Of all the interesting stumble-upons that we have, er, stumbled upon recently, we think this beautiful little set of drawings is up there with the best.
Published in France some time in the 1960 the book is a a nice example automotive art before the Apple Mac came and swept pen and crayon aside forever.
We haven’t been able to find much in the way of info about who author or publisher might be. Perhaps some of our readers who fetishise automotive ephemera might be able to help with that.
We reckon this pre-digital showcase of line and colour has a colourful vibrancy and fascinating appeal that is lacking in a lot of the contemporary stuff…
Did you play Top Trumps as a kid? And yes, I mean the car kind: was there any other? Of course you did. And the same instinct that lit your little heart when you saw you’d been dealt, say, the Cizeta with its unassailable sixteen cylinders makes the adult you want to own that car. Or, if you’ve grown up to be an automotive engineer, build something even badder.
Extreme cars, and especially those at the top end of their scale – the fastest, the most powerful, the most expensive – can also be absurd, flawed and pointless. Chasing one automotive superlative to the exclusion of all else can leave you with a car that’s virtually unusable, and there will almost always be a row over your claim to whatever title you’ve targeted. But there can be a benefit too; in the single-minded pursuit of top speed, say, we’ve learnt stuff about cooling and aerodynamic efficiency that will trickle own to cars we can all afford.
I’ve just driven an extreme machine. And for once, there isn’t a row about its main claim. The Bugatti Veyron Super Sports is the fastest production car in the world, and it has a certificate from the Guinness Book of Records to prove it. But the cynic in you will say it also puts a big tick in the absurd box. We’ve previously reported how the standard Veyron, with ‘just’ 1001PS, capable of ‘just’ 253 miles per hour, can’t actually do 253 miles in an hour because at that speed it will drain its tanks in about twelve minutes and fifty miles. The Super Sports can trump that. Customer’s cars will be electronically limited to 258mph, because if you started with a full tank of fuel and accelerated to the true, drag-limited v-max of 268mph the tyres would disintegrate before you needed to fill up; less than five minutes, Bugatti reckons, though nobody’s yet volunteered to find out. That’s assuming you’d found a 22-mile straight on which you could hold 268mph for five minutes, but the Volkswagen Group isn’t prepared to bet you can’t. Some billionaire owner might just build one.
But of our three failings that afflict extreme machines – absurd, flawed, pointless – the Veyron Super Sports doesn’t do too badly on the last two. It’s far from flawed. Its colossal 365-section rear tyres with their shallow 4mm tread depth mean you won’t want to do more than about 30mph through standing water. But otherwise, for something so savagely, shockingly fast – it holds all the production car acceleration records too — it’s amazingly docile and driveable at low speeds, and feels like it will last as long as a Golf.
Pointless? There wasn’t much point in Edmund Hillary climbing Everest either. And the Veyron was conceived by the Hillary of the car world; Ferdinand Piech, the head of the family that controls Volkswagen and Porsche, a brilliant engineer and businessman, and Mr. Extreme. While still in his thirties he developed the legendary Porsche 917 racecar. The CanAm version – the 917⁄30 – is the most powerful car ever raced, making an insane 1580bhp in qualifying trim from its turbocharged 5.3-litre V12, and getting to 60mph in 1.9 seconds. One-point-nine. But at the same time as he commissioned the Veyron, he started another team of VW engineers on the one-litre car project: a two-seat diesel-powered coupe that can cover 100km on a litre of fuel. That’s around 300mpg. A production version is expected in 2013 which, once it’s laden with all the safety stuff the EU demands before it will give a car number plates, might ‘only’ return 200mpg. And you can bet that despite being as single-minded in its pursuit of an extreme as its Veyron cousin, it will also be every bit as driveable and reliable as a Golf.
The pursuit of extreme parsimony might be politically more acceptable now, but it’s subject to more controversy than any other measure of a car’s performance. It’s almost impossible to disentangle the relative environmental claims of electric vehicles versus fuel-cell cars versus hybrids. It’s hard, however, to argue against the claims of French firm MDI, which has started building cars that run on compressed air, although yes, you do need electricity to compress the air in the first place, and no, we don’t expect to see fleets of them whistling down our roads like un-knotted party balloons any time soon.
These kind of radical leaps sometimes need to come from outside the automotive mainstream. Piech has done fast and frugal but he hasn’t yet done extreme cheap. For that we need to look to another visionary, Indian industrialist Ratan Tata, who was so appalled by the carnage caused on his country’s roads by families of four riding on a single scooter that he ordered engineers at his fledgling car company to design something with four wheels for 100,000 rupees, or £1400, or the price of a motorbike.
We’d heard rumours about this new ‘car’; that in order to meet that price target it would have no side glass, a plastic body and a fabric roof. But the Tata Nano, when it arrived, looked and drove remarkably like a normal car. Just like the Veyron, its engineers had worked very, very hard to hit an almost impossible target while keeping the car usable. But their achievement is greater than Bugatti’s; the Veyron is only a few miles per hour faster than its rivals, but the Nano is less than half the price of the next-cheapest car, and the mainstream carmakers – Piech included, probably — are still scratching their heads about how to catch up.
The C5 was stupid-looking, probably dangerous, but strangely prescient and now kind of retro and cool. Clive Sinclair’s doomed project was the product of the extreme entrepreneurialism of the early eighties.
The long-time holder of the fastest-car title, engine bay lined with gold makes it the most bling too
Maybach 62
The biggest car currently on sale, but a sales disaster for parent Mercedes-Benz: crass, ugly and overly bling. Also the heaviest.
Smart ForTwo:
Currently the shortest car on sale but Gordon Murray’s new T25 city car will be 30cm shorter and have an extra perch
Caparo T1:
You’d struggle to call it a car, but it does wear number plates and has a power-to-weight ratio that blitzes anything else you can buy with 575bhp in a body weighing less than half a tonne
Bugatti Veyron Super Sports
Not again! But we didn’t mention that alongside all its other records, it’s also the most expensive and least-efficient car you can currently buy?
There is little to compare in the history of the automobile, interms of pure automotive audacity as the Bugatti Royale. Designed literally for a handful of the world’s regal élite in 1925, the car, otherwise known as a Type 41, is the child of one of one man’s personal vision.
In a story that mirrors that of the Ferrari-battling Ford GT, Ettore Bugatti is said to have come up with the idea of this most regal of rides in response to a the comments of an aristocratic English woman, who remarked that only the Rolls Royce could possibly be a car fit for a king, the huge, astronomically priced Royale project was scuppered on the reef of the great depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929.
All six of the cars produced remain, scattered to the four winds in various car collections. They may fetch as much as the most sought-after 250 GTOs should they ever come up for sale.
With a 12.7 litre engine, 24-inch wheels, a 6.4 Metre overall length, and a kerb weight of over 3000KG, it was a dinosaur whose evolution was cut short by global economic realities. How many times have we heard this story of late?
But more stunning than the Royale’s astronomical spec is the sweeping elegance of its design. It may have come a cropper in the pre war years, but the dynamic elegance of post war cars in Europe managed to live on.
But if we were hoping that the current economic crisis doesn’t spell the end of beautiful cars, then we’re not sure wether last year’s 4-door concept unveiled by Bugatti to coincide with compay’s centenary, should soften or heighten our worries.
The Galibier Bugatti featured the typical radiator grille, big round LED headlights and the clamshell design running the length of the vehicle, which became synonymous with the brand identity under Jean Bugatti in the Type 57.
Beneath the bonnet, which folds back from both sides, there resides a 16-cylinder, 8-litre engine with two stage supercharging that can run on ethanol. Four-wheel drive, specially developed ceramic brakes and a new suspension design keeps the car agile, and the body is constructed of handmade carbon fibre parts coloured dark blue so that, when illuminated, the woven structure shimmers through strikingly.
The Galibier’s design might have mastered the challenge of uniting sportiness with the comfort and elegance of a modern four-door saloon, and the basic architecture picks up on the torpedo-like character of the Type 35, which was already revived in the Veyron, and reinterprets it.
But looking at the graphic picture from the side elevation you can see how even this highest-end saloon recalls more workaday exec wafters like the VW Phaeton, and even the Audi A6 series.
The Royale surely was a one off– the product of a time and an attitude to design that is probably gone forever.
The perfect illustration (below) of the glorious absurdity of the very, very fast car. The Bugatti Veyron will do 253 miles per hour. But it can’t do 253 miles in an hour, because at that speed its fuel consumption is so voracious that it will drain its tank after just fifty miles. You’ll have covered the distance from London to Brighton in twelve minutes, but stopping for petrol five times for every hour’s driving might get to be a drag.
The Veyron is not alone, of course. The 200mph car is probably a complete chimaera; to our knowledge, nobody has ever tried to drive a production car at 200 miles per hour, for an hour. Almost all the cars that make the claim would need to be towing an oil tanker to do it, and that would knock their speed a little.
Veyron: a brilliant absurdity
And it’s all academic anyway. The combination of circumstances that allow you to do a really big speed in a road car are so rare as to make the proportion of very fast cars that have actually been driven at very fast speeds incalculably small. Forget the law: you’re almost certainly going to have to break it. The real problem is distance. Plainly, as a car’s speed increases, its rate of acceleration declines; you might get from zero to sixty in three-and-a-bit seconds, but getting from 190mph to the double-ton might take a minute as your car reaches the very limit of its abilities. Finding a road sufficiently long and straight and clear is almost impossible, and finding the nerve is even harder.
So why are we so hung up on top speed? Once, there was a genuine engineering benefit; the advances that made cars go faster, such as aerodynamics and more efficient engines, and stay stable and stop again, such as better brakes and suspension, filtered down to ordinary cars. That’s no longer the case; we’ve learnt pretty much all we’re going to learn, and the extra few miles per hour that now make a car the fastest in the world are eked out with extreme engine tuning and otherwise utterly impractical aero and suspension settings.
The Veyron did bring some benefits. Ferdinand Piech, the Sauron-like mastermind behind the Volkswagen group used the project as a trial-by-fire for aspiring engineers; if they could hit the almost impossible targets he set for the car – 400km/h, 1001 horsepower, one million euros – their careers were assured, and they’re now working on the Polos and Golfs the rest of us drive. But more often, being cajoled into doing a huge speed makes a car worse in normal driving. Off the record, Bentley engineers admit that making the Continental GT do 200mph left it hopelessly overspecified and overweight at a crushing 2.4 tonnes.
Over Specced and superfast: The Bentley Continental GT Speed
But even if you don’t actually want it, and never get the chance to use it, a big top speed appeals to anyone who ever played Top Trumps as a kid. It sells cars, and it sometimes prompts even the most revered of carmakers to massage the figures a little. A car’s top speed can be calculated with a fairly simple equation, making it easy to disprove some of the more ludicrous claims. You only need a car’s power, frontal area, drag coefficient and rolling resistance to work out how fast it will go with the right conditions and gearing.
But the really striking thing is the relationship between speed and power. To make a car go faster, the extra power required is proportional to the cube of the extra speed. Put simply, to make a 180mph car do 200mph – a speed increase of 11 per cent – you need 37 per cent more power. It’s difficult, expensive, and much easier to fib.
Could this car really breach a ton-fifty?
The pre-production Jaguar E-Type that became the first road car to hit 150mph in 1961 almost certainly had a little help from the competition department; subsequent tests couldn’t replicate it. The Ferrari F40 was the first credible production car to claim a top speed over 200mph, boasting of 201.3mph at its launch in 1987, but to our knowledge this has never been independently verified. Maximum respect to Porsche for eschewing Italian willy-waving and NOT claiming 200mph for its 959, launched at the same time as the F40. It would have been a killer marketing line, but Porsche knew it wasn’t true. It claimed 197mph instead, and that’s exactly what the 959 did in an independent test.
In the same month that Ferrari made its 200mph claim for the F40, Phil Hill and Paul Frere timed the Ruf CTR ‘Yellowbird’ at 211mph for US magazine Road and Track, and it did 213mph the following year at Nardo. The CTR – Ruf’s reworking of the Porsche 911 Turbo – was made in small numbers compared to the 1315 F40s built but it still qualifies as a production car, Ruf having been granted manufacturer status by the German government six years previously. This tiny, bespoke carmaker beat the best in the world to make the first production car to prove it could do 200mph.
Ferrari was caught out again with the F50: it claimed 202mph, but the lease under which all 349 were sold specifically forbade independent speed tests; when a US mag finally managed to test one it did ‘only’ 194mph. Ferrari learnt its lesson; the Enzo will do all of its claimed 218mph.
The Enzo Ferrari lived up to its noble moniker
The Jaguar XJ220 and McLaren F1 posted genuine big numbers, but needed a little help. In ’92 the Jag had to have its catalysts removed to produce the extra 50bhp Martin Brundle needed to lift it from 210 to 217mph at the Nardo test track in Italy, or just over 220mph once the scrub effect of the high-speed bowl has been allowed for. Cue mass exhalation in Coventry; the car (just) lived up to its name. The McLaren F1 in which Andy Wallace set the long-standing 240.1mph record in 1998 needed its rev limiter removed to do it, though rumours still abound that the engine was ‘special’.
All these cars are extraordinary, covetable, engineering marvels. But perhaps our obsession with top speed is passing. There may never be another car like the Veyron: global recession, emissions regulations, social opprobrium and dwindling oil supplies mean we’ll have to get our kicks elsewhere, and the new technologies that replace the internal combustion engine might simply be incapable of propelling a car that fast. But do you really care that the all-electric Tesla Roadster will do ‘only’ 125mph, when you’ll seldom get close to that in normal driving, and its acceleration to 100mph is so – well – electrifying, and produced with zero emissions or guilt?
The Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport, a roadster version of the epoch-making hypercar, launches this month. With only 100 up for grabs, even a €1.4 million base price won’t stop the global élite from grabbing the ultimate in alfresco driving.
Like the Lamborghini Countach, McLaren F1 and Ferrari Enzo before it, the closed top Veyron has already redefined the supercar genre – standing as a monument to power, consumption, speed and not a little bit of greed. When VW revived the dormant Bugatti name in 2000 then Chairman Ferdinand Piech promised the fastest production car in history.
Now, as the Bugatti brand celebrates its 100th anniversary with a year-long celebration, the open topped Veyron Grand Sport stands unchallenged as the most outrageous convertible ever built.
There are strong German overtones, with chief designer Hartmut Warkuss and Jozef Kaban taking responsibility for the bluff Germanic looks. But the Bugatti remains fiercely French. It is even named after Pierre Veyron, who won the 1939 Le Mans 24 Hours in one a Bugatti.. A space age factory to build them was created next to Ettore Bugatti’s château in Molsheim, France, and clients visit the quaint Atelier – that is part meeting room, part museum – to select their chosen two-tone colour scheme with the aid of polished stones stored in a bespoke cupboard. No online car configurator necessary.
Totemic fashion brand of the super rich Hermes is also on hand, providing an optional interior upgrade for Veyron customers who want that little bit extra exclusivity. other special editions include the Pur Sang, Sang Noir, and the one-off Bleu Centenaire which bears the all-blue racing livery of the original French GP cars.
Bugatti’s customers, including designer Ralph Lauren, are drawn to this distinctly Gallic flair, combined with the resonant and romantic image of Ettore Bugatti, who built an empire with racing cars driven by gentlemen racers that dominated the early days of Grand Prix. The Type 10, Type 25 and more were the cutting edge supercars of their day and though the technological times have changed, Bugatti is still out in front.
The styling of the Veyron, however, is more about impact and aerodynamics than traditional supercar beauty. The bullshark front end, the muscularity of those sloping flanks and the monstrous square exhaust, which looks like it should be firing grenades, create a cohesive vision of brutal power applied with finesse and exactitude. Its true elegance lies in its simplicity, and the way that the designers managed to wrap a drivetrain as powerful as a freight train in a car the size of a Ferrari 430.
An eight-litre W16 engine with four turbochargers and 10 radiators is overkill on a grand scale, but then it does send almost two tonnes of car to 60mph in just 2.5s, which is superbike fast, and, of course, to that near mythic top speed of 253mph.
The Grand Sport allows for 217mph wind in the hair motoring after the removal of the Veyron’s roof. And as the overjoyed owners speed off into the sunset this might just mark the end of a wondrous motoring adventure. The tide is turning against such extravagant machines and now even the supercar manufacturers are looking at reduced emissions and fuel consumption. And in the current economic climate a €1 million supercar that costs €40,000 a year to run, before the insurance, is not a simple sell.
So the Veyron Grand Sport could be the end of an era, and it will almost certainly be the most spectacular, most powerful petrol-powered car the world will ever see. And though it’s heavily influenced by Germanic neighbours, this car will fly the French flag for the rest of motoring history.
Look at your car. Ignore the kerbed alloy and the parking dent and the fact that you didn’t get around to cleaning it last weekend. Look beyond all that. Look at its forms, its details, its edges and curves. How does it make you feel when you really look at it? If it leaves you cold, it’s a crime. There’s no excuse for lazy, passionless car design; you have been cheated. If — even when it’s parked — the looks suggest speed and freedom and all the other things you love about driving your car, the designer has done his job. The very best-looking cars are simply beautiful; if you own a DS or a Miura or an Alfa 8C, just looking at it might be enough.
But is it art? You might get the same instinctive, irrational, love it-loathe it reaction to a car as you do to a painting or a sculpture, but can it qualify as a work of art? I’m going to argue that it doesn’t, but it does get very close. Perhaps a car magazine shouldn’t be attempting to answer such big questions — but one definition of art is that it exists purely for its own sake. The shape of your car does not; the designer has had to package an engine in a given position and a given number of seats and doors, and wrap it all in a shape that slips efficiently through the air and won’t try to take off over 100mph.
This is design, not art, but the car industry has produced some of the most emotive design of the last century. The French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote when the Citroen DS was launched in 1955 that the car was now the “exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”
The comparison between architecture and car design is a good one. Buildings and cars each have a function beyond their physical appearance; we ought to care how they look, and too often are let down. The comparison of cars with cathedrals is even better. One is a place of worship, the other an object of worship. It’s hard to separate how they look from what they represent. Believers look at a great church and see divinity in its beauty and the fact that it was built at all. Our reaction to great cars is maybe a little more prosaic, but the same thing happens; we look at a Ferrari 250 and can’t dissociate its looks from the knowledge that it is fast and rare and expensive and sensationally exciting to drive.
So, some examples of the greatest car design/art. We’ve wanted our cars to look good since Edwardian times; as soon as we’d cracked getting them to drive at more than a few miles per hour and for more than a few miles without breaking down, we’ve wanted them to look more than purely functional. Those ungainly, upright things with bicycle mudguards and their guts on public display soon gave way to styled, streamlined sheet metal.
And just like art, attribution is everything; despite being designed 43 years ago, a pedantic but amusing row still simmers between Gandini and Giugiaro — now old men — over who really created the Miura.
But how many truly beautiful cars have there been since then? Car designers have always had to work around the constraints imposed on them by the engineers and aerodynamicists. There’s an argument that the constraints are now too tight for designers to create anything beautiful. Add the legal requirements of all the countries where the car sells and, according to Jaguar design chief Ian Callum, skinning a car becomes a ‘join the dots exercise’. Callum knows good design; one critic wrote that his Aston Martin DB7 has ‘the sort of beauty the car world is lucky to see once in a generation”. His seductive XK coupe and XF saloon have re-established Jaguar’s reputation as a maker of the world’s best-looking cars, anchored by the ’49 XK120, the ’61 E-type and the ’68 XJ, but he isn’t sure he could do something as unfettered as the DB7 again.
It isn’t Callum’s work, but the Bugatti Veyron exemplifies his thinking. At €1.2m, handbuilt in tiny numbers and with no purpose other than to delight its owners it ought to be a visual masterpiece, as ‘30s Bugattis were. But the Veyron’s styling is its least-discussed attribute; the demands of packaging its monstrous mechanicals, cooling its 1001 horsepower engine and preventing it from taking flight at 253mph mean that when you first encounter it you’re surprised by its unthreatening, unremarkable egg-shape.
But we are still making great looking cars, if not cars that border on art. Look at the new Alfa 8C, or even the Fiat 500, cars whose visual appeal is so strong that discerning car people are prepared to ignore the fact that they’re not that great to drive. Patrick le Quement, about to retire after 43 years as a car designer and 22 as the head of Renault design is more sanguine than Callum. “Yes, we’re all suffering a little bit, and the European pedestrian protection rules mean the noses of our cars look a little bit like Le Mans-ready Porsche 911s, but ingenious engineers will find us a little more flexibility. I think we could be entering a new golden era.”
