Great Isuzu Moments

The Bellett MX1600 rocks the 1969 Tokyo Motor Show

A magical one-off graces the world’s most consistently bonkers auto event

Born in Detroit in 1934, Stevens Thompson ‘Tom’ Tjaarda van Starkenburg was trying to irritate his architecture professor when he submitted a car design—and not a building—for his senior thesis. Instead, his sleek drawings of a sports car station wagon won him an internship at legendary Italian design house Carrozzeria Ghia.

So the student, better known as Tom Tjaarda, moved to Europe. And then took his pencils to an even more legendary employer, Pininfarina, where he worked on the Ferrari 365 California and 330 GT.

By the late 1960s, Tjaarda was ready to produce a concept so slick and radical—and so unimaginable through, say, the lens of modern pedestrian impact standards—that there was only one sensible place for it to debut: the often nonsensical Tokyo Motor Show. It’s a forum where production cars have long been outnumbered by breathtaking, and boundary-bursting one-offs.

Tjaarda’s Isuzu MX1600 super sports car would be one of the hits of the 1969 event.

“At that time there was a midengine Ferrari, but if you looked at that car you couldn’t tell where [its] engine was located,” said Tjaarda. “There was no design clue that let you know where the power was coming from. So I decided that I would do something different. I’ll design the car so that you could tell where the power was coming from—in the middle of the car.”

A mid-engined, rear-wheel drive two-seater, the MX1600’s only relationship to the production Isuzu Bellett family was sharing a 1.6-litre engine, a 103kW four-pot, with the GT-R. Isuzu—and the crowds— loved it so much that in 1970 Isuzu presented a second concept, the appropriately named MX1600-II. It was basically the same car, but with a tweaked nose.

Shortly afterwards, a presumably frustrated Tjaarda would repurpose his designs to build a still-legendary, improbably linked sibling: the 1970s De Tomaso Pantera.