gonna be great for your career congratulations way to go but never ever waste a modeler's time making such a detailed exhaust pipe so i thought the guy was on the lathe for i don't know six hours with a solid tube a lot of money for an exhaust pipe but of course i was too embarrassed to tell them you know a four-minute job that i would be with a beer can so i was yeah i kept it silent oh secrets out now yeah yeah something to see a lot more and then a couple years later obviously the supplier asked me how he wanted how i'd like the finisher to be and i gave him the beer can they replicated it and we had from 2000 to 2006 the mini cooper s no sorry the mini cooper yeah had that world exhaust pipe on the side that was basically it was a budweiser beer can yeah and i wasn't allowed to talk about it too much at that point one of the things i always think of electric cars you had these queues with normal engine cars we know it's performance cars it's got four exhaust pipes and things suddenly an electric car we don't know what to do do we so we've got a tesla model three that looks rubbish like a four-door saloon yeah does stupid you know north a hundred times in quarter miles yeah it's a it's a must be a dilemma for a designer well you know when you're designing normal cars it's not the most important thing probably but when you're designing high-end cars every sense of you needs to be touched i think when you're designing a supercar or hyper car so that you fall in love with it if it lacks if it lacks sound you know yeah that's one quality that you really like to work with on hyper cars um there's an emotional attachment a product the moment you start taking little things out like that it kind of demotionalizes the product and it's much harder to to really really love that love it as we say you know because love is five senses but but we're going down this road so from a car design point of view what what's your take on the future i don't like the future uh from a car point a car petrol head point of view um electrics makes it almost too easy and already we've been entering that with a lot of the aids driving aids which is safe i mean the whole direction of design in the world is always trying to make things safer than they are currently so you're always in that trend of trying to make something safer for the driver but it's nice to be able to switch it all off and uh and be you the person who's actually engaging the car to do what you wanted to do not the car controlling you it's all this thing about tesla you know level five driving i think gladly i think that it's not going to happen anytime soon level 5 is still pretty far off but just that shift that we're delicately moving into now with electric and hybrids is taking away it's making cars more similar i think in a certain way yes now it's nothing nothing incredible to go under two and a half seconds from zero to sixty percent so it's becoming less about you know that that single factor that makes a difference for us as petrol heads or drivers or enthusiasts and cars are becoming more more similar in that respect and i kind of miss that i i i'd love to know your views on it what i think is going to happen is there's going to be a real divergence going to happen in the next few years in the mobility will become what i the easiest way to explain white goods there will just be cars that do a job and they are allowed into inner cities etc but the toys that's why i have real confidence that these will be celebrated in years to come absolutely and design they will might rethink because we just we don't want to go any quicker and i think every quicker i think every performance maker is having scratching their head how can we make cars open without the marketing saying just add 10 percent yeah each year yeah i don't know if you're finding this no absolutely i mean there's really realistically unless you go to a track you're never going to reach the performance capabilities of a of most of the high-end supercars or hypercars unless you're a test driver or somebody like that but i think the enjoyment now has to be brought out in other parts of the car and that that part where you sort of disconnecting with the car is kind of painful for me to see at the moment i i kind of like i agree with you these cars are going to still have even more value in the future than they have at the moment so yeah um you know it's not like we're all old school and we just don't want the future to be different than it is today i think we have to accept that it is going to be different yet you want to hold on to what a car really means um you know for an enthusiast not for somebody who just wants to get from here to there because you want new you're a car designer so you want to pen more design yeah you want is anyone looking at um we hope lotus might if you like to bring it down do you think do you think the market can calm down the performance car makers or they all just locked into a thousand i mean i mean i i i think the fun part is not the horsepower part it's it's very much along the weight part right i think any anything we can develop in the future that reduces weight of components of structure panels whatever is going to make driving more fun again it's not horsepower anymore i think we've reached the part where it's you're driving dragsters on the road you know kind of thing it's just you know who goes from one stop light to the other in in that kind of acceleration uh but i i think the the the challenge for us as designers to make designs still as exciting as it is today even more exciting obviously and to maintain that brand appeal or your brand language but find ways of designing that that concentrate now on for example reducing the number of panels on a car you know we've got so many bits and pieces on cars less than before but still more pieces i think on a car than we really need and it's obviously okay it's cheaper to replace parts on a car like that but materials don't have to be as expensive as we think they are they can you know you can make things out of plastic that are a lot cheaper than other materials bioplastics also for example but i think if we can start to learn how to make cars in a different way and headlight and taillight technology is moving on all the time cameras are starting to work for us instead of rear view mirrors you know wheel design still has a long way to go because wheels are basically wheels that we've had since the old cart days with spokes there's a lot of different ways to to design a wheel they say don't re don't redesign the wheel but that's an easy excuse there are better ideas i think out there that we can use for wheels they've got to be round that's all right yeah but you can make a wheel a lot lighter than it is today and that's only a good thing for unsprung weight for example mass um but yeah there's a lot of a lot of active aero investigations going on now that mean that you don't have to put appendages all over the car yes uh the shape of the body can change it just takes uh plus and minus charges that speed tail is fascinating yeah the way the air moves it's a bit crude if you ever look at it very closely it's almost like with with a band saw like that and you hope like heck that you know after a thousand times it does it looks like crazy so it's like the galaxy folding phone and whether or not when he falls yeah who's to say i mean maybe it doesn't it doesn't happen i i don't know i don't want to you know say yes or no it's going to happen but at the same time active arrow or body shifting body morphing panels are interesting um i think we're going to be seeing very soon new directions in in color and material because oftentimes you'll buy a color a car in a safe color because it's a long term car that you're going to have for a few years so you don't want to be risky with the color yeah but who's to say we can't change the color of the car electronically like some things do so you can have your red car on monday blue car on tuesday yellow current wednesday yeah and legislation is important of course you have to get it past legislation but there are ways to do that too so interior interior uh design is going to change incredibly in the next decade i think because of the fact that we're going electronic with so many things and uh and you have that uh sort of vr effect uh inside of a car where things start floating instead of giving you sort of a 2d impression of displays right that can all be closer to you um i think voice activation is going to be a lot more present in the future because you don't want to i mean a lot of us like to turn knobs and things and it's a safe way obviously um but you can activate things through voice so a lot of it doesn't have to actually be manually done because well one of the cars that sort of impressed me recently is a step change it was actually ferrari aroma yeah just suddenly flowing beautiful no aggression to it different you know different tape from where we've seen the ferrari sf 90 etc but it's interior is very digital and ipad and i just wondered if that was a step too far yes i think so i i absolutely i just think well like this is the wrong i want that in the honda e but i'm not sure of actually one of them either on that no no no i think uh they've they've gone a step too far i think for me that kind of that's still not safe because you need to have feedback and you can't beat a knob the thing is with digital it's you have to really look and see it's between your finger in the right spot yeah whereas a button you know if it's a button to grab a button and especially the on off on the aroma i think they've really you need a button on a on a ferrari oh yeah or the start button yeah yeah i think so yeah well it's trying to predict the future is very hard yeah yeah it's i mean as designers were paid to predict the future but i don't think it's really predicting the future it's kind of so far out there anyways when you start designing a car you're pretty much thinking five years ahead more or less and then you're thinking three years ahead of that before they do the facelift so you're actually working i don't know seven eight years before that car actually comes out and we don't know what's going to be coming along i mean you have to stay on top of technology and innovation and all that customer tastes are pretty much you can't say what's what the customer is going to want in seven years so you almost have to force it on to them with an educated guess one thing taught me when i did the bit of consultancy for jack land rover is you've got to think globally and you can get in the uk you can get very focused on what's happening in parliament excellence in an eu banning this electorate in a city yeah and then you get america and then you get into the and then you get you know all sorts of different parts of the world who think in a different way yeah um argentina are they ever going to go all electric i don't think they're going to do that for many decades south america you can forget about it just yeah just so yeah i'm not saying it's right or wrong i just think petrol is definitely going to continue for a lot longer you don't think that's because governments say in 2013 it's all going to disappear no i i mean i wanna feel and hear that engine i just wish they would put more in research and and money into uh biofuels oh synthetic fuel yeah i think that's massive you know and then you can treat the emissions the way their their you know the world wants that to be but just to say we're going to go electric and if you think about it we all know that electric is not as clean as people think it is right and if we really want to make a push then i think the uh it provides a stop gap sort of solution electrics but i think high um hydrogen is probably the real step that we should be looking at for me a little bit after i left mclaren i started thinking you know there's got to be a better way or more efficient way and obviously we as enthusiasts still want that flexibility that a car gives us so um but the the obvious push now is to try to unclutter if you realize it only took 60 years from the beginning of the automobile to clutter up the highways in any significant way that it makes it hard to get from one place to the other so we have to find a solution pretty quickly to to reduce that and i think one of the trends right now it might be off topic a little bit but is we're going to go sky upwards you know into that yeah yeah and you've done that haven't you yeah it's very exciting yeah i mean if you're outside the industry the business you'll think well yeah hopefully in my lifetime but on the inside we know it's coming very very soon and it's going to shock a lot of people i think um obviously you need public acceptance and that might be harder with the older crowd with the younger crowd who are not so much into buying vehicles anymore you know it's more about the experience about not worrying about resale or service or anything like that short hops so city city or city to rural right this is a taxi you're not going to be driving this thing no no no no no no these are these have to be incredibly safe so they'll be flying low over towns they'll be landing on hotel rooftops parks where we have a small open space um and you can probably fit anywhere between five to ten people in one of these which makes it economically incredibly efficient because you're there's no infrastructure not building roads or anything like that just a landing port or a takeoff port you know we went from horses to cars it took a long time for people to feel comfortable going you know 50 miles an hour nowadays it's nothing but it's the same next step right thing that we're doing so that will leave more space for us to enjoy these toys then won't we i hope so we can go a little bit faster on the motorways yeah hopefully the limits change but um but yeah i mean i think what we're going to be seeing in the future is also some type of uh when you look at nature and you see how birds and fish can be so tightly packed and swarmed and maneuver in high volume and speed and it looks coordinated synchronized we still don't know how to explain that there's no scientist that's come up with a definitive answer of how nature does that i think it's just a sixth sense that we don't understand because it's hard to imagine that but they work such that the inside and the outside of the group are synced at the same moment in time and in space but if we can get that somehow can we translate that to automobiles and the cars can detect what's around them and know when to brake or when they can accelerate we can say suddenly cars are all going 70 miles an hour almost bumper to bumper you know and and that efficient flow that's sort of the point i was making that's my divergence so we're going to have that sort of transport and then this sort of transport i think the tricky bit for the legislators is how you mix the two isn't it well yeah that's you can't have stupid cars in smaller cars yeah a contest coming into that thing it doesn't really work i think the way you would do that is you would split the lanes you would have maybe two lanes dedicated to the smart cars right all right i'll have the two lasers they can all yeah this is what i enjoy and i love some of the cars you've put out there i can't say i can't wait to hear what you're going to say about the f40 as well but uh a fascinating insight into car design and where you're heading to the future into the sky and beyond yeah i didn't expect that at all so yeah well thanks ever so much for dropping by the garage look around i hope you'll come down yeah another time well i wouldn't call this a shop it's more like a candy store as i said when i first walked in yeah yeah it's all good fun that's what it's all about yeah absolutely so there you go i hope you've enjoyed this video as well if you have well keep watching keep subscribing more videos coming along very soon

Channel: Harry's garage

Views: 764,429

Keywords:

Id: 6Gdcp9HKJ6U

Length: 55min 10sec (3310 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/willy_p3te]

I mean, as cool as the Countach is - I'd take the F40 all day every day. The F40 seems to have nailed the more timeless design. Still looks sexy as hell to this day by any standard.

[u/chunguswholesum]

but the F40 is really fun to drive i've heard

countach is cool but its a horrible car

[u/Zenki2zenki]

If i recall correctly Frank Stephenson also has his own yt channel where he recently did a design breakdown of the new Maserati MC20 and the drama with the old maserati "boomerang" taillights.

[u/Galactivate11]

That's like trying to pick between your left nut and right nut. Gonna have to go Countach, but damn

[u/dfsaqwe]

testarossa

[u/matt2331]

Misread the title as Hoovie's Garage and was very confused and impressed for Tyler.

[u/Rickard0]

I will say Countach if they are going for design looks. If they are going for aerodynamic design then I can't say as I don't know the details.

[u/[deleted]]

On the side profile shot at 7:32 you can see how extremely pointy the rear of the Countach is. Looks ace!

[u/Clareth_GIF]

To me the Pininfarina story sounds like garbage. Pininfarina was doing amazing work for Ferrari. You mean to tell me Montemezolo had a problem with the 458's design?