All Entries Tagged With: "motorbooks"
How To Be The Next Harley Earl or How To Design Cars Like A Pro
by Gunnar Heinrich ::: How To Design Cars Like A Pro
READING How to Design Cars Like A Pro. The title of this book is somewhat misleading. It isn’t so much a “how-to” as it is an overarching study on car design. It’s also written by two automotive scribes, Tony Lewin and Ryan Borroff who, according to the inside leaflet, have never actually penned a car.
So what makes How To Design Cars Like A Pro worth reading if it’s title is slightly misleading and its authors critique cars rather than create them? In a word: insight.
Scrapping the comical notion that in order to communicate a concept you have to be employed in the same field (how else would the world’s news get about?) the authors do a good job of giving us an almost up-to-the-minute account of the present industry and introduce us to the people, the process, and the art of conceptualization.
We also get an analytical look of history’s good and great – from icons in design like Harley Earl, Bruno Sacco, and, gulp, Chris Bangle to the legendary cars themselves – the Eldorado Biarritz, Ferrari 250 GTO, and Audi TT, to name a few.
There is one chapter titled, “Tutorials” that does go into the mechanics of actually, you know, drawing an automobile. But text is like reality, where 95% of the work is conceptual, the rest is CAD, clay models, and where humble pen meets paper.
Jaguar Design Director Ian Callum writes an optimistic forward that encapsulates the book’s bright tone about the future of automotive design.
“I really can’t imagine a more exciting time to become a car designer. New challenges and demands on the motor car are going to change the comfortable assumptions we have had for many years. “
On an interesting and aspirational note, Mr. Callum writes that Jaguar design in the 60s inspired him as a young boy and that at the tender age of 14 he sent his first application to the same car maker he would eventually lead.
Fuel for thought.
MotorBooks furnished ADLXa copy of How To Design Cars Like A Pro.
Read: Velocity Supercar Revolution
by Gunnar Heinrich ::: img Motorbooks ::: Velocity Supercar Revolution
“I don’t know what you’re up to, but stop it.”
This imperative suggests a desist notice to any number of, um, wanton activities. But in this instance which Road & Track alumnus John Lamm retells in Velocity Supercar Revolution, it was a state cop telling one of R&T‘s editors to quit playing with a Lamborghini Countach on public roads.
Kill joy.
This one tale encapsulates what Mr. Lamm’s bold hardcover’s all about – the stories behind the very supercars that so many of have come to idolize through the years.
In Velocity Supercar Revolution, designers, collectors, industrialists, and, of course, journalists all weigh in on the most elaborate and impractical autos of the post war era – from the 70s Maserati Bora to the 2006 Z06 Vette and much rolling stock in between.
Chris Bangle even offers his two cents.
On page 19, Jay Leno shares one harrowing account of an afternoon with his Lamborghini Miura.
“I was driving my Miura one day and I looked in the rearview mirror and I go, ‘It’s raining…damn.’ Then I looked out the front and it’s not raining the front. I realized what had happened was that one of the carburetor hoses had popped off and was spraying the rear window with gas. I pulled over, opened the back and heard ‘ping…ping…ping’ as gas hit the exhaust manifold. All I’ve got is this stupid little Haylon fire extinguisher. Luckily the car didn’t start on fire. People just don’t have those sorts of adventures anymore.”
Mr. Lamm threads a narrative from the 70s to the 80s, 90s, and 2000s that points to a special few car manufacturers who’ve been at pains to outdo themselves all these years.
Velocity Supercar Revolution, shows not so much a revolution but an evolution as top speeds, 0-60s, and world records are broken with each succeeding decade.
Considering the years of environmental lobbying and economic crises, that these wildly flamboyant, utterly impracticable, but ultimately special cars inhabit the same democratic asphalt as the world’s Highway Patrol officers, stands as the real revolution.
Velocity Supercar Revolution by John Lamm. Published by Motorbooks.
Ed. note: Motorbooks provided the writer (yours truly) with a copy of this text.
Bentley Driver’s Must Read: Bentley Continental, Corniche, & Azure 1951-2002
by Gunnar Heinrich ::: img Veloce ::: Bentley Continental, Corniche, & Azure 1951-2002
LISTED fourth down on a roster that reads like a mid-20th Century Who’s Who , American racing legend Briggs Cunningham took delivery of BCA4 (built expressly for him without emblems or mascots and in right-hand drive by coachbuilder exemplar, H.J. Mulliner) on what must’ve been a beautiful summer day in 1952.
The car that Mr. Cunningham received was the newly minted Bentley R Type Continental -Britain’s first post-war supercar; a unique-to-Bentley 2+2 grand tourer; a classic today.
Martin Bennett chronicles Mr. Cunningham’s superlative car and others in Bentley Continental, Corniche & Azure 1951-2002 published by Veloce and distributed by Motorbooks.
Two hundred and fifty two pages (256, if you count the three full-page RR/Bentley service adverts at the back), the UK turned Aussie native’s work is by all accounts a well documented history of postwar Bentley coupes up until the introduction of the VW Phaeton based GTs.
In exchange for this informational over-abundance (including such finite details as how Bentley management chose to fit the seats of the magnificent 90s Azure into the Continentals R and T for ease of ingress and egress), and perhaps with the type of customer in mind, the publisher demands a Bentleyesque price – $150 suggested retail.
With razor focus, Mr. Bennett chronicles the only Bentleys to be visually and somewhat mechanically unique of their Rolls-Royce stablemates (except for the 70s & 80s Corniche) – a rarity in the annals of the two marque’s long-entwined history.
Lacking the comprehensiveness of Anthony Bird & Ian Hallows’s The Rolls-Royce Motor Car and the Bentley since 1931, but similar in grace of presentation (art deco titles with smarty organized listings) Mr. Bennett’s work will in presentation and informational offerings appeal directly to those precious few who count themselves privileged to own a Continental, Corniche, or Azure.
Mr. Bennett stolidly delivers the essential aspects of the Continental as he describes in the text’s introduction:
“The appellation ‘Continental’ is perhaps the most evocative in Bentley history, conjuring as it does visions of fast motoring to the South of France, or through the Alps Maritimes, with silken power clothed in supremely elegant coachwork, and drivers and passengers enveloped in the heady aroma of Connolly hides and the rich glow of fine woodwork.”
Mr. Cunningham doubtless thought the same of his first Continental.
Ed. note: Motorbooks furnished the reviewer (yours truly) with a copy of this prodigious text.
Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman
By Gunnar Heinrich | IMG MotorBooks
HAD Steve McQueen lived long enough, perhaps he, and not Paul Newman, would be Hollywood’s face to race car driving. They were both hardened race car fanatics and both enjoyed racing victories off-screen. Or perhaps they would both have been Hollywood’s greatest race car rivals. Who knows?
Not that Mr. Newman donned the Hollywood mantle with any outward hint of pride, mind, it was, nonetheless, his entrée into the automotive world.
Here in the Constitution State, Mr. Newman always enjoyed a bit of lore that seemed more intimate than the blue eyed spectacle that world vaguely knew.
A resident of Westport, he was “our neighbor”; living what seemed like an ordinary, if privileged life. A patron of the Westport Country Playhouse. A Volvo dealer. A dutiful philanthropist; helping his daughter forge profits into charity via Newman’s Own.
However, behind this disarmingly low key façade was a deeply, fiercely competitive man. In Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman, authors Matt Stone and Preston Lerner retell the stories from colleagues and rivals who knew Mr. Newman in the pits, on the track, and from the stands.
What is most striking in their well researched account is how readily the racing community accepted an actor. Following his leading role in the 1968 drama Winning, a story about an amateur who dreams of winning the Indianapolis 500, Mr. Newman set off headlong into racing which seemed at first to be reality imitating art.
Sometime rival racer Sam Posey brings insight to the story:
“One way to look at is that [Newman] acted his way into being a racing driver. He used his powers of concentration and his image of himself succeeding, and he played it like a role. Or maybe he was just a guy who was able to build on each lap incrementally [...] He’s often been quoted as saying that [racing] was the only thing that gave him a sense of physical grace. I can really identify with that[.]“
What’s clear is that no matter how Mr. Newman was able to glean victories in the IMSA and Trans-Am series or establish himself as a racing authority (as he did in playing part of the 2008 effort to reignite Indy fans), Paul Newman won his way into the folklore of automotive racing by his own skill.
A year after his death, his legacy is the respect of his peers in what is a hugely egocentric arena.
Mario Andretti caps the tributes to Hollywood’s leading race car driver: “What I saw in him was the wisdom of someone in love with life. A man who stayed with his dream [...] how lucky I felt to walk pit lane with him.”
Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman by Matt Stone and Preston Lerner. Published by MotorBooks. Retails for $30 / $37.50 CDN.
