14 minute read
BM-Wednesdays: Totally Frank
Totally Frank
Words: Will Beaumont Photos: Chaydon Ford
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Frank Stephenson worked in BMW’s design department for over a decade, he penned some of the company’s most influential cars and witnessed the creation of even more. Who better to talk us through the 70 years of BMW design that the club has been around to witness?
Ican’t pretend that being a motoring journalist is the most stressful career, it really isn’t. But there are moments before any job that can spike the anxiety of any motoring writer. Before any feature with a classic car, will the owner turn up? So far, I’ve never been stood up. It’s similarly nerve-racking before an interview. Will the guest arrive? Will they arrive on time? So far I’ve been lucky on both accounts. Will they be pleasant and amiable, or will they be a demanding diva with a complicated coffee order that requires milk squeezed from exotic beans only found at the foothills of the Andes? Sadly, that situation isn’t as rare as the others.
Not even the swanky café area at the heart of Cotswold BMW’s sprawling dealership can completely calm my nerves as I wait for ex-BMW designer, Frank Stephenson, ahead of our live broadcast that evening. And I’m still anxious when his car pulls up to the door. Take a look at Frank’s career and you can see why. He’s a big deal. After studying automotive design at Art Center College of Design in California he was employed by Ford. He then moved to BMW and worked for the Munich company for over a decade. Stephenson can take credit for two of the most influential BMW designs of the past 30 years, the first generation X5 and the new Mini.
Simply being here is all well and good, he certainly has the credibility and authority to talk me through BMW’s design history, but the success of the night really depends on just how engaging and charming he is. And more worrying for me, how well we get on.
As soon as he steps out of his taxi, halfway through having a joke with the driver, all my tension evaporates. His huge smile, open posture and deep chuckle are captivating and I know the event is going to be a success. To top it off, his coffee, no make that his drinks order is wonderfully simple: pretty much anything with caffeine.
Cotswold BMW is full of cars, far more than we had anticipated. The plan was to have eight, one per decade from the 1950s up to today to celebrate the Club’s 70-year lifespan so far, but there’s half a dozen more than that. Next to the superrare 1957 BMW 503 is a 1M, an E92 M3. There’s an immaculate AC Schnitzer-tuned E39, an Alpina B3 Touring, two E9s one of which is a CSL, a Z8, a Z3, an E46 Coupé, an E30, a 2002 and an E24 M635CSi. That’s before we get to the brand new cars. Where to start? There’s an obvious choice, an early E53 X5. Frank’s design.
As this was BMW’s first offroader, SAV, SUV… whatever you want to call it, you’d expect that a lot of time was dedicated to the task of getting the design correct. Apparently not according to Frank: “We were told we had six weeks. I assumed that was how long they were giving our design team for the sketch period.” Which is a tight timescale to come up with some resolved sketches. “The six weeks was
actually for us to create a full-size scale model. The sketch time was my flight out to Italy. We had to go to Italy because no German unions would allow us to work the hours we’d need to put in to create a full-scale model in such a short space of time.”
So who got to see the sketches that you created before you got into the modelling process? “No one. Just me. Not even Chris Bangle, who was head of design at the time. I turned up to this industrial area just outside Turin in Italy and was met by an Italian translator and three rather old modellers. None of them was younger than 70.”
Tasked with turning his freshly-penned X5 design into a model in a matter of weeks, Frank was uneasy. “I was a bit unsure and asked, ‘Are you sure these guys are up to working 18-hour days for six weeks?’ I was then told that it would be absolutely fine and these were the same guys who created the design model of the gorgeous Lamborghini Miura back in the late ‘60s. For me, it was like working with Michelangelo, Rembrandt and da Vinci.
“In Italy at the time, they still created models traditionally with plaster. Not clay. So the entire time we were in the studio, there were puddles of water on the floor from the fresh plaster and dust in the air from where they’d carved and filed away at the model.
“They worked so well as a team. One guy slapping on new plaster, one guy would get the shape right and another one was all about the details.”
Despite the unconventional and truncated process, Frank’s design for the X5 was signed off for production. Much of that success is down to Frank’s understanding of BMW’s design history. To create an all-new model, one that’s still distinctly a BMW, you have to be a scholar of the brand. Thankfully he had a helping hand when he was younger: “My mother had a 2002tii, so I spent a lot of time as a kid in that car. I have a real affinity with BMWs.”
But what defines a BMW? “Traditionally, the cars are athletic and sporty. They look like an athlete that has just put on a well-tailored suit. They’re lithe. They’re well-engineered, but they‘re engineered to be light with nothing extra or over the top and that’s reflected in the way they’re designed. That sportiness comes from their stance and attitude, things like the shark nose that slants forward make them look like they’re moving when they’re not.
“They have a line that continuously runs down the side, that’s often unbroken. The proportion of the glasshouse to body side is large, too, and that makes them look light.”
A red two-door E30 provides the perfect example to illustrate most of Frank’s points, then we move on to the E39. “Some of the sportiness and intent comes from a very small distance between the top of the front wheel arch and the bonnet, and a big distance from the front of the door and bulkhead to the front wheel.”
Beautiful and elegant it may be, but the 50s 503 doesn’t exhibit many of these BMW traditions. It was before BMW really galvanised its signature look, Frank explains. Still, even without a shark nose and BMW proportions, there’s plenty to admire: “With older handbuilt cars like this, you get really subtle lines. Like this one that reaches along the top of the fender. It appears and disappears and you can’t quite tell where it begins or ends. It has such smooth uninterrupted panels, too. If this were a modern, mass-produced car, there’d be a panel gap here.”
As he describes the graceful panels of the 503, one word keeps popping up, surfacing. You hear car designers mention it a lot, but what does it mean? “Surfacing
is what we call the treatment of the panels, the curves and the tension that create the shapes. For example, you won’t ever see a straight line on a car, except maybe on a Cybertruck. There’s always a slight curve or a bow to every line or surface.”
It’s this understanding of how to treat the lines and panels of a car that separates car designers from other disciplines. “Product designers don’t make very good car designers, it’s not in the practice of any other part of design to get a sense of movement like you need to with car design. You have to be more conscious of light and reflections and how they hit and flow along the panels.”
Frank is using the shape of an E46 Coupé to help me understand his description, running his finger down the line of the car and the back of his hands to show me the curves. He has to make a comment on the car before we move on: “I really think this version of the 3 Series will go down in history. It’s one of the last BMWs to really embody traditional BMW design elements.”
In 2002, Frank left BMW to work at Ferrari, “It was a dream. You don’t say no to the pope if he invites you to the Vatican.” While working in Italy, thanks to his success with the Mini, he was given the task of designing the new Fiat 500. But creating supercars was what he really wanted to continue doing, who wouldn’t? And he moved to England to become Design Director at McLaren Automotive in 2008.
In the early 2000s, after he’d left, BMW’s design language began to change. Frank’s boss at BMW, Chris Bangle, introduced a brave new look which was given the title, Flame Surfacing. Many of the attributes Frank identified as typical BMW attributes were abandoned in favour of this radical new look. It’s not one he’s much of a fan of. “I don’t like lines for lines sake. Or unnecessary vents.” We’re poking around a 1M. “I bet if I put my hand in there, it’d go nowhere. Who wants a saggy bulge here?” Frank points to the lower sill of the little M car. “It looks like whoever sat in the car has buckled it in the middle.”
Critical, certainly. But it’s so plainly his view that, even though it comes from a position of authority, it doesn’t sound disrespectful. Perhaps, because he’s willing to pick fault with designs he does like too, that any criticism rarely feels too negative. For example, many of the details on a late E24 really aren’t to his taste: “The bumpers, they’re too much. These fins on the B-pillar, you don’t need those.”
There are even elements of the 3.0 CSL, a car he admires deeply, that he finds fault with. “There are lots of things we wouldn’t do now. These stuck-on grilles, the stripe and the chrome arches. Modern cars have their details integrated into them. But this is how it was done back then. And it doesn’t matter, because the design and proportions of this car are so perfect. It’s the result of one man’s vision.”
After we’ve both taken a moment to appreciate what a stunning car the CSL is, we wander over to the Z8. I want to call it a retro version of BMW’s 507, but that’s the wrong term. Frank tells me why. “Retro suggests that something actually looks old. And the Z8 looks modern, or it did in the 2000s. Yes, there are similarities to the older 507, but it’s not replicating an older car.”
Thanks to the Mini project, Frank
understands what it’s like to create such a car. “When I did the new Mini, I didn’t look at an original Mini at all. I knew what one looked like, it was in my mind but I wasn’t constantly referring back to it. What I did was design the ‘69 Mini, the ‘79 Mini and the ‘89 Mini, as if it had been updated over the decades rather than staying the same, then I designed the 1999 Mini.”
It’s a great point. We don’t call the latest Porsche 911 retro because every iteration from the original to the latest version has existed. With cars that didn’t get redesigned for every decade, like the Mini, the Fiat 500 and the Z8, the designers didn’t have the luxury of a recent model to play off, they had to fill in the gaps.
When it comes to the Z8, the result was simply stunning. “I was at BMW while Henrik Fisker was designing the Z8. It’s a really beautiful car. The quality and the tolerances are so tight. You can see it in the way the exhaust comes through the body at the back. Most cars you see today that do that, you’re not seeing the actual exhaust but some tips that aren’t even connected to the system. But this is the actual exhaust and that’s difficult to do.”
Such achievements aren’t just the work of the designer, but the engineers who work with them to realise their concepts. It’s refreshing to hear Frank talk so enthusiastically about engineers. The stereotypical engineer is one that stifles the creativity of a designer, tells them their ideas aren’t feasible and are too expensive. One of Frank’s designs, the Escort Cosworth, was famously altered by Ford’s finance department. The wild rear wing on the rally homologation special was meant to be even more outrageous, it should have had three tiers to it. Sadly, the finished car made do with just two: a boot spoiler and the big wing that followed the roofline.
According to Frank, however, it was a very different story in Munich. “At BMW, an engineering and design-led company, the culture is totally different to one like Ford’s. At BMW the engineers work out a way to make your designs happen. In fact, there were times when I was able to improve designs based on the engineers’ input. On the X5 I had designed it so the spare wheel was mounted on the back behind a sculpted panel. It wasn’t exposed, but you could tell it was there. The engineers developed the car so that the spare didn’t need to be mounted on the back and we were able to make the back-end cleaner.”
Even aspects as important to engineers like aerodynamics take a back seat to design. “No one buys a car because its drag coefficient is 0.03 better, they buy the one that looks better. So aerodynamics does not play a significant role in car design, it’s something engineers worry about. They might make slight changes to a design to improve certain aspects but design is king.”
Next to the Z8 is a collection of BMW’s latest cars. If you thought Chris Bangle’s flame-surfaced cars were controversial, they’ve got nothing on the gargantuan grilles of the new cars. We head for an i4 and, just for a minute, I think Frank might be lost for words. Thankfully, he isn’t. “I’d say to the new design team: ‘step back, think about the emotional design direction you really want to go in.’ It’s like two different designers were working on the car, one on the front and another at the back. And they didn’t get on well. There’s no real Hofmeister Kink.” The angled line on most BMWs that connects the bottom of the rear pillar meets the lower window line. “It feels like such a shame to have lost such a strong design element.”
It’s not all doom and gloom. “Some
Frank Stephenson with Will Beaumont and Club Chairman, Martyn Goodwin
Frank with the Cotswold Motor Group team
Frank Stephenson and Club photographer, Chaydon Ford
of the surfacing, and the way that’s been treated, has been done with skill. The subtle crease on the rear bumper quarter and the line down the side is crisp.”
Frank might not think the results of BMW’s latest design decisions are ideal, but he is sympathetic to the challenges that the designers face. “How do you create a strong identity when things like grilles aren’t so necessary on electric cars? It’s an even bigger challenge for interior designers, there is a lot of great work being done by UX and UI designers for the screens in cars. But when a car is turned off and they’ve just got blank screens, how do you make that look interesting?”
Life for the designer isn’t getting any more straightforward, then. I am not about to make things easy for this designer, either. I ask what I think will be the trickiest question of the night: if you had to choose just one of these BMWs, which one would you take home? I am wrong, it’s far from difficult. Immediately Franks responds: “The CSL.”
