Description
To know something about the man is to know something more about the cars he designed. The character of an automobile inevitably reveals something of the personality and, sometimes, genius of its creator, and it is from this viewpoint that L.J.K. Setright sets out to assess the work of some seventy great car designers in Europe and the United States. Magnificently illustrated in colour and black and white, including some fascinating historical pictures only recently discovered, this book covers the whole history of the automobile from its beginnings in the horse-carriage-inspired vehicles of the turn of the century right up to the aggressive modern streamlining by Porsche and Lamborghini.
The author groups his designers according to their temperament or particular talent, enabling him to compare and contrast the men and their work. An important chapter on design teams includes an account of the young Fiat designers in the early 1920s, who became so influential as they continued their careers with other manufacturers throughout Europe.
Here is Henry Royce – that superb but earthbound mechanic with grease down his fingernails. Then consider the sheer brilliance of an eccentric like Bugatti, who also produced designs for aero-engines, bicycles, a chair, and shoes with a separate compartment for each toe! Alec Issigonis’s convention-defying approach in rearranging the car’s elements to produce maximum passenger space within minimum outer dimensions made his Mini-Minor a bestseller. But in contrast the Facellia, though lovely to behold, was doomed to failure because the capacity of Emil Petit’s engine was quite incompatible with its body size.
Countess Dorothy di Frasso commissioned the prince of American coachbuilders, Howard Darrin, to make an elegant and beautiful body for her 1930 Rolls-Royce Phantom II, specifying only that it should eclipse the Rolls of Constance Bennett, her great social rival. Steuart Tresilian, on the other hand, was asked by the British Army to build an extraordinary military vehicle that was enabled to jump obstructions with the aid of airfoil blades mounted on the rims of two huge horizontal flywheels, each driven by a 2g-litre BRM Grand Prix engine! Aptly named the ‘Flying Pig’, it never advanced beyond the prototype stage.
L.J.K. Setright has produced a unique analysis of the great designers and their superlative achievements in creating cars which have found, or should have found, world fame.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1976. Hard Cover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. First Edition. 199pp, indexes, drawings, photographs including 8pp in colour, pictorial endpapers.
