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AU G U ST 2017 AUTOMOBILEMAG.COM / @AUTOMOBILEMAG

I N S TA N T

Driving Ford’s New GT:

A Legit Successor to its Supercar Ancestors

THE MAN WHOSE MOTOR VALLEY DREAMS CAME TRUE MORE CL ASSICS AMERICAN DREAMERS

We find a pair of the coolest cars you’ve never heard of

PAGANI LOWRIDER GOES TO D.C.

The Gypsy Rose takes its place among other automotive giants

A WEEK IN MONTEREY

The Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is only the beginning

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CONTENTS

Automobile

AUGUST 2017 SPECIAL CLASSICS ISSUE

66 76 88 Time Capsules

Smelling the Rose

By Rory Jurnecka Two of the most interesting custom cars in history—the XR-6 “Tex” Smith Roadster and a former Hollywood star known as The Reactor—will roll onto the 18th fairway at the upcoming 2017 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance as part of a special class dubbed American Dream Cars of the 1960s.

By Aaron Gold The open-top Devin C sports car and European GT-inspired Apollo GT are two all-American mix-and-match machines that flashed briefly and then quickly faded into history. We drive them and trace the stories behind these fascinating cars that now inspire curiosity and wonder wherever they go.

By Arthur St. Antoine Born from the barrios of Los Angeles, the Gypsy Rose has become the rolling embodiment of lowrider culture, so much so that the rose-bedecked Chevrolet Impala that helped define cruising low and slow recently took a bow in Washington, D.C., as part of the Historic Vehicle Association’s roster of icons.

102

108

By Rory Jurnecka Navigate the peninsula like a pro with our guide to Monterey Car Week’s diverse event lineup. From auctions to just watching cars go by, there are options for every budget, culminating with the annual Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.

By Rory Jurnecka Regardless of what your grumpy car buddy may think, there are still bargains to be found in the carcollector world, according to the experts we surveyed. And we check out what the top Astons went for at the Bonhams Aston Martin Sale.

6

AUTOMOBILE (ISSN 0894-3583) August 2017, Vol. 32, No. 5. Published monthly, with double issues in September and March, by TEN: The Enthusiast Network, LLC., 261 Madison Ave., 6th Floor, New York, NY, 10016-2303.

Copyright © 2017 by TEN: The Enthusiast Network Magazines, LLC. All rights reserved. Periodicals Postage Paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. SUBSCRIPTIONS: U.S. and U.S. Possessions $19.94 for 12 issues.

Canada $31.94 per year and international orders $43.94 per year (including surface mail postage). Payment in advance, U.S. funds only. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS. (See DMM 707.4.12.5); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address corrections to AUTOMOBILE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. For subscriptions, address changes, and adjustments, write to AUTOMOBILE magazine, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, Florida, 32142-0235, or email automobile@emailcustomerservice.com or call 800-289-2886 (U.S.), 386-447-6383 (international). Please include name, address, and telephone number on any inquiries. Reproduction without permission is prohibited. Manuscripts, photos, and other material submitted must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope; AUTOMOBILE magazine assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. Printed in U.S.A.

COVER SHOT BY WILLIAM WALKER

Collector Treasures

•

Monterey Car Week

DEVIN AND APOLLO: EVAN KLEIN; XR-6: BARRY J. HOLMES; GYPSY: CASEY MAXON

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CONTENTS

16 Editor’s Letter

By Mike Floyd Our grand automotive adventure evolves.

Automobile

38

By Design

By Robert Cumberford The new Range Rover Velar is an elegant, rugged, and mature design with one seriously fast windshield.

58 Four Seasons: Jaguar F-Pace S

By Conner Golden Jaguar’s first-ever SUV lands at Automobile headquarters and makes a good first impression as it begins its year of evaluation.

18 44 112 Horacio Pagani

By Ben Oliver The man whose heart was always in Italy’s Motor Valley now has a new facility there to produce his astonishing, hand-built hypercars.

32

Noise, Vibration & Harshness

By Jamie Kitman We won’t live forever, but a Pinto might.

34

Ford GT

Air Science

By Mac Morrison Which came first, the race car or the street car? Does it really matter? We finally slide behind the competition-style steering wheel of the road-going version of the Blue Oval’s dazzling new supercar.

By Michael Whiteley Advances in technology at the track and on the street translate into all manner of aerodynamic benefits, from improving downforce to increasing miles per gallon.

The Asphalt Jungle

By Arthur St. Antoine The Bugatti Type 41 Royale will always stand out.

36

Letters Alfas never fail to draw a crowd.

122

Catching Up With …

By Mike Floyd Klaus Zellmer, president and CEO of Porsche Cars North America, talks about how important it is to reach enthusiasts.

PAGANI: RICHARD PARDON; F-PACE: ROBIN TRAJANO; GT: WILLIAM WALKER

AUTOMOBILEMAG.COM

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12

AUGUST 2017 MEAT AND DRINK

WHAT’S ON DEMAND THIS MONTH? SCHEDULE KEY: RACING | ORIGINAL PROGRAMS JUNE 30 LIVE! 24H Series, Imola; FIM Motocross World Championship, MXGP of Italy; Motorsport Mundial JULY 1 LIVE! DTM Championship, Norisring JULY 2 LIVE! FIA Formula 3 Championship, Norisring; LIVE! Lamborghini Super Trofeo North America, Watkins Glen JULY 3 British Touring Cars Championship, Croft JULY 4 Dirt Every Day - Ep. 66 JULY 5 GP Confidential JULY 6 Hot Rod Garage - Ep. 54 JULY 7 LIVE! 24H Proto Series,Misano; LIVE! Virgin Australia Supercars, Townsville 400 JULY 7 Roadkill - Ep. 67 JULY 8 LIVE! Virgin Australia Supercars, Townsville 400 JULY 10 Ignition - Ep.178 JULY 11 The House Of Muscle - Ep. 9 JULY 13 FIM Enduro World Championship, Paradfurdo, Hungary JULY 14 Motorsport Mundial JULY 17 Real Road Racing, Oliver’s Mount, Scarborough, England JULY 17 Engine Masters - Ep. 24 JULY 19 Head 2 Head - Ep. 92 JULY 20 FIM Enduro World Championship, Púchov, Slovakia JULY 21 Motorsport Mundial JULY 22 LIVE! DTM Championship, Moscow JULY 23 LIVE! ADAC GT Masters, Zandvoort; LIVE! European Le Mans Series, Red Bull Ring JULY 24 Ignition - Ep. 179 JULY 26 GP Confidential JULY 27 LIVE! Inter Continental Challenge Series, 24 Hours Of Spa JULY 28 LIVE! Pirelli World Challenge, Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course; LIVE! Virgin Australia Supercars, Ipswich Supersprint JULY 29 LIVE! FIA Formula 3 Championship, Spa – Francorchamps; LIVE! Pirelli World Challenge, Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course JULY 30 LIVE! Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup, Spa JULY 31 European Truck Championship, Slovakia; Mobil 1 The Grid

AUGUST 1 Real Road Racing, Southern 100, Isle of Man AUGUST 1 Dirt Every Day - Ep. 67 AUGUST 3 Hot Rod Garage - Ep. 55 AUGUST 4 Motorsport Mundial AUGUST 4 Roadkill - Ep. 68 AUGUST 6 LIVE! ADAC GT Masters, Nürburgring; LIVE! Lamborghini Super Trofeo North America, Elkhart Lake AUGUST 7 Ignition - Ep. 180 AUGUST 8 The House of Muscle - Ep. 10 AUGUST 10 FIM Enduro World Championship, Castelo Branco, Portugal AUGUST 11 LIVE! Pirelli World Challenge, Utah Motorsports Campus AUGUST 12 LIVE! Pirelli World Challenge – Utah Motorsports Campus AUGUST 13 LIVE! Pirelli World Challenge – Utah Motorsports Campus AUGUST 14 British Rallycross Championship, Mondello; Mobil 1 The Grid; Real Road Racing, Barry Sheene Festival, Scarborough AUGUST 14 Engine Masters - Ep. 25 AUGUST 16 Head 2 Head - Ep. 93 AUGUST 18 LIVE! Virgin Australia Supercars, Sydney Motorsport Park SuperSprint; FIM Motocross World Championship, MXGP Of Switzerland – Frauenfeld/ Gachnang; Motorsport Mundial AUGUST 19 LIVE! DTM Championship, Zandvoort, Netherlands; LIVE! Rolex Monterey Motorsport Reunion, Monterey, California; LIVE! Virgin Australia Supercars, Sydney Motorsport Park SuperSprint AUGUST 20 LIVE! FIA Formula 3 Championship, Zandvoort; LIVE! GT4 Europe Northern Series, Zandvoort; LIVE! Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance; LIVE! Rolex Monterey Motorsport Reunion, Monterey, California AUGUST 21 British Touring Cars Championship, Snetterton AUGUST 21 Ignition - Ep. 181 AUGUST 23 GP Confidential

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Automobile EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Floyd SVP, IN-MARKET AUTOMOTIVE CONTENT Ed Loh INTERNATIONAL BUREAU CHIEF Angus MacKenzie EXECUTIVE EDITOR Mac Morrison CREATIVE DIRECTOR Darren Scott DETROIT BUREAU CHIEF Todd Lassa SENIOR EDITOR Nelson Ireson FEATURES EDITOR Rory Jurnecka ROAD TEST EDITOR Eric Weiner ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jonathon Klein MANAGING EDITOR Rusty Kurtz SENIOR COPY EDITOR Kara Snow COPY EDITORS Jesse Bishop, Mary Kaleta GRAPHIC DESIGNER Michael Cruz-Garcia MANAGING ART DIRECTOR Mike Royer EUROPEAN BUREAU CHIEF George Kacher AUTOMOTIVE DESIGN EDITOR Robert Cumberford NEW YORK BUREAU CHIEF Jamie Kitman EDITOR-AT-LARGE Arthur St. Antoine

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J EDITOR’S LETTER

@ a u t o m o b il e m a g VOLUME 32, NO.5 AUGUST 2017

also featuring cars that will wind up on the lawn at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance (page 66), and we’ll show you where to find the coolest events on the peninsula with our spotters guide to Monterey Car Week (page 102).

We’re also changing up how we do our auction coverage, with more expert analysis and a focus on trends.

August will be one of four signature issues throughout the 10-issue year, along with Design (March-April), All-Stars (May), and New and Future Cars (September-October). Yes, you read that right: We are compressing our publishing run a bit to 10 issues per year. Not to worry, though. If you signed up for 12 issues, you will get 12 issues.

You can be assured that the move to 10 issues was not to shortchange you in a cynical play to cut costs. Quite the contrary.

It allows us to grow the physical size of the magazine as outlined. It will also enable us to provide more space for the expansive features Automobile has become famous for because each magazine will have additional pages. You’re going to get at least as much as you were before, just in two fewer issues.

Inside, we’ve completely revamped how we approach our coverage, with five new sections. Up front, Ethos is where you’ll find Art St. Antoine’s and Jamie Kitman’s columns, interviews with amazing personalities like Horatio Pagani (page 18), and other offbeat and insightful stories. The aforementioned Design section is for all things related to how a car is styled. Drives is pretty self-explanatory, although as you’ll see in this issue, we’ll be providing more depth to our Four Seasons coverage. We’ll also endeavor to keep our new car features such as the drive of our cover subject, the stellar Ford GT, as fresh and different as possible. Classic and Progress are where you’ll find stories on vintage cars and advancements in automotive technology.

As we move forward, you will also find increased coverage of gear and gadgets, watches and wearables, and other interesting products and services we think car guys and gals like you will enjoy knowing more about.

There are many who question why print media even exists anymore. It’s understandable that some would ask. I know how important it is to have a strong Web presence, robust social media channels, and exciting video presentations and how vital a strong digital presence is to our future, but I will never stop believing in the power of print and putting more horsepower behind it. As long as I remain at the helm of this grand automotive adventure known as Automobile, the magazine will continue to be the ink and paper straw that stirs our editorial drink. And though we don’t pretend to have all the answers, we hope you’ll enjoy a spin in our new ride.

As always, we’re interested to hear what you think. Let us know your thoughts at letters@automobilemag.com.

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AUTOMOBILEMAG.COM

MIKE FLOYD

16

T O D AY ’ S A U T O M O T I V E I N D U S T R Y moves rapidly, and if you don’t relentlessly adapt and grow in a bid to attract new buyers while continuing to delight existing customers, you won’t survive.

This brings me to the new look of this magazine you’re holding in your hands. Those of you who’ve been with us since ’86—I’ve met many of you, and I can’t thank you enough for your loyalty and support—have seen myriad changes to Automobile’s pages. New logos (I’m still a fan of the groovy first one), illustrations, headers, sections, typefaces, info boxes, photo treatments—you name it, we’ve changed it, and we’re doing it all over again. Why? Because like the automakers we cover, we must also evolve and do so without alienating our loyal subscribers.

The biggest update is to the magazine’s size—literally. Much like an all-new car, it’s grown dimensionally. While it’s the same height, it’s roughly an inch wider than before.

The added room gives our crack creative director Darren Scott more freedom to design presentations with even greater visual impact, which is a hallmark of this brand. He’s also bumped up the main typeface slightly, which should make reading easier on the eyes.

Automobile has been underpinned by several key components throughout its history, and we’re using this opportunity to strengthen them further, namely design, classic cars and auctions, and eclectic, engaging features you won’t find anywhere else. For example, our new Design section, which is anchored by Robert Cumberford’s popular “By Design” column, is adding dynamism in the form of interviews with the people who pen the cars Cumberford critiques.

Moving forward, each year’s August issue will focus on classic vehicles. This month, we’re showcasing cars with incredible stories (Gypsy Rose, page 88) and cars you might not have heard of before (Devin and Apollo, page 76). We’re

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18

FROM SUPERCARS TO A NEW FACTORY, HORACIO PAGANI CONTINUES TO MESH MODERN TECHNOLOGY WITH ARTISTIC INSPIRATION

AN I HIS WAY

by B E N O L I V E R p ho t o g rap hy by

R I C H A R D PA R D O N

ETHOS

19

⇒

A COMPLETED HUAYRA BC awaits shipping in the new factory’s main assembly area. Yes, that’s plastic wrap on the tires. Behind it, two more BCs take shape.

ETHOS

→ →

HP

H O R A C I O P A G A N I H A S N ’ T forgotten what it was like to be a young car enthusiast stranded half a world away in Argentina, desperate to work at one of the supercar makers of Italy’s Motor Valley. So now that he builds supercars of his own in the very same valley, his attitude to access is egalitarian. His cars cost millions, yet for about $37 anyone can book a tour of his new factory, and unlike Ferrari’s policy you don’t have to be a customer.

As I arrive, a small group of tourists is being shown around.

They’re busy photographing the carbon-fiber washbasins in the bathrooms.

They’re also among the first ever admitted, and I’m the first journalist. Pagani, 61, isn’t an architect, but he designed the place himself with the same verve and originality he injects into his cars. You’ll find the occasional direct reference to them throughout the facility. It’s an extraordinary place, and the fact it exists at all is even more extraordinary given the difficulty of establishing an automaker from scratch.

21

Pagani explains how his customers specify what they desire for their cars.

Nothing he or his company offers is left to chance.

Although his company hasn’t yet acquired the same fame or scale or racing success as the houses that Enzo Ferrari and Ferruccio Lamborghini built, few others have been able to develop a supercar largely unaided as Pagani has. And though he’s inextricably linked with those Italian

ETHOS

legends, given his history and factory location he’s arguably better compared to engineers such as Gordon Murray or Ettore Bugatti—men who ran benign dictatorships that tended to produce better-engineered cars.

When Pagani walks into his factory, there’s the usual flurry of activity that surrounds the arrival of a very important person. Conversations end abruptly as attention swivels in the direction of the man who has become one of the great figures of Motor Valley in his own right, though he’s far from the uptight, needy attention-seeker type. A diminutive, avuncular figure, he’s dressed for our meeting in a Pagani tracksuit top (the zipper pull is in the shape of his trademark quad exhaust pipes), purple jeans, and gray Diadora sneakers. Abundant salt and pepper hair is pushed up and away from his face.

We’re having coffee before taking the tour, and his sharp, expressive eyes dart around behind thin-framed glasses. They settle on a spotlight in the ceiling of the room. It isn’t pointing in the right direction. He summons son Leonardo, named after da Vinci, who supervised the factory’s construction.

Leonardo appears with a ladder and aims the spotlight correctly.

You might be familiar with Pagani’s story. Born in Argentina to Italian immigrant parents, by his early 20s he had designed and built his own openwheel Formula 2 car. But local work as an automotive designer and engineer was limited to making camper-van conversions. So in 1983 he set off for Italy with little more in his pocket than a couple letters of introduction to the titans of Motor Valley from none other than favorite Argentinian son Juan Manuel Fangio, which helped him get a menial job at Lamborghini.

22

EARLY EFFORTS such as this F2 racer won the attention of Juan Manuel Fangio.

When Pagani found work at Lamborghini, Fangio would stay in the family’s two-bedroom apartment. The faded snapshots now hang on the wall of the factory.

His rise was meteoric, but his thinking eventually became uncomfortably constrained by his employer. The Countach Evoluzione concept he led the development of was among the first road cars ever constructed with a composite chassis, cutting a third of the mass from the standard car.

But Lamborghini wouldn’t invest in an autoclave to make its own carbon fiber, so Pagani borrowed the money to buy one of his own and installed it at the company. He took the autoclave with him when he left to found Modena Design in 1991.

There he made carbon-fiber parts for Ferrari’s Formula 1 team, among others. He started development work on his first car—the Pagani Zonda— in 1993, and it was shown at the Geneva show in 1999. His first factory and that autoclave have been overwhelmed by demand ever since. I ask him why, when dozens of other sports car and supercar startups have failed in that same amount of time.

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ETHOS

24

“A car has to make you dream. ... If a car can light you up every time you see it, it has done its job.”

GARY PATTERSON

VP OF INTERNATIONAL & STRATEGIC SALES, SHELBY AMERICAN, INC.

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“All the engineering and technology must be at the highest possible level,” Pagani says in Italian. “But the client doesn’t buy a car because it weighs a few kilos less than another. The client probably doesn’t give a damn about that fact. The car has to give you a strong emotion. A car has to make you dream. It has to light you up. If a car can light you up every time you see it, it has done its job.”

The new Pagani factory is a couple minutes down the road from his old production facility in San Cesario sul

26

“WHEN YOU ARE SELLING CARS BEFORE YOU HAVE MADE THEM, YOUR SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY TOWARD YOUR CLIENTS INCREASES

DRAMATICALLY.”

ETHOS

Pagani’s steel and glass architecture means his cars can be seen in natural light, even during harsh northern Italian winters.

This is a 739hp, track-only Zonda R from 2009 with a V-12 engine from the CLK GTR Le Mans car.

If you ask nicely, they can still make you one.

“The theme is the same as you see in our cars,” Pagani continues. “Our inspiration is Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was a designer. He studied engineering and combined the technology of 500 years ago with art. And that’s what we attempt to do. We pay attention to the aesthetics, even the parts that aren’t visible. Like the suspension arm, we want it to stand alone as a beautiful thing that could be exhibited in a display case. We care about beauty. It’s a word the world has almost forgotten. But because the Italians created beautiful things in the past, we have a responsibility to keep beauty in mind.”

A dozen or so Zondas and Huayras are on display alongside a Lamborghini Countach 25th Anniversary, his Renault-engined F2 car, and a mini moto he made in his teens. It’s an extraordinary sight. This is the only place in the world other than perhaps Monterey Car Week (see page 102) where you can use the phrase “lots of Paganis.” The company bought back some of its early cars from customers because the founder couldn’t afford the luxury of keeping them for posterity in the early years. Their climbing values would have made them a good investment. The museum’s back wall is adorned with memorabilia, including the letter Fangio wrote to introduce Pagani to Enzo Ferrari.

He leads me from the museum through a brick corridor and into the main assembly area. It has Roman arched

P

windows that frame a finished and perfectly lit Huayra BC parked in the final inspection area. “Outside, everything is made of steel and glass,” he says. “Inside, we have tried to create an Italian flavor, right down to the bricks and the type of construction, and marble from Carrara—many things to make the project feel Italian.”

And I thought the Ferrari factory was the most Italian place in Italy. Pagani has decided to out-Italian the old guard but with a sense of humor. The main assembly area

→

Panaro, near Modena. With a footprint about the size of a large car dealership, it isn’t exactly huge, but the facility will eventually allow the company to double production to roughly 50 cars per year.

“We designed all of it, my sons Leonardo and Christopher, our design team, and me” he says, waving a hand around.

“Everything reflects our way of thinking, even our bathrooms. We didn’t use an architect.

“The support of my family has been very important because I have been able to concentrate on the cars. I couldn’t forget about that side of things. I think the results are OK.” He takes me outside into the public area, an L-shaped space that houses the museum on one side and a customer area on the other. Its steel frame supports vast glass walls and was inspired by an iron-framed greenhouse designed

by Gustave Eiffel on the grounds of the French chateau of one of Pagani's customers. Some of the steel beams have been designed to look like a Pagani suspension arm.

Pagani’s back catalog. The Countach 25th Anniversary was his work too and a big seller, if not the prettiest of that model.

27

ETHOS

DREAM GARAGE H O R AC I O PAG A N I ' S

Most carmakers only allow their own cars to be parked in front of HQ, and most car company bosses usually avoid mentioning the competition. Not Pagani. His personal parking space outside his new factory is as likely to be occupied by his Porsche 918 or Ferrari TdF as one of his own cars.

He doesn’t conceal his lifelong enthusiasm for the other supercar makers just because he competes with them.

—EXCEPT IT’S HIS REALITY

28

HORACIO PAGANI ON THE: PORSCHE 918: “Porsche is the reference point when it comes to sports cars.

It is the sports-car maker. Ferrari is iconic, incredible, legendary.

But at the technical and engineering level, Porsche is the greatest—beyond a doubt. I own a 918. I bought it because I like Porsche GT cars, even though I don’t like hybrids. But if you buy

a car like that, it’s not a rational choice. Why did I buy it? Because I love it, full stop. During the final tests for the Huayra BC at Imola we tested it against a 918.

We said, ‘Which car is the standard that others are held up to now?

Which hypercar of the last few years has the best performance?’

We all agreed that it was the 918.”

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“My Tour de France arrived recently. I drove it with a client a bit, and it started to sing. It sounded like Whitney Houston, it sang like Pavarotti, endless long notes. It gives you goosebumps.

It’s incredible. When I uncovered the car and saw the Ferrari logo, I had the urge to kiss it.

Even telling the story now makes me emotional.

It really hit me.”

“I like the fact AMG is making a car with F1 technology. I will buy one.

Mercedes has been incredible in its use of this technology, and it has shown that by winning in F1. I think it’s fantastic that it is producing a supercar with that technology.”

“I was the first to order it in Europe.

In my view, the designer who created that car has very good little hands. I think it’s one of the most beautiful supercars of the last 20 years, one of the most original of the last 20 years.

Perhaps the engine is a bit on the small side.”

“The McLaren building is truly incredible, fantastic, one of the most amazing factories I have ever seen. I have been twice to visit. The details are incredible.

I promise you: If the P1 hadn’t been hybrid and therefore weighed 1,400 kilograms (around 3,100 pounds), I would have bought one.”

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ETHOS

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Why? Because the clients trust us. They send payment for something that they will have in two years, and we use the money they send to build the car. That’s a lot of faith.”

The same faith might allow him to expand the output of this new factory far beyond 50 cars each year. But in contrast to other CEOs who talk endlessly of expansion, Pagani would like to keep things this way.

“We arrived in 1999. That was the starting point, day one,” he reflects. “Without any financial support it was a very, very difficult task. But we believed in it, and we did it. We not only created a new way of building cars, but we created a name. Now we could create a second line of cars, thousands more of them, to increase our profits to 500 million euros a year. But I don’t give a damn about that kind of thing. We never wanted to be a second Ferrari or Lamborghini. With respect to the love and passion for Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, and the motor history of Modena, we want to be something small but intelligent. We want to be here, in our place.” AM

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is about the size of four tennis courts and is laid out like a piazza. There are original street lights, and in one corner sits a brick campanile, or bell tower, complete with a bell that tolls on the hour, sourced from a foundry established in the 15th century. Pagani needed to disguise an elevator shaft and thought this might be a fun way to do it. As he shows it to me, a worker strolls past whistling the theme to “The Godfather.” Maybe they do that for every foreign visitor.

The atmosphere is more like a highend furniture showroom than a car factory. It’s quiet and smells nice, chiefly because little dirty work is done here.

This is mainly an assembly operation: The cars are bolted together from a menu of exquisite parts, mostly made by outside suppliers and delivered in cut-foam trays like jewelry. Although the engine, gearbox, trim, and paint are outsourced to other suppliers— and there’s no shortage of good ones nearby—the carbon fiber could only be done in-house. Its intelligent, beautiful use has defined Pagani’s career.

So in a room on the mezzanine (where there are fewer dust particles than at ground level) held at a precise 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees F) and reverberating to a bad ’80s rock station playing Toto’s “Hold the Line,” about a dozen people, mostly women, press every curve of a Pagani into a mold by hand. Other carmakers might claim to build their products by hand, but panels are generally stamped out “WE COULD by a press. On a Pagani, every sinew INCREASE OUR really has been formed by hand. It’s PROFITS TO the modern equivalent of the way a 500 MILLION coachbuilder in the past would have shaped a panel with an English wheel.

EUROS A YEAR. The idea of having a minor crash in BUT I DON’T GIVE A one and asking these people to start DAMN ABOUT THAT that vast rear clamshell all over again KIND OF THING.” is too embarrassing to contemplate. As I visit, they are making the first pieces for the new Huayra Roadster. Even at roughly $2.4 million apiece, all 100 were sold to existing Pagani customers before the silk was pulled off the car during the 2017 Geneva auto show.

“When you are selling cars before you have made them, your sense of responsibility toward your clients increases dramatically,” Pagani says. “That’s why all of us, not just me, have to give so much more than we ever imagined.

NOISE, VIBRATION &

TIME MAKES CARS CLASSIC AND PEOPLE OLD

HA R S HNESS ILLUST RATION by TIM MARRS

WHEN THEY FAIL, PEOPLE FAIL FOR KEEPS. BUT IF YOU’RE RESOURCEFUL ENOUGH AND SO INCLINED, YOU CAN FIX CARS FOREVER SO THEY NEVER DIE.

Jamie Kitman

32

P E O P L E A N D C A R S . Although it’s wrong— logically, scientifically, morally, you name it—I often conflate the two.

Because cars are like people. You want to count on them. But often you can’t. You might love them both, but it’s not like either of them is never more trouble than they’re worth.

The care and feeding of cars and people is ongoing and expensive. But the car has the advantage of being a machine. A person is like a machine, only cleverer and much more complicated, totally amazing yet somewhat imperfect, and sometimes much harder or even impossible to fix. Needless to say, we humans come with no warranty, and there’s no money back if we go wrong. Quite the contrary.

People and cars both get old. And old cars can be like old people. They break down, and as time goes on they break down more and more. They are no longer in step with the fashion. They sag at the edges. They have a tendency to make bad noises unexpectedly and generally smell worse than they once did.

On the other hand, when they fail, people fail for keeps. But if you’re resourceful enough and so inclined, you can fix old cars forever so they never die. Not only will they outlast you, you can even fix it so your old cars perform better now than they did when they were young. And that’s a place no amount of Cialis or cod liver oil will take you.

Now to be fair, give modern medicine time. You don’t have to squint too hard to see the reality of 170-year-old humans out there on the horizon, the wealthy probably first among them. But as of today, you get old, you die, even if you’re rich.

A rich man’s vehicle, however? That need never die. And neither must

NVH

a poor man’s machine ever perish, if somebody chooses to give it life. We might not ourselves witness the majestic wonder of a 170-year-old Pinto parading under its own power down Outer Space Boulevard, but there could well be future generations that will.

Whatever an automobile’s age, pedigree, or caste, all it takes on a potential savior’s part to preserve it for eternity is an ability to diagnose the problems, however numerous, varied, or obscure. It also takes a willingness to locate or re-create any needed parts, however thankless or impossible a task that might be. Plus there are the extraordinary amounts of time and interest it will take not just to do the job but to also develop the experience and acumen to do something relevant with the pieces you’ve collected, enabling a proper remedy. Time to spare and lots and lots of money with which to pay others to do all this for you will also help.

When it comes to prolonging life, money is great for cars and people. Although ideally you’d still want to have some ability to evaluate the quality of the work you’ve paid for, requiring again some sense of what the work actually entails and what the fixed car ought to look and feel like. By contrast, after an operation, your body tells you pretty quickly whether or not it’s better.

This DIY repair option constitutes one of the many differences in the operational cycles of people and cars. Most folks, even those

who happily tear down their own cars to the smallest washers and screws, won’t even attempt tackling the simplest jobs the same way at home when they’re truly personal. By which I mean when the subject is no longer GM A-bodies but their own bodies. You know those thrifty and handy types who like to take everything apart, label it, figure out how it works, and then put it all back together? Things would be different if they practiced surgery out in the garage the way they fix cars—knocking AUTOMOBILEMAG.COM

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off an appendix with a few buddies, a case of beer, maybe a blunt or two, and a mobile Ted Williams-signature-model operating theater from Sears, Roebuck & Co. But they don’t.

The seemingly gratuitous Sears reference is not without somber purpose. Sniffle along with me now, lovers of classic cars and classic people. Bow your head and add your voice to those wishing godspeed and the best in afterlife service for Sears, that once great supplier of tools, parts, and automotive lifestyle equipment, lying splayed at death’s door as I write. When I was a young motorist, I always headed to Sears for tools and 6-volt batteries (an MG took two.) But things have changed. Let us pray the once great establishment (now owned by Kmart) may rest in peace when it ascends to the heavens. Or better yet, rest in pieces forged of vanadium steel, like one of its fine Craftsman wrench sets from bygone days when Sears seemed as enduring an institution as the government and your local bank, when lifetime guarantees really appeared to mean something beyond marketing lip service.

These days, any automobile 25 years of age or older is eligible for “classic car” insurance—meaning dramatically lower rates for the customer at the price of use restrictions (no driving to work, for example) and annual mileage limits. As a serial old car owner, I’m all for these policies. They make owning and driving old cars a lot more affordable.

Ironically, people who insure these cars are also typically required to be more than 25 years old—by which time in life few people are accurately described as classic. That is an honor we typically reserve for those who’ve lived for 40, 50, 60 years or more, people who coincidentally are also the

most likely classic owners. Yet while all old cars are deemed “classic” for insurance purposes so owners can pay less, all old people are deemed old by insurers and must always pay more.

This points to the fact that mortality rates fall for cars as they grow old, while the likelihood of human mortality certainly increases with advancing age. Once a vehicle makes it to 25 years of age, it is more likely to make it to 50 than it was making it to 25 in the first place. Once it’s made 75 trips around the sun, it’s almost surely going to make it to 100, by which time its eternal life is all but guaranteed. They might not be worth a ton, but who junks a Model T anymore?

And so it is that aging is a simple and remediable fact for a car—more gloom than doom. If you or your successors in this mortal coil have the time, you’ve got the car. But when it comes to people, death remains inevitable, and it’s a matter of great existential sadness. If we love them enough, cars—and the memories they evoke—stick around. People go away and don’t come back. Maybe that’s part of the classic car’s allure. AM

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T HE AS P HA LT

SURVIVING IS PRICELESS

J U NGL E

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ILLUST RATION by TIM MARRS

Arthur St. Antoine

I E N J OY A U T O M O B I L E S of every shape and form, but to me nothing beats driving a classic, being whisked back through time amid the shimmies of aging sheetmetal, the unfamiliar whir of a decades-old engine, and the aroma of sunbaked leather and unfiltered exhaust, all the while straining to pick up the echoes—the words and curses and happy whoops—of all those who’ve held this steering wheel long before I did.

In my three-plus decades in the auto-scribbling biz, I’ve been fortunate enough to drive some truly unforgettable machines: Clark Gable’s 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing, a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28 race car from the original Trans-Am series, the 1969 AstroVette once hurled around Cape Kennedy by Apollo 12 moonwalker Alan Bean, Old Red, the 1964 Meyers Manx dune-buggy prototype—plus so many others I’ll never remember them all.

One car, however, stands above all the rest. I drove it early in my career, in the late 1980s, so the awe factor was multiplied tenfold. But it also had the three elements that make an automobile seem priceless: It was exceptionally rare, of huge historical significance, and worth one helluva lot of money. Before I’d even seen the car in person, it had aged me by a couple of years. I was haunted by the thought of what might happen if I missed a shift or suddenly went crazy and aimed the thing at a brick wall.

The car in question was then the most expensive automobile in the entire world, a Bugatti Type 41 Royale. It was one of just six built between 1926 and 1931, a wheeled jewel that Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan had recently purchased for $8.1 million. The price almost seemed reasonable. With a 12.8-liter straight-eight with pistons the size of coffee cans, La Royale was the largest automobile ever built. This was

AJ

chassis number 41150, the Double Berline de Voyage, the Royale that creator Ettore Bugatti had kept for himself. No pressure. If I wrecked this masterpiece, I’d only be crucified on the “CBS Evening News,” forever hounded by furious auto enthusiasts and wolfish lawyers, and probably banned from ever ordering Domino’s pizza again.

When the big day arrived, my knees shook.

Really. I was 26 years old, living in a onebedroom apartment, about to drive a car worth more than Zimbabwe. When I arrived at the small airport (we figured dodging King Airs and Cessnas was safer than going out on the open road), there sat the Bugatti, as massive as a tractor, its paintwork gleaming black and yellow in the sunshine. To my eyes the Royale looked more like a vintage hearse—or maybe a jalopy straight from the set of “The Munsters.” It did look expensive, though. I could practically see those millions of dollar bills fluttering in the breeze.

I climbed aboard and settled into the righthand driver’s seat long ago occupied by maestro Bugatti himself. Way out ahead of me, atop the radiator cap, proudly stood the Royale’s hood ornament, a sculptured “prancing elephant” created by Ettore’s brother, Rembrandt. For years during World War II, this grandiose automobile—more than twice the price of a contemporary Rolls-Royce when new—was condemned to wallow in foul French sewers, hiding out of sight from the Nazis. I couldn’t help but think: poor little elephant.

Finally I cranked the huge engine to life, gently nudged the lever into gear, and eased off the clutch. For a while, my drive went fine. No Bonanzas crashed into me. Despite its size, the Royale proved to be a delightful machine, with light control efforts, smooth power delivery, and surgically precise steering. Soon I was gaining confidence—and speed. The car felt happy to be alive; I swear I saw the little elephant stand taller in the rush of wind. I pressed harder on the gas, feeling giddy enough to think about even squealing the tires a little.

Suddenly—the horror!—I noticed steam pouring out from under the hood. Immediately I shut down the engine, but Rembrandt’s elephant was already wet with radiator tears.

I slumped in the big driver’s seat, crushed. I’d just blown up the world’s most expensive car.

“Nah, she’s fine!” yelled the car’s handler as he approached with a smile and a rag.

“Overheats a lot. We just add some more water, and off she goes again!”

I went back to my apartment and composed myself with a few extra beers. And a pizza. AM AUTOMOBILEMAG.COM

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LETTERS

Write: Automobile magazine, 831 S. Douglas St., El Segundo, California, 90245.

Email: letters@automobilemag.com Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Customer service: automobile@emailcustomerservice.com; 800-289-2886

YOU LITERALLY WON’T HAVE TO

LIFT A FINGER

ALFA MAIL

wheel drive was hardly noticeable. No other cars ever left that Alfa behind.

With the five-speed transmission and well-chosen gearing, it was a rocket to about 120 mph, all the while singing that lovely Italian, twin-cam song. It was also a joy to open the hood or even put the car on a lift and look at all the artfully designed, finned, cast aluminum bits and pieces. I never had more fun driving, before or since.

Would I buy a new Alfa Romeo Giulia?

You bet!

CHARLES WEINER

G R E AT S T O R Y A B O U T

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ASSUR IT Y O .E .MR. C O LO H MA TC UA RANTE

the “Alfa Dogs” (June). During my stay in Rome, Italy, in the 1970s, I saw many Alfa Romeo Giulia TI Supers painted in police and carabinieri colors zip around the city with their two-tone European sirens blaring. There would be four carabinieri in the car, and as it went fast over cobblestone roads, the wheels would spin not just in first gear but in second and third, as well. Of course the cars were the most powerful option available, plus the police mechanics tuned them to go fast.

In the early 1980s law enforcement changed over to the Alfetta, which was even more powerful. And now it has been reported that the Italian police acquired two of the 505-horsepower Giulia Quadrifoglios with a top speed of 190 mph. Only a handful of specially trained police drivers are allowed to use them. Although there is a speed limit of 130 kph on the Italian autostradas or toll motorways, there are many Ferrari, BMW, and Lamborghini drivers who exceed it by a large margin. I’m sure the Alfas are up to the challenge.

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Woodland, California

The article on the three Alfa Romeos brought back fond memories. Living in Buenos Aires in 1995-’96, I had a 155 sport sedan with a 2.0-liter engine featuring two spark plugs per cylinder, variable valve timing, a variable-intake system, and fuel injection, plus a fivespeed gearbox, Pirelli rubber, and a locally made “sport” exhaust system.

It only had about 150 horsepower, but it was a terrific driver. The front-

Ave Maria, Florida

MY POMONA For two wonderful years I lived two miles from the Pomona Fairgrounds (“Paradise in Parts and Pieces,” June).

The sounds of the drag strip could be heard whenever action was going on at the track. Rain or shine I was at the fairgrounds on swap meet weekends.

As I remember, Saturday afternoon was when the vendors and show cars arrived. I would stand outside the gates and watch the action. Sunday morning I walked down to the grounds and paid my entrance fee and had a fantastic experience ogling the cars and walking the miles of vendor spaces. Any car guy or gal who has not done the Pomona Swap Meet should make every attempt to do so.

It is spectacular.

SAM LOLLAR

Carencro, Louisiana

ONE MAN’S TREASURE Regarding your June article on the “collectible” 1988 Ford Mustang 5.0, just a quick note to owner Matt Farah.

A lesson I learned some years ago after spending huge money and time restoring several Italian “exotics” I just knew would be world-beaters: A POS you invest $50,000 into is still a POS in the end, no matter how you feel about it.

DAVID POLLOCK

Oklahoma City

GOLF R VS. MUSTANG I have been shopping recently for a new car, with about a $40,000 cap. I was looking at your February issue,

→ → which oddly enough had both of my candidates in it: the Mustang EcoBoost and the Golf R. The article made my decision easy. The Golf R is the better choice by far, as it is quicker, faster, lighter, comfortably seats five, has better visibility, handles better, has better ride quality, and is better equipped at the base-price level. Having extensive test data on both cars helped, as well. With all the global competition, it saddens me Ford cannot produce a comparable car to the Golf R. In fact, in most positive aspects, the Mustang does not even come close to the Volkswagen. Thank you for making my choice easier.

There’s always time for a shine.

MICHAEL HEAD

Scottsdale, Arizona

We hope you at least remembered to attempt to test drive a Focus RS. —Ed 500 UNMISSABLE MILES I very much enjoyed Arthur St. Antoine’s column, “Indy Jones” (June). I am not a racer, but I am a fan of the Indy 500. I went to qualifications for the first time in 1974 at the urging of my college roommate.

I was uncertain, and he said, “You need to go once. You’ll either love it or hate it.” Well, I loved it and have only missed Indy weekend twice in the ensuing 43 years. There is quite simply no substitute for the feel, the smell, the crowd, the action, and the fun.

Last year, one member of our group asked me for a photo of the tickets.

He had shirts made that featured the photos, which we proudly displayed as walking billboards on race day last year. Keep up the good work.

JON BERNARDI

San Marcos, California

HOME ON THE RANGE Thanks for the wonderful excursion to Ladder Ranch (“Where the Buffalo Roam,” June). Manager Steve Dobrett and chef Tatsu Miyazaki are living a life of absolute tranquility and harmony with nature. Thanks, Ted Turner, for being a great steward of God’s creation and for allowing us a glimpse of your love of the West.

JAMES CIHOWIAK

Appleton, Wisconsin AM

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RUGGEDNESS

By Design

by R O B E R T CUMBERFORD

Range Rover

ELEGANT

VELAR

BY DESIGN / RANGE ROVER VELAR

inward toward the rear over the entire length of the passenger compartment from the A-pillar aft in both plan and profile.

In its formal sophistication, the Velar is the antithesis of the original Land Rover Defender, which ceased production last January after 68 years on the market and was almost surely the highest-drag, least-slippery passenger car in production during its lifetime. There’ll be a successor to the Defender sometime soon, but its shape is likely to completely reverse previous practice apart from having an aluminum body, as all Land Rovers did from 1948.

Even though it’s the most aerodynamically efficient model in Land Rover’s history, the Velar isn’t the most luxurious or prestigious Range Rover, nor is it the sportiest. But I think it’s the most serious and mature design in the entire company portfolio. It’s a product capable of prodigious off-road feats but clearly aimed toward on-road urban and suburban use. As is the Jaguar F-Pace with which it shares platform elements, it’s a sensible and economical way to extend Jaguar Land Rover’s industrial investment. The two base companies that could not stand on their own despite the many virtues of their cars seem to have come up with a winning hand under the apparently benevolent management of India’s Tata, which has let its staff do what it was able to achieve all along had it been properly guided. May this long continue.

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W I T H A H A L F dozen model ranges available in Land Rover’s Range Rover stable, you would think there would be little need for the Velar, a completely new model named after the few original Range Rover prototypes made back in the ’60s. To keep the then-radical concept of a somewhat luxurious full-time all-wheel-drive wagon secret, one of Rover’s engineers created a fictitious car company and registered those 30-odd vehicles as Velars, a subterfuge honored almost 50 years later in this new model’s name. And if there might not be any absolute need for this model, there is certainly a desire for it by the company and its customers alike. It is seen by its purveyors as a particularly avant-garde design. I don’t see it that way, but I do see a carefully designed, quite surprisingly aerodynamic box with a lot of consumer appeal as a road car.

What was apparent to anyone admiring the car at the 2017 Geneva auto show, where it was first shown earlier this year, is that Gerry McGovern, the clever SUV specialist who heads design at Land Rover, has taken the Edmund Rumpler approach to aerodynamics. Rumpler’s almost century-old Tropfenwagen design had a severe vertical windshield profile but was a pure teardrop in plan view, apart from exposed wheels sticking out from the seven-passenger body. McGovern used the “fastest” windshield I can recall seeing on an SUV, but he also tapered the body

THIS LINE IS not dead straight but subtly arched upward from the upper ends of the lower grille.

DESIGN

1

Front 3/4 View

THE TRANSVERSE radius across the top of the hood is just soft enough to satisfy European pedestrian safety requirements yet remain visually crisp.

THE AERODYNAMICALLY advantageous Kamm-like roof profile shows up nicely in this view.

THE NICEST BIT of surface development on the exterior allows the top line to fade into the hood’s top, while the side profile crease dips to emphasize the fender profile.

THE SLIGHT BEVEL below the windows runs all the way around the car to the opposite front fender, where it turns down into the daylight running lamp’s rear point.

TAILLIGHTS repeat the odd little body side joggle seen on the front end and front doors.

39

A STRICTLY HORIZONTAL line provides a datum reference for the graphic composition of the entire front end—ultimately quite simple and clean.

THIS UNOBTRUSIVELY protruding lip above the lower grille sets a baseline for the entire Velar, the only such element that’s easily visible.

NOTICE THAT THE bottom of the body side paintwork is parallel to the top fender profile but sharply upswept with reference to the ground plane and base of the body structure.

BARELY DISCERNIBLE IS the blacked-out lower part of the body structure, parallel to the ground but highly skewed up at the rear at the paint intersection line.

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Interior View

40

1. The padded shelf carrying all the way across the instrument panel is so plain and so straightforward that you can admire the restraint exhibited in the understated interior design. It represents true elegance.

2. Putting the steering wheel controls in separate panels seems like a good idea, easily apprehended by a new driver

4

Profile View 6. Nose the Velar up to a wall, and this transverse flange will be the part that touches.

7. The Velar’s wheels look amply strong but are styled much more for the road than for outback dirt trails, a nice compromise between the vehicle’s different roles.

8. Flush door handles are a touch of luxury unexpected on an SUV.

and easy to live with once you’re accustomed to it.

3. Maybe this 10-inch trapezoidal outline is too understated. It’s frankly rather boring.

4. The HVAC panel is admirably clear—easy to understand and manipulate.

5. The three-part instrument cowl also represents traditional British understatement.

3 9. A huge dark volume under the tail, augmented by an upward kink in the side treatment, slims the painted portion of the rear body to sedanlike proportions.

10. There’s no pretense of the Velar being a sublimated delivery truck. The internal volume is voluntarily reduced to give a sporty line, and the roof is extended for aerodynamics.

THIS MUST BE THE FASTEST, most extreme windshield angle of any SUV today, extra sporty and highly agreeable as it tempers the boxiness typical of such vehicles.

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Do you hate your detector?

It was your best friend, now it never shuts up.

The good news: New cars have a safety feature, the blind-spot warning system. Many models use K-band radar to “see” nearby cars.

The bad news: Onboard radar turns each of these “seeing” cars into mobile K-band false alarms. A blind-spot system may tag along with you for miles.

You’re stuck, not knowing which car to maneuver away from. GPS is no V1 wins war against false alarms: New solution. It doesn’t work computer code weeds out phony K-band alerts. on mobile falses.

Why you will love V1 Problem solved: V1 has an algorithm that recognizes these mobile false alarms and excludes them, yet never blocks a real threat. We’ve named it Junk-K Fighter. And it’s now built into all new V1s.

Detectors that don’t detect: It’s easy to make a detector without false alarms. Just give up on longrange warnings. Our competitors play that game, we don’t.

First obligation of V1: V1 will never miss a threat.

Quiet is nice, but missing an ambush is fatal. That’s why we don’t use GPS. GPS knows only location, and if the frequency range of a new threat is the same as that of a blocked alarm, sorry, but GPS programming demands silence at that location, even if it’s a trap. V1 will never fail you that way.

Satisfaction guaranteed: Try it for 30 days.

If it doesn’t satisfy for any reason, send it back for a full refund.

© 2017 VRI

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DESIGN

4

A

Gerry McGovern Interview

B

Plan View LAND ROVER CHIEF

A. Seen from above, the front end is almost as round as a Porsche 918, with similar penetration benefits.

B. From about here, the body shrinks in height and width as it flows rearward.

Rear View 42

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14. Exhaust outlets are nicely shaped, essentially separated from the body, visually even more than physically.

15. One of the most original ideas on the Velar is this arched section carrying the exhaust tips completely away from the painted body panels, isolated in a dark mass below.

16. That dark mass is nonetheless artfully shaped to control the flux of air at the rear of the body form for aerodynamic efficiency.

•

11. The generous dimensions of the outside rearview mirrors are an admirable part of what is meant to be a very practical vehicle.

12. The band that carries the taillights and the badge artfully bisects the upper two-thirds of the tail, providing a very clean graphic composition with a strong lateral line on its upper edge.

13. Unfortunately, the liftover height for the rear compartment is quite high, a practical problem with most SUVs.

BY DESIGN / RANGE ROVER VELAR

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designer Gerry McGovern has had an exceptional career in design, having started with Chrysler U.K. and worked with Austin Rover when it was part of British Leyland, the last gasp, boundfor-failure conglomerate that consolidated the British motor industry before it was sold off piecemeal to French, American, German, and Indian owners. He had a big part in the last MG sports car, the MG MGF, then did a (retrospectively indifferent) stint at Lincoln at the time Ford was busily and expensively accreting small-scale manufacturers it didn’t know what to do with.

But his return to the U.K. to concentrate on Land Rover has been brilliant.

At this year’s Geneva show, where the Range Rover Velar was introduced, we had only 30 seconds to give McGovern a thumbs-up gesture and a good word.

To glean a little more, we talked by telephone while he was at the New York auto show in April.

Gerry, what’s your favorite aspect of the Velar?

GM: I have to say it’s the long wheelbase that gives us really ideal proportions.

It lets the car be smooth

6 and clean architecturally.

And, of course, details like the flush door handles add a lot.

Do pedestrian-safety regulations impose a particular problem for you at Land Rover?

GM: Well, we always have to find a solution that works for the rules and for us, but we always do resolve it. As you know, a low front makes it easier, a higher one adds difficulties, but we’ve managed.

We think the arched trim piece under the tail piece that carries the exhaust outlets is particularly effective. It’s unusual.

GM: We were determined to reduce the mass at the rear, in a different way from the Evoque—more luxurious but still sporty.

This allows us to simplify the rear aspect nicely. We do want our cars not to be overly complicated, the “less is more” idea actually.

The interior is certainly quite plain. Is that part of the same philosophy?

GM: It is. We make good use of materials on simple forms to achieve a high level of understated luxury with nothing overdone, so it is not ostentatious in any way. We have a range of colors and different ways to present the interior to suit customer desires. AM

STIRS THE SENSES, NOT THE WIND. When designing the Prius, the purpose was clear: Build a hybrid that captivates the eye without capturing the wind. One that incorporates a drag-reducing active grille shutter, a built-in spoiler, a lowered hood and aerodynamics to produce a quieter cabin, a more confident drive and a .24 drag coefficient. The Prius not only transforms how efficiency can look, but also how it should feel.

Options shown. ©2017 Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.

FG 44

FORD’S ALL-NEW GT BRINGS SOME OF RACING’S BEST PRACTICES TO THE STREET

CHICKEN? EGG? WHO CARES?

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by M A C M O R R I S O N photog raphy by W I L L I A M

WA L K E R

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Carbon fever!

Between the monocoque chassis and each individual body panel, the GT is built by Multimatic using more than 40 carbon-fiber pieces, which help to keep its weight in check.

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T H E T E A M B E H I N D the 2017 Ford GT has faced one particular question, even internally, since the program began secretly in late 2013, which explains the half smirk on Dave Pericak’s face. It also accounts for why Ford Performance’s global director has polished his go-to response, as many successful Fortune 500-level executives do, into an adagio of Teflon diplomacy.

“It’s hard to answer: Did we do a race car first, or did we do a road car first?” he says. “We didn’t do any one first.

We did them at the same time. We had to because the clock was ticking. I know a lot of people want to know, did you design a race car and make it a road car? I always say, at the end of the day, does it really matter? We have a road car, and we have a race car, and it’s all legit. I’m not trying to be coy. It was a matter of circumstance. It was, if you want to race and you want to make a road car ... it’s all gotta happen now.”

An entire book is necessary to chronicle every stage and, in automotive industry context, the bullet-quick gestation of internal drive, desires, and challenges that led to this late April day at Utah Motorsports Campus, formerly known as Miller Motorsports Park. Indeed, Automobile friend and longtime motorsports journalist David Phillips has written it. (See page 50.) The compressed version: Prior to the GT’s conception, a team including Pericak and newly named president of Ford North America Raj Nair launched Project Silver, aimed at taking the Mustang, of all cars, to race in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The 2016 installment of the endurance-racing classic would mark the 50th anniversary of Ford’s historic, 1-2-3 podiumdominating result at Circuit de la Sarthe with the GT40—a world-famous, endearing, and enduring middle finger to Enzo Ferrari. Long intimately familiar to the sports car and racing cognoscenti, the tale has since grown to near

THE EXPERIENCE FEELS QUITE LIKE DRIVING A RACE CAR BEFORE YOU EVER HIT THE THROTTLE. SO IT’S EYE-OPENING AT SPEED TO FIND THE GT ISN'T REMOTELY INTIMIDATING.

fabulist proportion. What better time then to stage a return? But the navigation of prohibitively exhaustive hardware changes necessary to put the ponycar on equal footing with established worldclass race cars from the likes of Porsche, Corvette Racing, and Maranello, among others, meant the top-level suits with final say over Dearborn’s course ultimately deep-sixed Project Silver. In the end, it was the best thing to happen to Ford’s subsequently on hold but still aspirating Le Mans ambitions.

In its wake a new project emerged, codenamed Phoenix, a nod to the countless times people inside the company over the years spoke of resurrecting the GT. Pericak, Nair, design chief Moray Callum, and a small, modern skunkworks team of swornto-secrecy members set about to create a blanksheet, mid-engine design. Channeling the spirit of the original GT40 program, they toiled after hours in a padlocked basement room of Ford’s

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HELLO, SISTER Despite the changes to automaker culture over the past five decades, the new GT’s development is reminiscent of the old GT40’s.

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Product Development Center, often late into the Midwestern darkness—and only after each team member’s official workday concluded. Few knew the concept existed, and it was a risk to raise the Phoenix sans approval from the Blue Oval’s upper echelon. But once the smokescreen dissipated and the potential of the machine behind it emerged, final approval arrived swiftly. The GT concept made its debut at the Detroit auto show in January 2015. Ford would gun for the 50th-anniversary win at Le Mans after all, and it would succeed. And the car would become the closest thing in years to a racing-homologation special.

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Engine idling, my left thumb spins a black plastic dial on the steering wheel to switch from Normal to Sport to Track and … bang! I’m startled as the GT drops off its air jacks and hovers just above the tarmac, just like the race version during a pit stop. Except there are no air jacks built into the road car. The jolt here is the result of the GT’s hydraulic active suspension, which is comprised of pushrods, torsion bars, actuators, springs, and Ford GT constructor Multimatic’s Dynamic Suspension Spool Valve (DSSV) dampers. The latter has seen duty in top-level pro racing from F1 to sports cars, and the setup, which eschews

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The 2017 Ford GT sits on UMC’s pit road early in the afternoon on a chilly spring day. An ovoid, Alcantara-covered Formula 1-style steering wheel sits in front of me, positioned via manual, two-lever multiplane adjustment. The deep carbon-fiber driver’s seat features a rake-adjustable back but no fore/aft slider; it is bolted to the carbon monocoque’s floor in the name of an improved center of gravity. An adjustable carbon-fiber pedal box—pull a nylon strap next to your right leg to unlock it, then push on the dead pedal to slide it forward, or lift your foot to allow it to spring toward you—teams with the steering column’s dexterity to suit a wide range of driver sizes. At 6 feet 1 inch tall, I’m comfortable, and there’s just enough headroom to accommodate my helmet without wedging it against the roof. The cockpit is the definition of spartan, but it’s functionally cool, with a clean industrial design resplendent in leather, carbon fiber, Alcantara, and aluminum. But from the manual ergonomic adjustments to a distinct absence of

Racing enthusiasts, be they video gamers or real track-day veterans, will appreciate the utilitarian, competitioncar-like interior.

luxury nods, this is not a working environment familiar to Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Porsche owners.

Push the red start button on the center console to stir the 3.5-liter twin-turbo EcoBoost V-6. The engine isn’t a world removed from the basic architecture of Ford’s other 3.5-liter EcoBoost offerings, sharing the same aluminum block. But compared to, say, the 450-horsepower version available in the F-150 Raptor, with which Ford says the GT’s V-6 shares about 60 percent of its parts, it rocks up to the dance with 647 horsepower at 6,250 rpm and 550 lb-ft of torque at 5,900 rpm, thanks to bigger turbos and bespoke manifolds, among other changes. Much of its development was done with it bolted to the back of IMSA-spec Daytona Prototype race cars, beginning with Michael Shank Racing during the 2014 season and, of course, continuing with Chip Ganassi Racing, Ford’s eventual competition partner for the GT program. (Ford motorsports PR still chuckles about how, for some time after the Daytona Prototype effort launched, the media didn’t figure out just why it was supplying such an engine in a class powered traditionally by nonturbo V-8s.) Fueled-up curb weight should come in around 3,265 pounds, all for a 0-to-60-mph time of about 2.9 seconds and a top speed of 216 mph.

B E C AU S E

T H E

R OA D

N E V E R

T R AV E L E D

I S

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BOOK EXC ERPT

~{INTERMISSION}~

the garage apparatus not the car) and soon effected repairs. “The second stint we got the radio back,” said Bourdais. “‘OK,’ I thought. ‘It’s back under control. Everything is good.’”

Good indeed. For all the communication problems, Bourdais had clawed his way back to within 7 seconds of the Risi Ferrari when the second chapter of his crazy ride commenced.

“We triple-stinted the tires, which was tough because the performance was degrading quite a bit,” Bourdais said. “But … we had a safety-car period, so we could follow the safety car around without putting too much stress on the tires … and then the steering wheel [electronics] froze.

I couldn’t see data, only the radio was working, and when I went into the pits, the pit-lane speed limiter wasn’t working.

So I was trying to gauge my speed from the Aston Martin ahead of me and not get a penalty for speeding in pit lane. Then when I came to a stop in the pit, I hit the kill switch on the steering wheel and the engine went brrrrrrrr … and then it started again.”

The trouble was, the moment the engine Phillips’ book shut off, fueler Lee Blackwell pluggedtakes readers along as Ford in the hose only for the engine to re-fire conceives the GT with its eye instantly, incurring a penalty for refueling on one of global with the engine running, regardless of the motorsports’ biggest prizes, extenuating circumstances. something the company hadn’t As Bourdais was reaching for the master claimed since switch on the dashboard to cut all the the 1969 race. electrical power, Dirk Müller had the door open, the window netting down, and was trying to yank his teammate out of the car—which didn’t work so well given the driver hadn’t yet released his seat belts. Meanwhile, the team had located a spare steering wheel. The beleaguered Frenchman pulled the quick-release on the BOURDAIS HAD CLAWED inert wheel, replaced it with the spare, and HIS WAY BACK TO finally, exited the car. It was, in Bourdais’ WITHIN 7 SECONDS words, “quite special.”

Müller belted-in and with a new OF THE RISI FERRARI steering wheel and four fresh Michelins WHEN THE SECOND installed, the No. 68 car burbled to life.

CHAPTER OF HIS CRAZY Müller engaged first gear and headed RIDE COMMENCED. down pit road, destined to return a few laps later to serve a drive-through penalty for refueling with the engine running. What had been a 7-second deficit had ballooned to 39 seconds. Unfazed or perhaps energized, Müller set about reeling in the Ferrari, driving—in the immortal words of Jake and Elwood Blues—“like he was on a mission from God.”

“A BIG ASK: THE STORY OF FORD’S TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO LE MANS”

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W H E N S E B A S T I E N B O U R D A I S took over the No. 68 Ford GT from Joey Hand shortly after 5 a.m., the car was a little more than a minute behind the leading Risi Ferrari.

However, if anyone could bring that gap down it was Bourdais, a formidable race driver under any circumstances but in this case one competing on his “home” circuit for the 11th time and who could probably lap Le Mans’ Circuit de la Sarthe in the pitch dark faster than most of his competitors in broad daylight.

What Bourdais couldn’t know was that he was setting off on one of the wildest rides of his career. All went well initially, but it wasn’t long before radio communications with the pits vanished.

However, while pit-board technology (as simple as chalk on a blackboard or as sophisticated as electronic pads with LED displays) went out with bias-ply tires and carburetors, every team has pit boards in case of just such an eventuality. But Bourdais couldn’t read the Ford Chip Ganassi Racing board in the glare of the headlights. “It felt like the longest stint in my life,” he said.

Fortunately, the steering wheel’s electronic data display was functioning, including a countdown of the number of laps before Bourdais had to pit for fuel.

All well and good, but could the onboard computer be trusted? It was right on the money. Bourdais made a routine stop and returned to the track. What’s more, the team tracked down the glitch (it was in

Editor’s note: David Phillips is a freelance motorsports journalist whose articles have appeared in Automobile, Autoweek, Autosport, Motoring News, and Racer. He is editorial director for iRacing.com, the world’s foremost online motorsports simulation service. Published in December 2016, his book is available for $34.95 at store.bookbaby.com/ book/A-Big-Ask1. AM

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You can’t see it, but one of the GT’s unusual and welcomed functional features is an FIA-approved rollcage mounted within its cockpit structure, straight from the factory.

haters brigade, it is very direct, with an almost springloaded feel on both street and circuit.

Our in-house hot shoe, Andy Pilgrim, takes a few laps of his own and notes immediately how well you feel grip-level and chassis-behavior changes through the steering wheel and the seat of your pants. Feedback is at a race-car level, and it’s so immediate you find yourself with what feels like extra time to react, which in turn allows you to lean on the car hard using throttle and steering adjustments that are slower than you’d expect. This makes it intuitive to maintain momentum and to keep your velocity up rather than having to wrestle with the GT, a driving style that tends to scrub speed. And when the car's front or rear does break away, it does so in an easily controlled, almost giggleinducing manner, even on this day when the 46-degree ambient temperature is somewhat less than ideal for its 20-inch Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 rubber.

The engine can sound coarse and produces a fair amount of drone if allowed to dawdle along at low-to-medium revs

T

traditional coilovers, allows for variable spring rates based on the car’s different modes. In Track and V-Max top-speed settings, it compresses a spring inside each hydraulic actuator and effectively locks those springs out of play, reducing the ride height from 4.72 inches to a staggeringly low and almost unstreetable 2.75 inches, and increases the suspension’s overall spring rate.

In other words, the experience feels quite like driving a race car before you ever hit the throttle. So it’s eyeopening at speed to find the GT is a performance monster without being remotely intimidating to drive, the polar foil to something like a Viper ACR. Then again, ease of use rather than barely controllable chaos is a noted hallmark of today’s best GT-class competition cars. This car’s hydraulic rack-and-pinion steering with a 14.8:1 ratio is the first thing you notice after grinning from the EcoBoost’s linear pull— thank you, anti-lag-boost system—to its 7,000-rpm redline.

Much to the anticipated applause of the electric steering

in a relatively high gear, and history will not remember it as an all-time orchestra. Flat out, though, it is satisfyingly delicious as you work the seven-speed Getrag dual-clutch ’box, cracking off 70-millisecond gear changes as the steering wheel-embedded shift lights illuminate. Hair on fire, it delivers a racket of a score inside the cockpit, with all manner of induction noises whistling behind your head.

This car offers plenty for enthusiasts to geek out over, not least of which is the fact air enters the large openings in

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front of the rear wheels and into the charge-air coolers before being ducted through the exterior buttresses and down into the V-6’s intake. Technically minded race fans will likewise swoon at the front suspension’s “keel” design, a layout familiar to F1 anoraks. It allows the lower A-arms pickup points to move far inboard, which in turn means other suspension pieces can be mounted within the chassis to cause less airflow disruption.

Ah, airflow, another major contributor to the GT’s capabilities. For starters, there ON SALE: Early 2018 is the body’s radical, wind-tunnel-sculpted (final 250 cars) Coke-bottle tapering and an underwing.

PRICE: Active aero elements (see page 112) $450,000 (base) (est) ENGINE: including the Gurney flap-equipped rear 3.5L twin-turbo DOHC wing, which also functions as an airbrake, 24-valve V-6/647 hp @ and closable slots in the front splitter 6,250 rpm, 550 lb-ft @ trade grip for outright speed as needed.

5,900 rpm TRANSMISSION: Combined with the careful and considered 7-speed dual-clutch manipulation of air around, over, below, automatic and through the body, Ford says the GT LAYOUT: creates 400 pounds of downforce at 150 2-door, 2-passenger, mid-engine RWD coupe mph. You feel how aero efficient this car EPA MILEAGE: is on top-end acceleration, especially the 11/18 mpg (city/hwy) way it pulls above 100 mph. Throughout L x W x H: 187.5 x 78.9 x 43.7 in the rev range it mimics the torque of a (41.7 in low mode) steam locomotive, from down low all WHEELBASE: the way to the rev limiter with stunning 106.7 in midrange surge. Coming hard out of the WEIGHT: 3,265 lb (est) track’s Turn 5 hairpin lights up the fairly 0-60 MPH: liberal traction control, even in second or 2.9 sec (est) third gear. More giggles.

TOP SPEED: 216 mph The GT is equally wild yet controllable on the street. The roads near UMC are far from inspiring, but we finally encounter a few miles of twists and turns that confirm the feedback from the track: This is a THE FIRST 750 light-touch, fingertip-rewarding chassis ARE SOLD, WITH that likes to dance as it changes direction THE APPLICATION brilliantly with supreme, instant confiPROCESS FOR dence. We might call its agility severe were it not so intuitive. Drive smoothly PURCHASING ONE yet with commitment, and the rear end OF THE FINAL 250 works in step with you, rotating through SET TO OPEN IN corners with authoritative grace and no EARLY 2018. trace of evilness.

If one performance question lingers, it concerns the giant Brembo carbonceramic brakes, a setup that provides excellent pedal feel and neck-bending stopping power. Pilgrim’s on-the-limit lapping approaching the circuit’s hairpins, however, reveals an issue that initially feels like brake fade or glazed discs, a diagnosis that makes little sense after an inspection. We instead suspect ripples and heaves in braking zones are causing the ABS system fits. Because a tire is in the air

THE SPECS

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for a fraction of a second over any ripple’s low-point, ABS senses it and releases some brake pressure. This in itself isn’t an issue, but the system needs to resume full pressure quickly when it recognizes grip has returned. In these situations, however, the GT doesn’t give back full bite for the remainder of the braking zone, something the on-site engineers say they will investigate. Perhaps we’ll soon add that informative lesson to the filing cabinet full of things Ford learned on various racetracks while testing this most addictive of supercars. The street version, as one example, received more robust front anti-roll bars as standard equipment after the race team broke more than a few.

One thing it certainly won’t bust is the six-figure sports-car sales record, as Ford announced a limited total production of 1,000 over a four-year period. The first 750 are sold, with the application process for purchasing one of the final 250 set to open in early 2018.

Fittingly, though, considering what this car represents,

The No. 1 GT40 Mk II seen below is the same car to have finished second in the controversial photo finish at Le Mans in 1966. Ken Miles and Denny Hulme drove it.

even its customer-delivery schedule is part of the competition story. The rulebook says a manufacturer must build 100 production cars in the same year as it begins campaigning a race version. Ford might have delivered as few as two by December 31, 2016, though it did receive a waiver from the FIA and Le Mans authorities allowing it to dodge the letter of the law—to the irritation of some rival team bosses, one of whom describes the situation as “disappointing” and “unfortunate that they have taken advantage of a good opportunity.”

But hey, racing wouldn’t be racing if everyone was always 100 percent satisfied.

Circling back to Pericak, I take a different—granular, really— tact with the original question. When it comes down to it, was the overwhelming desire to build a production car to sell or to win Le Mans—not to mention the seven other victories and 10 pole positions the race version has so far recorded from 26 global starts?

“The main goal was to win Le Mans,” he finally allows, the half smirk spreading into a satisfied smile. For anyone who drives Ford’s greatest supercar to date, everything about the new GT makes it impossible to forget that fact. AM

BUY IT FOR THE THIRD ROW. DRIVE IT FOR YOU. Luxury seating for seven. The INFINITI QX 60.

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2017 Jaguar

F

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IS FOR CROSSOVER

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WE START OUR LONG-TERM REL ATIONSHIP WITH JAGUAR’S FIRST-EVER SUV

Introduction

S C O F F I F Y O U must at the notion of a Jaguar crossover, but keep in mind that without one—as with certain other onceniche luxury or sports-car marques—the storied British brand might have been on its way to a permanent cat nap.

The F-Pace hit the market in May 2016 and sold north of 10,000 vehicles by year’s end.

Indeed, in only eight months the F-Pace helped Jaguar more than double its sales compared with 2015.

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So demand existed out of the gate, but there are those who wonder how much identity Jaguar is sacrificing in the name of sales targets. (There were similar reactions in 2002 when Porsche launched the Cayenne SUV, and that worked out just fine.) But these are crossover-crazed times, and Jaguar insists the F-Pace contains numerous strains of legitimate Jag-ness. To find out firsthand and see how well the company’s first SUV can withstand 12 months of hard and fun miles, we nabbed one for a Four Seasons test.

From the moment it arrived, the F-Pace didn’t exactly darken our parking lot. It’s a handsome brute of a ute, thanks to the efforts of lead designer Ian Callum and his team who have worked since 2006 to sculpt Jaguar into a thoroughly modern, design-forward brand that also incorporates clever, heritage-themed cues. Clean-sheet models such as the F-Type and F-Pace have shown Callum to be one of the best in the business, and the Jaguar design squad did a top-notch job of differentiating its crossover from those of its Land Rover and Range Rover cousins.

The F-Pace’s stance is taut and athletic, sleek but not too rakish. Stylistically it’s more in line with the Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe and BMW X6 than the Lexus RX but doesn’t necessarily ape any of them. Sometimes the available color palette significantly impacts a car’s design, so we were quite pleased with our choice of vibrant Italian Racing Red ($550). We also added the aptly named Black Design package ($350), which darkens several exterior trim pieces.

Although the SUV certainly looks the part, Jaguar knew the F-Pace also had to have credibility beneath its skin and in its JAGUAR’S ADVANCED ADAPTIVE DYNAMIC SURFACE cabin to battle the competition. To wit, the company worked overtime to RESPONSE SYSTEM ADJUSTS STEERING, ENGINE, make sure the performance envelope backed up the go-fast appearance.

TRANSMISSION, AND STABILITY CONTROL BASED It also strove to ensure the interior was ample in both materials and ON ROLLING RESISTANCE AND TIRE SLIP. space to take on the luxury-oriented

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Thanks to an advanced AWD system, refined suspension setup, and lightweight aluminum construction, the F-Pace drives a lot smaller than it is.

the Jaguar-tuned, ZF-sourced eight-speed automatic the brand employs throughout its lineup. Power is distributed to all four wheels through Jaguar’s AWD, incorporating its advanced Adaptive Dynamic Surface Response system, which adjusts steering, engine, transmission, and stability control based on rolling resistance and tire slip. This provides the SUV with a sure-footedness that makes it feel smaller and lower to the ground than it is. Combined with a double-wishbone suspension setup in the front and a subframe-mounted multilink system in the rear, plus a weight of 4,481 pounds and a monocoque comprised mostly of aluminum, the F-Pace is an agile offering.

All that extra chassis work pays dividends when things turn twisty, at least judging by what we’ve gathered so far.

Associate editor Jonathon Klein was duly impressed. “This car can hustle,” he noted. “You barely notice its size even on a tight canyon road.”

Inside, the cabin’s presentation errs on the crisp and sporty side rather than one of ornate British luxury, but its design flows smoothly. In order to amp up the interior’s luxury factor, we checked off nearly every package and addon available. The Technology package ($3,200) includes a host of features such as an upgraded 825-watt, 17-speaker Meridian sound system, navigation, and in-car Wi-Fi. The Driver Assistance package ($3,200) adds a dash of safety

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and sensibility to the mix, with a 360-degree camera setup, adaptive cruise control, and traffic-sign recognition among its features.

Jaguar Land Rover’s InControl navigation/infotainment system has garnered mixed reviews from our testers in other vehicles, thanks to some glitches and sluggishness, but to its credit JLR has updated it consistently. Our unit is the upgraded InControl Touch Pro with a 10.2-inch screen and quad-core processor, and it’s been so far, so good from the colorful and responsive interface. The Meridian sound

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crossovers in this class. The BMW X4 and Audi Q5 were initial benchmarks, but according to Jaguar’s off-road department, the engineering team went back to the lab when the Porsche Macan broke cover. As a result, Jaguar claims the F-Pace is nearly as agile as the Macan, yet with 33.5 cubic feet of cargo room, it can swallow more supplies than the Q5 with 28.7 cubic feet. This is the type of vehicle designed to carve up some tasty canyon roads with a load of camping gear tied down in the back on the way to a weekend getaway. (It’s on the list.)

When it came to selecting options, we couldn’t resist the range-topping S trim, which crams some extra muscle under the hood in the form of Jaguar’s trusty 3.0-liter supercharged V-6 with 380 horsepower and 332 lb-ft of torque, a 40-hp boost over the next-most powerful F-Pace trim, the 35t. This is the same raucous six-pack that powered our dearly departed Four Seasons 2015 Jaguar F-Type S Coupe.

In our F-Type, the 3.0-liter shouted through a standard adjustable active exhaust, offering up a banshee soundtrack with cracks and pops on overrun that harkened back to the less restricted sixes of the 1960s. It’s a feature not offered on the F-Pace, which left some editors initially less impressed with the crossover’s more muted war cry. “Drones with just a hint of supercharger whine instead of something more musical,” said senior digital editor Kirill Ougarov.

However, the F-Pace’s supercharged firepower is expertly routed through what has become an industry standard,

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system is outstanding, but the rearview camera’s odd angle does not thrill us.

We also opted for some additional pampering by ordering up the Comfort and Convenience pack (an $1,800 grouping that includes climate-controlled front seats and heated, power-reclining rear seats) and the $2,200 Luxury Interior option, adding accoutrements such as four-way climate control, a lockable and air-conditioned glovebox, and configurable interior mood lighting.

Sprinkle on a few extras such as the heated front windshield ($375), head-up display ($990), and the nifty Activity Key armband, which allows us to leave the heavy metal key in the car while we wear an access key on the wrist ($400), and our F-Pace S settled in at $71,360 as tested.

“IT’S A CLASSY AROUND-TOWN CROSSOVER THAT’S RIGHT AT THE TOP OF THE CLASS.” → → 62

IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING It might wear SUV proportions, but the design is pure Jaguar, incorporating the best bits from the XE and XF sedans.

So far we haven’t shied away from putting the F-Pace to work, whether it’s turning heads at the restaurant valet stand or soaking up sun with a surfboard on the roof. Editorin-chief Mike Floyd recently had some family in town and found the F-Pace to be a perfect way to shuttle them around.

“We got lots of admiring looks, there was plenty of room for four, and the F-Pace had no issues getting up to speed with everyone on board,” he said. “It’s a classy around-town crossover that’s right at the top of the class.”

It was a no-brainer for Jaguar to produce the F-Pace, and on the surface, at least, it seems like a job well done. AM

THE SPECS

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P I C T U R E T H E 1 8 T H fairway at Pebble Beach in midAugust, and you don’t think of golfers trying to keep their Titleists out of Monterey Bay’s picturesque, kelpstrewn waters. Instead, your mind is likely on rows and rows of precious metal: race-winning Ferraris from the 1950s; pre-war, custom-bodied Packards, Talbot Lagos, and Bugattis; and maybe a smattering of unrestored preservation cars, wearing their factory-original checked lacquer paint and pitted brightwork like a badge of honor.

But this year, there’s a twist.

Two automotive one-offs known as the XR-6 “Tex” Smith Roadster and The Reactor are crashing the highfalutin Pebble party. They’re part of the larger American Dream Cars of the 1960s special class, open to vehicles designed

A DIFFERENT KIND OF SHOW CAR 66

by R O R Y J U R N E C K A photog raphy by B A R R Y

J. H O L M E S

CLASSIC

and built in America in the ’60s, thanks to dreams of individuals as opposed to corporate think tanks.

The class has been curated carefully by well-known automotive journalist and historian Ken Gross, whose words have graced the pages of many magazines, including Automobile’s, over the past several decades.

“It’s a mistake to typecast Pebble Beach as a place that all you’re going to see is Delehayes and Duesenbergs,” says Gross, who has been a Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance judge for 28 years and serves on its selection committee. “We really do stretch the envelope on interesting cars.”

“Interesting” is one way of putting it. The XR-6 Roadster looks like a full-scale car from a vintage amusement park kiddie ride, and The Reactor seems every bit the Hollywood star car it would eventually become. More than that, they represent the vision of their creators, former Hot Rod editor LeRoi “Tex” Smith and legendary car customizer Gene Winfield. Each car was born in the misty haze of imagination, transformed into real metal and rubber and Plexiglas, belching sooty exhaust as they go.

“These were individuals who had an idea that they wanted to bring to fruition, and we’re celebrating that,” Gross says. “We’re celebrating automotive ingenuity and innovation in that era. Even though all these designers dreamed the same dream, these people were all substantially different from each other.”

Pair of SoCal customs set to I N VA D E the Pebble Beach Concours

67

68

“It’s as nontraditional a hot rod as you can possibly find. It is very much a product of its time.”

The XR-6 was not only a show car but also a model kit.

AMT helped fund the project in exchange for the rights to sell XR-6 toy car models.

RED-HOT ROLLER Few would call the XR-6 a conventionally pretty car, but the asymmetrical styling was radical for its day.

CLASSIC

Unhappy with the amount of heavy lead filler Barris’ shop used in the XR-6’s nose section, Smith had Gene Winfield re-skin the front end in aluminum.

XR-6 19

TA K E T H E L AT E

LeRoi “Tex” Smith, for example. Born in Oklahoma in 1934 but raised for a time in Texas, Smith was an Air Force fighter pilot before settling into California’s burgeoning hot-rod scene and taking a job as associate editor of Hot Rod magazine in 1957. It was there where Smith, by 1961, began mulling the hot rod’s relevance in an era of ever-increasing performance from new, showroom stock cars. The XR-6 was born from this line of thinking, with the name meaning X-perimental Roadster 6-cylinders.

“The XR-6 became the cover car for Hot Rod magazine,” Gross recalls. “Tex was trying to say, ‘This is the hot rod of the future.’”

The project started in Smith’s home garage, where he welded up a steel ladder frame and dug out an engine—a hopped-up, aluminum-block Chrysler slant-six that came from a warmed-over Dodge press tester. The slant-six was unusual for its six cylinders canted at a 30-degree angle to achieve a lower profile (allowing a lower hoodline) and improve efficiency of exhaust flow. Its unique design also became part and parcel of the XR-6’s asymmetric hoodline—taller on one side than the other. Volkswagen torsion-bar suspension and Triumph disc brakes were fitted up front, while coilover shocks—a rarity at the time and inspired by Indycar design, custom-made for the project by Monroe—were fitted to the rear, along with trailing links and a Panhard bar.

Styling duties went to Steve Swaja, then a student at nearby ArtCenter College of Design, who sketched out a body with a front similar to an open-wheel race car and a rear that was a composite of a 1923 and ’27 Ford Model T body. A timely infusion of cash from scale-model builder AMT—the company wanted this new hot rod to be the basis for a model kit—took the styling to an even wilder level.

“Certain things, like having a six-cylinder engine, isn’t exactly a hot-rod-type thing,” Gross says. “But the car itself was a period piece and in its time represented a big step away from ’32 Fords and so forth. It made a big splash in its day.”

Smith wanted to have the body made of aluminum and found a builder, but AMT had a contract with ace customizer George Barris and mandated the work be done at his shop. The XR-6 was slated to debut at the 1963 Grand National Roadster Show in Oakland, California, but when Smith informed the organizers it might not be ready in time, he was told it had to be ready: The XR-6 had already won the show’s America’s Most Beautiful Roadster (AMBR) award.

The interior is simple but looks comfortable enough, a tribute to the car’s usability. Its design echoes contemporary styling cues.

The car was displayed in Oakland that year. Also at the show, Smith ran into California-based customizer Gene Winfield whom he would hire to remake the XR-6’s aluminum fenders, hood, and nose. Barris’ crew had struggled with the job and used plenty of heavy lead filler. The completed XR-6 graced the cover of Hot Rod’s August 1963 issue.

The XR-6 is now a proud part of the Petersen Automotive Museum’s collection in Los Angeles, after its purchase in 2006 by the late Robert Petersen, founder of both the museum and Hot Rod magazine. Leslie Kendall, the Petersen Museum’s chief curator, explains the XR-6’s place in automotive history.

“I think [Smith] was trying to show that a hot rod could be civilized and styled right for modern times,” Kendall says. “It’s as nontraditional a hot rod as you can possibly find. It doesn’t resemble any other vehicle and is very much a product of its time.”

70

KINDRED SPIRITS Today, The XR-6 and The Reactor are recognized not only for their advancement in automotive concepts and design but also for being shockingly well-built in an era where show cars were just that—built to show, not to drive. Although both are now undergoing some sympathetic mechanical refurbishment prior to the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, show rules state each vehicle must drive onto that famed 18th fairway under its own power. Winfield will be there, likely placing The Reactor on the grass himself. And somehow we suspect that LeRoi “Tex” Smith, who died in 2015, will be there in his own way, if only to witness the reaction of the blue blazer crowd.

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71

The

REACTOR B Y T H E T I M E the XR-6 made its name, Gene Winfield was already big time. He was a well-known car customizer based out of Modesto, California, and he had applied his aluminum-working knowledge gained from the XR-6 project to the Strip Star. When Joe Kizis, organizer of the Hartford Autorama in Connecticut, called Winfield in 1965 about building him a car for the show and paying him $20,000 to do so, Winfield knew aluminum would be a suitable lightweight material to skin his newest creation.

“It’s got a turbocharged Corvair engine, front-wheel drive, on a 1962 Citroën ID 19 chassis,” says Winfield, who at 89 is still sharp as a tack and still hard at work, though his shop many years ago moved from his mother’s backyard in Modesto to the Mojave Desert.

The flat-six engine had the same peculiar counterclockwise rotation as the original Citroën mill, but it was able to sit lower in the chassis to fit under the car’s sleek bodywork and made significantly more power.

The Reactor’s original design was a collaboration between Winfield and Ben Delphia, an ArtCenter College of Design graduate who was working in Chrysler’s design department.

“When I was a young man and got enthusiastic about cars, I lived in Patterson, which is a city close to Modesto,” Delphia recalls. “I got a ’36 Ford two-door sedan, and I wanted

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“He was looking for something that had all of the things that ... were exciting in the custom-car world at the time.”

72

Gene to customize it for me, which is what got me hooked on automotive design. I’d sketch the changes I wanted Gene to make to my car.”

Years later, after Delphia had finished school and joined Chrysler, Winfield knew he had just the person to design his latest show car.

“Ben sent me sketches,” Winfield says, “and I sent him sketches back and forth several times until I found what I liked.” Delphia says Winfield was looking for “a car that had all of the things that were going on and were exciting in the custom-car world at the time. Drag racing and custom cars … all kinds of stuff that was intermingled together. We were trying to get it to have a superior power look. A nuclear reactor was the thought that went into the car’s name.”

The result was a hot rod for the space age. The car was low and sleek, with a long, angular front end and a striking concave curve at the rear. The doors, retractable headlights, and Plexiglas windshield and roof were operated with a switch. The Citroën’s original pneumatic suspension was left intact so The Reactor (or more accurately, the Autorama Special, as then-owner Kizis named it) could be raised and lowered dramatically.

The car was a hit at the Hartford Autorama, but Kizis sold it back to Winfield not long after, and it was officially renamed The Reactor. After a little maintenance, Winfield made the Hollywood rounds with the car, where it would be featured prominently in episodes of several television shows, including “Bewitched” as the Super Car, “Star Trek,” where it was known as the Jupiter 8, and even “Batman,” where it grew ears and a tail to become the Catmobile.

The Reactor’s interior is as space age as it got in the mid-1960s, but the seats are office furniture. Pistol-grip steering wheel handles swivel when the wheel is turned.

LONG LIVE PERFORMANCE

When you create a New Sportscar eXperience, you don’t chase the competition—you chase your dreams. You build a facility that manufactures one thing: performance. You assemble the world’s best designers and engineers.

You throw in a couple of troublemakers. And you get to work. You start with the driver. You reject benchmarks. You stay true to the feeling. You do it your way.

You deliver PRECISION CRAFTED PERFORMANCE. You don’t just tell the world what you’ve created. You find a racetrack. And you show them.

Build your NSX at nsx.acura.com/build NSX GT3 Race Car shown. ©2017 Acura. Acura, NSX, and the stylized “A” logo are registered trademarks of Honda Motor Co., Ltd.

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74

“Eartha Kitt (Catwoman) was so short, I had to extend the pedals 12 inches so she could drive it,” Winfield says. “I just found out last year that she did not know how to drive a stick, so she went out and rented a Volkswagen and practiced until 2 in the morning for the next day’s shoot.”

We catch Winfield in the single day off he has between returning from a trip to Spain and boarding a flight to Australia, where he’ll chop and channel a few cars for local customers. At his own shop, there’s a right-hand-drive ’54 Chevy just in from Australia for some paint work and an old Buick from Japan that’s waiting to be chopped. Winfield has customized plenty of cars in his lifetime, but is The Reactor the one that defines his career?

“Well, partly … partly,” Winfield says. “I like to say I make a statement with each and every custom car. The Reactor, of course, was a big statement.”

After a succession of different owners, Winfield once again has The Reactor in his possession, and he’s not letting it go anytime soon. “No, no … I’m not going to sell it again,” he remarks, then laughs. “Unless someone pays me a million dollars for it.” AM

The Reactor’s doors and Plexiglas canopy raise and lower via a switch, but that doesn’t seem to make the car any easier to get in and out of.

For TV’s “Batman,” The Reactor grew ears and a tail to become the Catmobile for Eartha Kitt as Catwoman.

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THE

APOLLO GT

76

c CLASSIC

FADED DREAMS

BY AARON GOLD

PHOTOGRAPHY BY EVAN KLEIN

AND

DEVIN C

A R E T W O A L L- A M E R I C A N

MASHUPS FORGOTTEN BY TIME

77

6 B B9 0

APOLLO GT

IT HAS AN INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AND AN INSATIABLE URGE TO VENTURE OFF IN NEW DIRECTIONS ON ITS OWN INITIATIVE. DRIVING IT MAKES ME WONDER HOW ANYONE SURVIVED THE 1960S.

78

Stuck for a powerplant for his low-cost sports car, Bill Devin found the answer in the Corvair’s flat-six.

Milt Brown believed Buick’s aluminum 215 V-8 was an ideal mill for his GT.

B U D B O U R A S S A , I’m about to learn, is a man prone to understatement.

“The Devin is like driving a skateboard,” he tells me.

“It’s very quick and really responsive.” As for the Apollo GT, “You have to be pretty attentive. It’s a fun car to drive, but it takes concentration.”

In retrospect, I should have taken him more seriously.

Bourassa is a car collector from Scottsdale, Arizona, and he’s agreed to let me drive two of the rarest American cars in his collection. His Devin C is one of about 25 made, and it was Bill Devin’s own prototype. The Apollo GT is one of 39 examples built by the short-lived International Motor Cars company and one of only two automatics. Both cars stand as reminders of how difficult it is to get traction in the automotive business: Conceived in the same era, they launched hard and wound up flaming out.

Devin started his business building race cars, but he was best known for his fiberglass bodies. Made in 27 sizes to fit every chassis from Crosley to Corvette—all of which sold for the low price of just $295—these Ferrari Monzainspired shells were a fixture of the 1950s and ’60s era sports-car culture.

Still, turn-key sports cars were Devin’s dream, and in 1958 he introduced his Chevrolet-powered Devin Super Sport. It was ridiculously fast, but at $5,950 it cost more than a Cadillac. By 1961, the price was $10,000. Devin needed a low-cost model, so he designed the Devin D (for Deutschland), a rear-engine car using either Volkswagen or Porsche power. There was just one problem: Devin’s race cars were embarrassing Porsche at Riverside International Raceway in California, and as a result Stuttgart had little interest in selling him engines. The VW Bug’s mill was easier to come by, but 36 horsepower didn’t quite cut it.

Devin found his solution in the 1960 Corvair. He kept the D’s VW-sourced front end and installed the Corvair’s engine, transaxle, and rear suspension. Devin asked motorsports legend Stirling Moss to evaluate the car. Moss advised him to add one more beam to stiffen the frame.

Once that was sorted, the Devin C was born.

0

CLASSIC

“We take them to a show, and we just get bombarded,” Bourassa says. “‘What is it? What is it?’”

79

APOLLO: BASHED PANELS AND BONDO X

80

BUD BOURASSA fell in love with the first Apollo he ever saw, a red 5000 GT on the “Still for Sale” lot at a Barrett-Jackson auction. He restored the car and later sold it but soon decided he wanted another.

“One day I get a call: ‘There’s an Apollo on Craigslist!’ I called the guy and said, ‘I want the car. I’ll overnight a check, and then I’ll come look at it.’ His parents each had an Apollo. His mother was 87 and quit driving. It looked beautiful, and it drove fairly well, and I knew they were few and far between, so I bought it.”

But it turned out the car’s beauty was barely skin deep.

“I had a guy soda-blast the paint off, and it was Bondo everywhere! His mother had crashed every corner. They used a slide hammer, then Bondoed it in.”

Bourassa sent the Apollo to the body shop for new panels and almost lost the car.

“It was there for six or eight months,” Bourassa remembers. “Finally they called and said, ‘It’s done.’ It was 114 degrees, and I said, ‘I don’t really want to go get the thing, it’s so hot.’ But I hooked up the trailer, drove into Phoenix, and loaded it up, and that night the place burned down.

Everything in it was destroyed.”

The fire left Kurt Sowder, who did the metalwork, out of a job, so Bourassa hired him.

And as it turned out, there was still plenty to do on the Apollo.

“The front clip was badly smashed and puttied,” Bourassa explains, “so we got a new one made in Italy. The guy cut it in half to save on freight! I just about crapped. I called him on the phone: ‘Why? Why?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s a lot cheaper to ship in smaller boxes.’ We had to put it back together without making it look wavy. It was really a job.”

It was only later that Bourassa learned just how rare his Apollo was. Not only was it one of just two automatic-transmission examples, but it was also the second car off the production line despite having serial number 0005.

“They didn’t want the customers to think it was the second car built, so they gave themselves a little cushion,” Bourassa explains. An outside fuel-filler flap, downward-angled switches, and chrome trim around the secondary gauges mark this as one of the first two cars built.

Despite its rarity, Bourassa drives it regularly.

“People say, ‘Are you driving it?’ Well, yeah.

You can’t just let it sit and deteriorate.” AM

The C was made with weekend racers in mind, but the Apollo GT was more of an American answer to European GTs. It was dreamed up by a young California engineer named Milt Brown, styled by Art Center graduate Ron Plescia then later restyled by Franco Scaglione in Italy.

Brown saw great potential in Buick’s allnew 1961 Special—not only the light and powerful all-aluminum 215 cubic-inch V-8 but the suspension as well, particularly the rear axle’s four-link coil-spring setup. All were adopted and improved for the Apollo.

Carrozzeria Automobili Intermeccanica of Turin, Italy, hand-built and assembled the bodies, frames, and interiors and shipped them to the newly formed International Motor Cars in Oakland, California, for installation of the mechanicals.

The GT was light (at 2,440 pounds, it was 700 pounds lighter than a fiberglassbodied Corvette), and it was quick for its time—0 to 60 mph in a claimed 7.5 seconds, though contemporary magazines timed it about a second slower. It went on sale in 1963 for $6,597, midway between a Jaguar XKE and a Mercedes-Benz 230SL. Reviews were good. “Handles as well Leather-lined or better than a 2+2 Ferrari, an Aston interior and Jaeger gauges DB4, and a Sting Ray Corvette,” racer and give the Apollo respected journalist Denise McCluggage a European feel. Matching wrote in Science and Mechanics magazine. luggage was a lucky swap meet In 1964, IMC added a convertible and a find. This is one new version with an iron-block 300 cubicof two automatic IMC Apollos. inch Buick engine that became known as Note the funky shift pattern. the 5000 GT, with the 215-powered cars adopting the 3500 GT moniker.

Settling in behind the Apollo’s big, wood-rimmed wheel, it’s easy to see the European parallels: Its leather-lined interior is snug and very obviously handmade, and the Jaeger gauges are labeled in Italian. The windshield pillars are stick-thin, and the hood seems to extend for miles. But one twist of the key, and visions of Modena are quickly forgotten. The engine rumbles to life with a delicious Detroit soundtrack.

Bourassa wasn’t kidding when he said the Apollo requires attention. With the R-1-2-N-P shift pattern of its Dual Path Turbine Drive automatic, selecting a forward gear is a challenge.

But even with the automatic transmission—remember, it was the Dynaflow from which this transmission is derived that gave us the term “slushbox”—the bantamweight Apollo is eager to take off. But it’s not so eager to stop. The brakes are drums all around with no power assist, and the pedal rides so high I feel like I have to touch my knee to my chin just to get my foot on it.

The steering wheel is offset far to the right, and despite the fact the Apollo is fitted with unassisted steering and an extended pitman arm to effectively speed up the ratio, it still responds like a Kennedy-era Buick. It has an independent spirit and

CLASSIC

APOLLO MISSION The GT bears more than a passing resemblance to a Ferrari 275 GTB. But once you turn the key, there’s no mistaking the rumble of the American V-8.

The Devin C is street legal but a race car at heart. This is Bill Devin’s original prototype, which once ran 167 mph at Bonneville with an experimental supercharger.

82

an insatiable urge to venture off in new directions on its own initiative. Driving it makes me wonder how anyone survived the 1960s.

The Devin C is a completely different experience, more race car than road car.

Devin offered the C with engines rated from 80 to 150 hp, with the highest-spec model using the turbo unit from the Chevy Corvair Corsa. Bourassa’s Devin has a naturally aspirated engine with a multi-carb setup, and a dyno test revealed 180 horsepower—plenty for a car that weighs about 1,400 pounds.

First gear in the close-ratio four speed is funky, if you can even find it. This is still a ’50s-era American transmission.

Once you’re in second, you really start to boogie. I expected the Corvair mill to echo the sophisticated thrum of a Porsche flatsix, but the largely unrestricted exhaust on Bourassa’s car belts out a bratty blat like a demon Volkswagen. The Devin steers a bit like a Volkswagen, too. There’s more on-center play than I expected, but once it begins to respond to the wheel it never stops. This car lives to change direction.

Like the Apollo, this Devin has drum brakes, and it takes a deliberate foot on the pedal to haul it in. Clearly the car was meant to go, not stop. Out of respect for its rarity—and a passing concern for Scottsdale’s traffic laws—I remain mostly at second-gear speeds. The Apollo got my blood pressure up, but the Devin is pure adrenaline. I never wanted to stop driving it, a plan the brakes clearly agreed with.

So what happened to Devin and Apollo? In the end, both companies simply ran out of cash.

“I think [Devin] was undercapitalized, like most startup businesses,” Bourassa says. A successful businessman himself, he knows a thing or two about running a company. “There just wasn’t money there to research and build the cars. He sold a lot of fiberglass bodies for $295, and you can’t make a lot of money doing that.” Devin sold just 25 Model Cs between 1959 and 1965, when he finally threw in the towel.

A similar fate befell International Motor Cars, despite high demand.

“They had orders they couldn’t fill,” Bourassa explains. “They were buying the motor, the suspension, and all the running parts over the counter from Buick. They owed Intermeccanica a lot of money for the production they had already shipped.” With some 39 cars completed, Intermeccanica demanded payment, and IMC went bankrupt.

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While Bourassa went looking for the Apollo, his Devin C found him.

“This was Bill Devin’s car,” Bourassa explains.

“I have pictures of it racing at Riverside. All of the famous racers we know, from Stirling Moss to Dan Gurney, they raced against it. Bill Devin painted it gold so it wouldn’t be confused with Max Balchowsky’s yellow car, Ol’ Yeller.

“Bill Devin was approached by Andy Granatelli, who was in the process of developing the McCullough supercharger. He wanted to mount it on the Devin. The supercharger wouldn’t fit in the engine compartment, so they cut a hole in the back fender. He ran something like 120 mph.” The car clocked an 11.94-second quarter mile at 117 mph and also ran 167 mph at Bonneville, though it was never timed officially.

The experiment done, the supercharger was removed. “There’s a picture of it on the track with the hole patched in,” Bourassa adds.

“Bill decided to restore it, and before he finished he passed away. The family sold it to another gentleman in Arizona, and lo and behold he passed away, so the family was

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Owner Bud Bourassa and bodyman Kurt Sowder handmade the low-profile Plexiglas windshield.

“We finished the car,” Bourassa says, “the way we thought Bill [Devin] would want it to be.”

looking for someone to finish the project. I was recommended by a few mutual friends, and I bought the car. The body had been painted, but there wasn’t much else done. It was a lot of parts and pieces and an old Corvair motor.”

Because of the car’s unique history, Bourassa had some flexibility with how it was finished.

“It’s not like doing a restoration on a Jaguar E-type, where every nut and screw has to be a certain manufacturer. You can take liberties. We finished the car the way we thought Bill would want it to be.

“The windscreen and the side windows are something we wanted to do. Bill sold the cars with an old-fashioned upright windshield with chrome around it. Ugly as hell. I wanted a screen that went all the way around and on to the doors, so that’s what we did. Kurt molded it out of Plexiglas. We also did the headlight covers. We heated them up in the barbecue!

Two-hundred-twenty degrees, and they just shrunk over the form.”

Asked about the Devin’s lasting appeal, Bourassa says, “It’s unique, and it’s something I can finish up and create.” AM

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Vanguard Industries of Dallas, Texas, which made aftermarket air-conditioners, bought 19 bodies and continued production as the Vetta Ventura, though it reportedly finished only 11 cars before going belly up in 1965. The Apollo went back into production in late ’64 under its own name, with Intermeccanica shipping 24 bodies to the freshly minted Apollo Industries of Pasadena, California. But that company completed only 14 cars before it, too, became insolvent. A shop foreman bought and assembled six bodies. Four went unclaimed at the dock and were sold at a customs auction and assembled. In total, 90 Apollo GTs and Vetta Venturas were built.

Today, it seems only a handful of hardcore collectors and historians know about the Apollo or the Devin.

“We take them to a show, and we just get bombarded,” Bourassa says. “‘What is it? What is it?’ You can spend your whole day answering questions.” He’s only too happy to answer.

Bourassa is keeping the faded American dreams of Bill Devin and Milt Brown alive. “I like cars that are limited-production and unique,” he says.

Take that as his ultimate understatement. AM

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GYPSY ROS E , TH E M O S T FA MO US L OW RI DE R OF TH EM A L L , TA K ES I T S RIGHTFUL PLACE IN THE PANTHEON OF AM E RI C A N AU T O HI S T O RY

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY CASEY MAXON

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“ THE GYPSY ROSE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A PART OF LOWRIDER HISTORY. BUT TODAY IT’S PART OF AMERICAN HISTORY, TOO.”

F AT H E R ' S D AY On the Mall, Jesse Valadez II pays tribute to his forebear’s legacy. At right, the senior Valadez poses with an Imperials car club plaque.

ROSE: MERFIN / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

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A S T H E L A S T embers of daylight burn away on a warm April evening, a crowd bubbles around a large glass case commanding a prime spot on the National Mall—the Air and Space Museum on one side, the National Gallery of Art on the other, in the background the Capitol’s dome gleaming marble-white under a wash of flood lamps. Amid the onlookers, a solidly built, middle-aged Latino in a Los Angeles Dodgers jersey and baseball cap steps forward. Behind him, family members and his fiancee clasp their palms in anticipation, their eyes bright with tears. This stage has been nearly a year in the setting, a wave of inspired ideas and dogged planning vanquishing endless spools of red tape and daunting logistics to arrive at this moment. Nearby photographers and video shooters raise their cameras. The onlookers go quiet.

It’s then that Jesse Valadez II flips a switch in his hands, and the glass case alights to reveal the pink and chrome jewel inside, the Gypsy Rose, the groundbreaking custom car his father, the late Jesse Valadez (who died in 2011), brought to life some four decades ago, the Mona Lisa of its genre, the wheeled masterwork that came to symbolize and define a movement born in Southern California’s barrios that now thrives across the U.S., Mexico, and even as far away as Japan.

For half a century, from Boyle Heights near downtown into East L.A., past the pawn shops and muffler garages and taquerias along Whittier Boulevard, Angelenos have been cruising their cars at a pace that would embarrass a glacier in an internal-combustion riff on the traditional Mexican paseo—where young men and women would gather in town squares to eye each other and mingle, the more determined men arriving on horses decked out like parade floats. In the modern interpretation the saddles are long gone, but the steeds remain: big American automobiles lavished with artwork on par with graffiti by Banksy or an oil by JeanMichel Basquiat, flaunting wild suspensions chopped

to skim the asphalt yet outfitted with aircraft hydraulics to rise, hop, or even dance at the flick of a dashboard toggle—the better to impress the eyes of passing chicas. This is lowriding, “low and slow”—thumping stereos, glinting chrome, and outrageous artistic talent in an endless summer promenade largely the dominion of MexicanAmericans who proudly call themselves Chicanos.

And now one of their own, a lowrider—the most famous lowrider of them all, in fact—is standing center stage in the nation’s capital, chosen by the Historic Vehicle Association to be inducted into the National Historic Vehicle Register, where its specifications, photos, detailed scans, and entire life story will be archived for all time by the Library of Congress.

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JOHN MEDINA / @JOHNNYBLAKSOX JOHNNYMEDINAPHOTOGRAPHY.COM

“I’m speechless,” Valadez says of the Mall display. “I just wish my dad was still alive to see this.” He pauses to compose his emotions, gazing through the glass at the lowriding icon that has been his since his father bequeathed it to him in 1997. “The Gypsy Rose has always been a part of lowrider history. But today it’s part of American history, too.”

T H E E L D E R J E S S E V A L A D E Z couldn’t have foreseen that one day he’d be known as the godfather of lowriding. Born in 1946 in Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, Mexico, he immigrated to Texas in 1959 and settled in Los Angeles two years later, eventually opening an auto upholstery shop in

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J BURLESQUE DANCER GYPSY ROSE LEE PHOTOGRAPHED CIRCA 1937

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ESSE PUT UP WITH A LOT O F B U L LS H I T F R O M OT H E R CA R C LU B S B E CAU S E O F T H AT PA I N T J O B.”

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DOORS SLAMMED Sorel Knobler’s El Camino, L.A. Woman, is a lowriding tribute to a song by Jim Morrison’s trailblazing rock band, The Doors.

Garden Grove. In his lifetime he built three lowriders all named Gypsy Rose.

First came a 1963 Chevrolet Impala.

Cheap, flat, and broad, it made an ideal sheetmetal canvas. Valadez painted it a flashy pink in homage to the renowned burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee. But if the original got lost in a burgeoning crowd, the second version, another ’63 Impala that Valadez completed in the late 1960s, rocked the lowrider scene. “Jesse wanted to do a theme car, something that stood out from everything else,” says Joe Ray, chief editor for Lowrider magazine, longtime friend, and sometimes rival of Valadez. “He wanted to do roses, and he brought the idea up to his mom because she liked flowers. His mom loved the idea of putting roses on the car.”

After the new Gypsy Rose made its debut at the 1968 Winternationals Rod and Custom Show in Pomona, once again pink but now adorned with more roses than a winning Kentucky Derby thoroughbred, lowriders were never the same. “When I first saw that Gypsy Rose,” Ray says, “I thought it was beautiful, a work of art.” Of course, the design had its critics, too. “Jesse put up with a lot of bullshit from other car clubs because of that paint job,” says Tomas Vasquez, 65, president for the past 20 years of the Imperials, the legendary East L.A. lowrider club founded in the mid-1960s by Valadez and his younger brother, Armando, who was still in junior high school at the time. “They used to dog on him like, ‘How can you put effin’ roses on your car, man?’” Sorel Knobler, 63, a member of the rival Lifestyle club and owner for the past 26 years of the renowned lowrider L.A. Woman, remembers those digs.

“Yeah, our guys would make cracks about the Gypsy Rose.

But of course it was an Imperials car, so they had to do that.

But privately they also said, ‘Wow!’” The Gypsy Rose’s fame eventually extended well beyond Los Angeles—especially after it landed on the pages of the March 1972 edition of Car Craft magazine. A lowrider had finally gone mainstream.

Soon, however, Valadez’s glamorous Gypsy Rose was gone. “Today it’s one big friendship. Everybody helps everybody out, no matter what club you’re in. But in the early days, lowriding was gangs on wheels,” Vasquez says.

“You’d catch a guy from another club on your turf, and just for the hell of it you’d smash his rear window and take his plaque.” (If a car meets a particular club’s standards, its owner is allowed to “fly” a stylized club name, or plaque,

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“THE EL MONTE GANG MADE JESSE AN EXAMPLE. THEY JUST DESTROYED HIS CAR. ” 94

CRUISE SHIP It’s the 1970s all over again as Jesse Valadez II and the Gypsy Rose lead a “low and slow” promenade down Whittier Boulevard. Below, the Gypsy Rose’s flamboyant rear seat includes a cocktail bar.

inside the rear window.) No one learned that the hard way more than Valadez. “The Imperials thought it would be cool to have a party in El Monte,” says Ray, himself a member of the Lifestyle club. “And they went ahead and had it without clearing it with the local gang. Back then, if you were going to drive your car into a rival club’s neighborhood, at the very least you had to take down the plaque on your car. Well, when a few of the El Monte guys came down to the Imperials’ party and were told they couldn’t come in, they came back with their whole gang and found the Gypsy Rose parked out front. Everybody knew you couldn’t do what the Imperials did, and the El Monte gang made Jesse an example. They just destroyed his car.”

Valadez was devastated, but his dream would not be forgotten. Soon he built the third, enduring Gypsy Rose, this one a ’64 Impala, pushing the limits to create a masterwork beyond anything the lowriding community had ever seen before. “On his final Gypsy Rose, Jesse just went wild,” Vasquez says. “That car was just way ahead of its time with that crazy-ass paint job.”

Like the first flowered Gypsy Rose, the latest car was painted to Valadez’s concept by custom legend Walter Prey. “Walt was a recluse,” says Ray, who knew him well.

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(Prey died in 2011.) “He never went anywhere, maybe a five-mile radius from his shop, didn’t like people watching him work. But he was the best striper ever. Everybody talks about Von Dutch, but back then great painters like Larry Watson and Bill Carter would hire Walt to stripe their cars because he was the best.

Walt knew color coordination, how to add lines of color between the patterns, bring them all together. But … there was so much work involved. When the first flowered Gypsy Rose got destroyed and Jesse approached Walt to paint another one, Walt got really bummed out about it. He really didn’t want to do it.”

Fortunately for history, Prey eventually did take on the new Gypsy Rose. Working with painter Don Heckman, he created a canvas of intricate roses—the new version with 115 flowers compared to 72 on the second car—gauzy veils, and immaculate striping on a background of pearl white, candy red, and pink body panels. Lore has it that the paintwork is layered with more than 20 gallons’ worth of clear lacquer. To complete the car, Valadez had the interior finished in crushed velvet (his older brother Gil did all the upholstery), plus chandeliers and even a rear-seat cocktail bar.

Even though he hired others to do much of the work, Valadez was an artist in his own right, a visionary who elevated lowriders from mere custom cars into works of art. At the same time, as a community leader, he pushed back hard against the gang mentality so prevalent in the mid-1960s, advocating respect, values, and above all the importance of family. But it was the third and final Gypsy Rose, unveiled about 1974, that would cement Valadez’s reputation as lowriding’s godfather, eventually earning the car the moniker “the most famous lowrider of all time.” Later

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PA I N T A N D S U F F E R I N G After obsessively painting the second Gypsy Rose, Walter Prey ultimately shook off that car’s loss to complete an even more intricate masterwork.

that same year when NBC launched the hit Mexican-American sitcom “Chico and the Man” (starring Jack Albertson as the owner of a down-and-out garage in East L.A.), the rising young comic playing Chico, Freddie Prinze, insisted the Gypsy Rose be included in the title sequence. For four seasons— tragically, Prinze took his own life during the third season—viewers across America caught a glimpse every week of the Gypsy Rose with Jesse Valadez at the wheel. The car would later go on to appear in TV commercials and even a few feature films. “The Gypsy Rose didn’t have

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any body or engine modifications or, at first, even any hydraulics,” Ray says. Valadez added hydraulic suspension years later. “It was just pure artistry. Since then there have been lots and lots of lowriders that are way more advanced, with modern hydraulics, chopped tops, suicide doors, big V-8s, really elaborate mural paintings. But the Gypsy Rose set the benchmark. There’s a piece of the Gypsy Rose in every lowrider you see today.”

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“ W E W A N T T O tell the stories of auto genres that have been overlooked,” says Mark Gessler, president of the Historic Vehicle Association. Based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and boasting 375,000 members, it is the world’s largest historic-vehicle owners’ group. “For our first event on the Mall three years ago, we showcased the original Meyers Manx dune buggy. I always say, people come to D.C. for two things: policy or heritage. We’re trying to bring the country’s auto heritage to the people, rather than having them come to a museum. When people get up close and really see the Gypsy Rose, all that handiwork, they just go nuts.” Indeed, Gessler admits even he had much to learn. “The more we got into the Gypsy Rose and the Imperials, the more we saw them fighting the stereotypes, shaping the community to go against gang culture, working to be an outlet for something good in a tough area. Really, it’s kind of amazing that someone would pour so much time and money into a car like this and then take it out into an environment like East L.A. in the 1970s. It’s startling.”

LOW AND BEHOLD HVA president Mark Gessler, below left, toasts the Gypsy Rose. Below right, Valadez II admires the 1951 Hirohata Merc, also honored in D.C.

It’s now been a half hour since the lighting ceremony, and Jesse Valadez II is still circling the big glass case, barely taking his eyes off his car inside. “When the guys at the HVA first came to me about this event, at first I was 50/50 whether I’d do it. I mean, a lowrider on the Mall, Washington, D.C.? Is this for real? Plus, I try to be very selective about the shows I bring the car to. The Gypsy Rose is older than me by a couple of years, and I have to be very cautious, keep her out of the sun as much as I can.” His eyes drink in Walter Prey’s exquisite roses behind the glass. “She’s faded over time but faded beautifully. Of course, once I realized this event could really happen, I had to do it.”

Jesse well remembers that day in 1997 (he was still in his early 20s) when his father passed his prized Gypsy Rose on to him. “I was scared to death. It took me some time, some guts, before I’d even work on her. But I had my dad right there to show me, help me. He always said, ‘Have fun with the car.’ And I never really knew what that meant. But then later on I realized. Like being here in D.C. today, the Gypsy Rose has taken me to places I never even dreamed of.” Speaking those words, Jesse’s eyes well up. Then he raises his gaze to the Capitol beyond, shakes his head. “Before, I didn’t know that would happen. But my dad … he knew.” AM

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“I had my dad right there to show me, help me. He always said, ‘Have fun with the car.’ ”

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PERUSING THE PENINSULA OUR GUIDE TO A WEEK’S WORTH OF KILLER CAR EVENTS, DESIGNED TO FIT ANY BUDGET

CAR WEEK

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as it has become commonly known, is an automotive experience unlike any other in the world. With events held all over California’s beautiful Monterey Peninsula, it has blossomed from a relatively low-key weekend into a shiny, manufacturer-sponsored multiday extravaganza. Anchored by the granddaddy event since 1950—the annual Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance—Monterey Car Week is a bucket-list affair for enthusiasts of all stripes, especially so for fans of classic cars, and it gets bigger and more impressive every year.

There have been a few downsides to the growth, namely the ever-burgeoning crowds and ballooning ticket prices that have made several Monterey events difficult to attend for some. On the plus side, the number of low-cost options designed to fit virtually any budget has grown as well. You’ll find it all in our soup-to-nuts spotter’s guide to what’s in store for Monterey Car Week 2017.

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Collector-car auctions are a big part of the Monterey Car Week experience. Last year just more than $343 million (yes, million) worth of cars were sold across seven auction houses. Even if you aren’t in the market, the car spectating is fantastic, and watching bidders duke it out over multimillion-dollar prizes is always excellent theater.

Most auction houses offer spectator passes and typically at a far lower cost than bidder registration. Contact the individual auction house for more information.

MECUM (mecum.com): August 16-19 RUSSO AND STEELE (russoandsteele.com): August 17-19 RICK COLE AUCTIONS (rickcole.com): August 17-20 BONHAMS (bonhams.com): August 18 RM SOTHEBY’S (rmsothebys.com): August 18-19 GOODING & COMPANY (goodingco.com): August 18-19

One of the best ways to save money and beat the crowds is to simply start your Monterey experience a weekend early. If old-school race cars are your bag, head to Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca for the Pre-Reunion, where you’ll see many of the cars scheduled to participate in the following weekend’s Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion finding the fast way around the track. Even though the merchandise vendors and food concessionaries won’t be there yet, the advantages are inexpensive admission and fewer spectators to wade through.

It’s like your own private Motorsports Reunion at a cut-rate price.

Tuesday, August 15 Carmel-by-the-Sea Concours on the Avenue SPECTATOR COST: FREE

carmelconcours.com

MUST DO

We attended the Carmel-by-the-Sea Concours on the Avenue last year and found it to be one of Car Week’s gems, hidden in plain sight and featuring an eclectic mix of vehicles—from hot rods and muscle cars to European classics and racers. Because most car enthusiasts don’t arrive until closer to the weekend, it isn’t a madhouse to navigate. You’ll enjoy the generally laid-back atmosphere, especially so if you’re with someone who doesn’t eat, sleep, and drink cars. Take a break from the machines casually displayed throughout Carmel-by-the-Sea’s picturesque shopping district to grab a bite at a local cafe or duck into some of the area’s numerous trendy art galleries and boutiques.

Finding parking is only slightly more difficult than any other Tuesday, and best of all, admission is free.

CLASSIC

R I S E E A R LY F O R DAW N PAT R O L AT T H E C O N C O U R S d ' E L E G A N C E

Wednesday, August 16 Carmel Mission Classic SPECTATOR COST: $50

carmelmissionclassic.org Former Indy 500 winner Danny Sullivan is scheduled to be the honored guest at this intimate event, now in its fourth year, held at the historic Carmel Mission. Spectator admission is $50 and includes wine tasting. This year’s featured car is the 1930 Duesenberg J Convertible Sedan, and everything from Packards to Corvettes will be on display.

Dawn Patrol and the Tour d'Elegance give you opportunities to see and hear Pebble Beach contenders in motion.

The Little Car Show SPECTATOR COST: FREE

marinamotorsports.org Little cars are cars, too, as the organizers of this annual show held just down the road from Carmel in Pacific Grove like to point out.

There is no admission fee, and should you happen to have a Nash Metropolitan or Fiat 600 Jolly you’d like to display (cars must be at least 25 years old with engine displacement less than 1,601 cc), registration will only set you back $25. If microcars are your thing, you have found your nirvana. Even if they aren’t, this eclectic show, which this year focuses on Scandinavian cars, is worth checking out.

F1 CHAMP JACKIE STEWART IS A ROLEX REUNION REGULAR

Thursday, August 17 Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance SPECTATOR COST: FREE

McCall’s Motorworks Revival SPECTATOR COST: $395 AND UP

mccallevents.com

MUST DO

pebblebeachconcours.net

VIP

The premier event for overprivileged Car Week attendees, McCall’s is a hip cocktail party for people who want to be seen.

Think high-end outdoor club atmosphere with enough exotic cars, private jets, and trophy wives to make even the well-to-do feel appropriately humbled. Tickets start at $395 per person—you know, to give it that behind-the-ropes, VIP appeal.

MUST DO

Monterey veterans love to harp on about Dawn Patrol, which takes place in the wee hours before Sunday’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance and allows you to see the cars drive up to the concours lawn. But we enjoy the Tour d’Elegance just as much. Even better, it doesn’t require getting up at 4 a.m. A drive featuring many of the cars that will participate in Sunday’s main event, the tour sets off from the Pebble Beach Equestrian Center at 9 a.m. Plan to arrive closer to 7 a.m. to spend more time around the vehicles and watch them line up for the start. Free donuts and coffee are usually on offer from Hagerty. Have other morning plans? By noon, the cars arrive on Ocean Avenue in Carmel, where they’ll be displayed until they set off for the return trip at 2 p.m.

Again, viewing is free.

Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion SPECTATOR COST: $30 AND UP

mazdaraceway.com If you can’t make it out to see the Pre-Reunion, then it’s worth attending the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion for at least one day during Car Week. Thursday and Sunday are our favorite days to attend, with smaller crowds than Friday and Saturday and fewer overlapping events. While you’re there, be sure to hike up to the top of the Corkscrew, Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca’s signature left-right turn that drops several stories in the process. It’s a great vantage point for watching priceless vintage race cars scrap with each other on the track. This year’s event commemorates 60 years of Formula Junior race cars, 60 years of Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, and 70 years of Ferrari. Tickets are just $30 for Thursday but are at least double that on Friday and through the weekend.

WHAT TO WEAR: Casual layers are an excellent idea. It’s typically cool and overcast at the track in the morning, warm and sunny in the afternoon. T-shirts and shorts are perfectly acceptable.

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GO PORSCHE CRAZY AT T H E W E R KS R E U N I O N

Friday, August 18 Legends of the Autobahn SPECTATOR COST: FREE

legendsoftheautobahn.org If you’re a BMW, Mercedes-Benz, or Audi fan, you won’t want to miss this free show presented by Michelin and organized by car clubs for the three German marques. You’ll pay a small amount to display your car, but spectating is free (though on-site parking is $20 per car).

Werks Reunion Monterey SPECTATOR COST: FREE

werksreunion.com Why are Porsche guys so special that they get their own free concours event? Chalk it up to the sheer number of Porsches prowling the peninsula for car week and the sheer volume of owners who enjoy participating in such events. Like Legends of the Autobahn, you’ll pay a small amount to display your car (be sure to register ahead of time), but it’s free to spectate.

Parking fees may apply.

WHERE TO STAY Finding a place to stay around the peninsula is arguably the hardest part of planning a trip to Monterey Car Week. Even the most basic and inexpensive hotels in the area can book up a full year in advance, and room rates skyrocket. If you’re late to the game, try neighboring locales such as Santa Cruz or Salinas, or perhaps there are still some Airbnb options available. For those on a budget, tentcamping spots might still be available at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca or at campsites around the Big Sur area, but even these book up fast.

It’s never too soon to start planning for next year.

USEFUL SITES

Pacific Grove Concours Auto Rally SPECTATOR COST: FREE

MAZDARACEWAY.COM PEBBLEBEACH.COM QUAILLODGE.COM

Last year at the Pacific Grove Rotary Concourse Auto Rally, we saw everything from a ’60s MGB to an electrically propelled Ferrari 308 to a brand-new McLaren 650S. This run-what-youbrung event begins with the cars on display on Lighthouse Avenue in Pacific Grove in the afternoon before participating cars set off on a tour of 17-Mile Drive in the evening. Dinner will follow. Participants pay a small fee, but viewing is free. This is one of the week’s most refreshing casual events.

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Exotics on Cannery Row

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pgrotary.org

SPECTATOR COST: FREE

exoticsoncanneryrow.com Friday is full of great events that boast free admission, but plan for heavy traffic between shows.

This is the perfect event for the 8-year-old in all of us. Exotic supercars start setting up late in the afternoon, and by dusk historic Cannery Row transforms into a multimillion-dollar parking lot. Stroll along the closed-off street, and grab some dinner in this touristy area of Monterey. If you want to spot the latest and greatest supercars in town, this is the prime event to do that.

HOT TIP: The Sardine Factory is one of the better restaurants in this area and was featured prominently in the Clint Eastwood film “Play Misty for Me.”

The Quail: A Motorsports Gathering SPECTATOR COST: $650 AND UP

signatureevents.peninsula.com

VIP

One of the week’s premier events, The Quail typically sells out well before the display cars hit the grass. Organized by the same group that puts on McCall’s Motorworks Revival, a limited number of tickets are issued by a lottery system and cost $650 this year. That’s all-inclusive, which means you can help yourself to complimentary food and beverage from several different stations, all while taking in some of the finest cars on the peninsula.

HOT TIP: Every year, Craigslist Monterey lights up with ticket holders whose plans have changed. The closer it gets to the event, the lower the prices go. Keep an eye out, and you could score a deal.

Saturday, August 19 Concours d’LeMons SPECTATOR COST: FREE

MUST DO

concoursdlemons.com

By Saturday you might find yourself getting a little desensitized to all the exotic machinery you’ve encountered. (Is that the 11th or 12th 300 SL Gullwing we’ve seen this week, honey?) The cure, of course, is Concours d’LeMons, which pits the worst of the automotive world against each other. If you’ve got a rusty Renault LeCar, a cherry Ford Mustang II, or anything in between, you’ve got a shot at taking home a trophy. It’s free to attend. Just make sure you’ve had a tetanus shot first.

HOT TIP: If you register a car for this event, be sure to bring a bribe for the judges!

See our sneak preview of American Dream Cars of the 1960s on page 66.

CLASSIC

The Barnyard Ferrari Event SPECTATOR COST: FREE

thebarnyard.com Carmel Valley is full of cutesy shopping centers, and The Barnyard is one of them. This event, hosted by the Ferrari Owners Club, is often a mix of a few very high-end Ferraris among a wider selection of more common cars. (Only during Car Week will you come to realize a Ferrari can be called common.) It’s a great event and a perfect spot to end Saturday, with several top-notch restaurants in the area. Food and wine are available for an extra charge.

Concorso Italiano SPECTATOR COST: $150 AND UP

concorso.com If the idea of row after row of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maseratis, and Alfa Romeos arrayed on manicured fairways gets you hot and bothered, then Concorso Italiano is your kind of show. Any Italian car is welcome to attend (even Cadillac Allantes get a pass), and there’s plenty of Italian food, music, and atmosphere to almost make you feel as though you’ve teleported to Italy. This show isn’t inexpensive, but it’s worth doing at least once. The classic Alfa Romeo GTV is featured this year, along with the new Giulia sedan and 4C sports car. Pricier admission tickets include a catered breakfast and lunch.

HOT TIP: If you register your Italian car for display, you’ll pay the same amount as a single general admission ticket ($150) but receive an extra pass for a guest as well as complimentary snacks and coffee.

THE REACTOR!

MUST DO

Sunday, August 20 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance SPECTATOR COST: $325 AND UP

pebblebeachconcours.net Monterey Car Week’s signature event, the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is arguably the world’s most renowned concours, with multimillion-dollar cars, breathtaking ocean views from the 18th fairway of the Pebble Beach Golf Links, and some of the best people-watching this side of Rodeo Drive. Tickets aren’t cheap, and this event gets very crowded by midmorning, so we recommend arriving as early as possible. Cars start rolling onto the grass around 4 a.m. during Dawn Patrol. Featured classes this year include American Dream Cars of the 1960s and Ferrari One-Off Speciales. Tickets start at $325 per person but increase to $375 after August 1. If you haven’t been at least once, this is an event worth saving for.

WHAT TO WEAR: Salmon-colored slacks, a loud sport coat, and deck shoes if you want to play rich. A navy-blue blazer, jeans, and sneakers if you are rich. AM

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THE VIEW FROM INSIDE

by

RORY JURNECKA

WHAT’S HOT AND WHAT’S NOT IN THE COLLECTOR-CAR MARKET? WE GET THE SCOOP FROM INDUSTRY EXPERTS

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What has the year to date taught us about the market?

THE EXPERTS

GORD DUFF

GLOBAL HEAD OF AUCTIONS, RM SOTHEBY’S:

As was a developing trend in 2016, cars that have regularly traded hands and/or were mass-produced are continuing to experience a market correction. There’s no reason for alarm, however; this just shows the market is stabilizing and maturing. The rate of return for such vehicles over the last five years was extraordinary and, as a result, unsustainable. The challenge for auction houses is to ensure sellers have realistic expectations and entries are priced correctly for today’s market.

ANGUS DYKMAN AUTOMOBILE SPECIALIST, GOODING & COMPANY:

We are definitely seeing a market shift, which is healthy for the collector-car market as a whole. Buyers are being more selective with their money, and there is a larger price separation in terms of quality, between good, better, and best.

CRAIG JACKSON CHAIRMAN AND CEO, BARRETT-JACKSON:

There’s no shortage of buyers out there! Our bidder numbers—particularly new bidders—continue to increase, and many are from younger generations who are contributing to the robust and growing middle part of the market. There’s definitely been a softening at the top of the market, which is not a bad thing, as it’s been on fire.

DAVE KINNEY PUBLISHER, HAGERTY PRICE GUIDE:

Every year has its own signature. Not too many cars above the $5 million mark have come to auction in 2017, and the sweet spot for cars that sell on the block continues to be below the $2.5 million threshold.

Well-prepared, fresh-to-market, “no excuses” cars in the $100,000 to $250,000 range are bringing very good money, but so are cars that meet that description in the sub-$100,000 range. Buyers want ready-to-go, point-andshoot, instant-satisfaction cars and are generally not buying restoration projects or even cars that need a paint job.

Who’s buying, and who’s selling? Are we seeing changes in auction room demographics?

GD: The collector-car market continues to be a passiondriven hobby. We’re selling directly to end users, as opposed to the speculators of the ’90s. In the past six months, we’ve also noted more limited dealer activity in our auction rooms. In terms of geography, the U.S. and Western Europe continue to remain the key markets, with growing interest from Asia. Although not a new trend, we’re continuing to see some collectors downsizing to just a few select favorites as part of succession planning, where their passion may not have necessarily been passed down to the next generation. With these collectors, however, the passion runs deep. They may sell only to return and buy at the next sale.

AD: Emerging collectors are quite interested in desirable

cars from the eras in which they grew up, from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Seasoned collectors are beginning to take note of certain cars from these eras that are now seen as modern classics. There is also an increased demand for limited-production modern supercars and modern, limited-production Porsches.

CJ: Unquestionably, there has been a shift in demographics. We’re seeing more and more Gen Xers and millennials coming into car collecting, looking for vehicles they grew up with, like ’70s and ’80s cars: Blazers, Broncos, “Fox Body” Mustangs, Trans Amera cars, the Z/28 IROCs, Grand Nationals, turbo and slant-nose Porsche 911s, Lamborghini Countaches. On the selling side, we are seeing people who are taking advantage of this new interest. We’re seeing a lot of people who have held cars for a long time—like that Porsche they may have bought as a used car years ago— now putting them up for sale.

DK: A younger generation looking for cars from the 1980s, 1990s, and even the 2000s is now firmly a part of the auction scene. JDM cars, never seen at U.S. auctions until about five years ago, are now big sales. As Packard Caribbeans give way to Mazda Cosmos, expect to continue to see a younger demographic of sellers and buyers.

CLASSIC ZORA ARKUS-DUNTOV’S CERV 1

DK: There are always bargains

AD: From Scottsdale, the three-owner 1925 Bugatti Type 35 Grand Prix ($3,300,000), the 1965 Ferrari 500 Superfast ($2,915,000), and the singlefamily ownership, garage-find 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing ($1,457,500). From Amelia Island, the magnificent 1998 Porsche 911 GT1 ($5,665,000), the uniquely outfitted 2015 McLaren P1 ($2,392,000), David Brown’s personal 1949 Aston Martin DB Mk II ($1,540,000), and the

extremely rare 1993 Porsche 964 Turbo S Leichtbau ($1,540,000).

PORSCHE 911 GT1

$

our upcoming Villa Erba sale in Italy—the Lancia Delta S4 and Audi Sport Quattro.

CJ: Seeing one of the most

AD: Alfa Romeo Giuliettas

important pieces of American automotive history—Zora Arkus-Duntov’s CERV 1 ($1,320,000)—go back to GM for its Heritage Center was a memorable sale. Justin Bieber’s Ferrari 458 Italia ($434,500) did really well at our Scottsdale auction, coming out as one of the top sellers. But I’m particularly proud of the vehicles Steven Tyler (Aerosmith) and Dale Earnhardt Jr. brought to the Scottsdale auction to sell for charity—Tyler’s 2012 Hennessey Venom GT Spyder ($800,000), and Dale Jr.’s 2014 Chevrolet No. 88 race car ($200,000) and a 1970 Chevelle resto-mod ($200,000) that he helped design.

and Giulia sedans, certain Maseratis and Fiats, OSCA and Etceterini, and wellpreserved, low-mileage or single-ownership Porsche 911 SCs. Also, road versions of 1980s rally cars, such as the Lancia Delta Integrale, along with historic grand prix and non-Porsche and Ferrari sports racing cars.

Are there any bargains left to be had? What’s undervalued right now?

GD: Certainly! As a group, I see rally cars of the ’80s and even street versions of these cars holding great future potential. They have global appeal and will only rise in value as the generation who grew up watching them race come to have means to purchase. Two great illustrations are offered at

M A R K E T U P DAT E

Of the cars your company has sold this year, which are you most proud of ?

GD: In many respects, our Paris sale provided a terrific demonstration of the continued demand for the very best examples of modern-era Porsches. The highlight of the group was a highly original, one of 29, 1988 Porsche 959 Sport, which achieved a world-record price of $2,093,280. Among other notable Porsche sales in Paris, a rare 1994 911 Turbo S 3.6 realized $962,909, while a 1995 911 Turbo Cabriolet garnered a fantastic $1,435,392. Amelia Island is always a personal favorite. The 1956 Bentley S1 Continental Drophead Coupe shattered its high presale estimate of $900,000 to set a new auction record for the model at $1,683,000.

NISSAN SKYLINE GT-R

CJ: There are always cars that

have gone up in value and cars that have plateaued. Will they come up again? Absolutely.

But right now I think the ’80s and ’90s cars that are rare/ limited production are going to keep moving up as the younger generations start buying more cars. Also, Japanese cars have a lot of upside—the 240Zs, the Skylines. Early Vipers are going to become more collectible going forward, especially since the Viper is ceasing production.

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Any predictions as we inch closer to Monterey Car Week in August?

GD: Monterey Car Week is truly the Super Bowl of the collectorcar world. I expect there will be a strong emphasis on rare, fresh-to-market cars at this year’s event, as these are what have been performing well.

Given current exchange rates, I also suspect we’ll soon see quite a few cars coming from Europe.

AD: Honestly, we anticipate

more of the same of what we have experienced this year.

Buyers are willing to pay a premium for the right car that exemplifies the best of its category and desirable specifications. An even larger premium than before is being paid for highly original cars.

CJ: Going into this year, pre-election, people were apprehensive. But money is still flowing, and people will still be buying the cars of their dreams. If you’re going to grow car collecting, you need new blood and new cars, and that’s what we’re seeing.

As demographics change, everything needs to change.

DK: Expect to see some very large-dollar cars come to auction in August. Not that the auction companies have been keeping all of their powder completely dry, but Monterey is the premier U.S. event for most of the big auction houses. AM LANCIA DELTA S4

WOW: IRENA LEVITSKAYA / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

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In the rarefied space that Porsche 959s occupy, Sport models, like the one that sold at RM Sotheby's for more than $2 million, are top dogs.

at auctions. It’s just that the bargain might not be in your price range, or it might be a car you have no interest in.

Undervalued cars include the final generation of Pontiac Firebirds, especially the Firehawks, and doubly those with rare options and colors.

BMW 8 Series cars are a good long-term play. In 10 years today’s prices will seem impossibly cheap.

ASTO N M A RT I N SA L E , May 13, 2017 BONHAMS N E W P O R T PAG N E L L , ENGLAND

TOP SELLERS 2004 V-12 VANQUISH

1964 Aston Martin DB5: $727,995 1961 Aston Martin DB4 “Series III” 4.2-liter: $517,440 1989 Aston Martin V8 Vantage Volante “X-Pack” 7.0-liter: $502,919

2000 VANTAGE LE MANS

SOLID RESULTS AT THIS ASTON-ONLY AUCTION

O N E O F O U R favorites of the day was Lot 240, a 2004 V-12 Vanquish that was among the last cars to be built at the Newport Pagnell factory. This particular car shows only around 6,000 miles of use and has been given a few of the Vanquish S model’s cosmetic upgrades, including the revised dashboard and some badges, though it does not have the S model’s extra 70 horsepower. The Vanquish sold for $118,112, and we hope the owner might have some room left in the budget to replace the paddle-shift manual transmission with a full manual conversion, a service Aston Martin Works is happy to offer—for a price.

The auction’s top-seller was Lot 209, a 1964 DB5, the only DB5 at the event. Delivered new to Glasgow, Scotland, in 1964, the seller bought the car in 1972 when he was just 21 years old and drove

it regularly until the late ’90s. It shows signs of that usage, with a somewhat scruffy-looking engine compartment and both wear and light staining to the light-colored interior. Many DB5s are resprayed silver to match the famous example in the James Bond movie series, so it is refreshing to see this one carry fresh medium-blue paintwork commissioned just last year. The best DB5s in the world are now million-dollarplus cars, but this one in “driver condition” with some mechanical and cosmetic needs sold well at $727,995.

A 1996 V8 Sportsman Estate was one of the more unconventional cars at the sale.

Based on a period V8 Coupe, this shooting-brake version is one of only three built and one of two special ordered by a pair of Swiss brothers. This car has an interesting history, with the

1996 V8 SPORTSMAN ESTATE

engine rebuilt by the factory after just 6,000 miles before being sold to its next owner. Today, the Sportsman presents very well and would make a unique addition to a serious Aston Martin collection.

It seemed a fair deal at $437,575 considering both its rarity and that it sold in the U.K. with a strong market for estate cars.

If rust and patina make your heart beat faster and you were looking for a project car, Lot 202, a 1957 DB2/4 Mk II, sold for $70,822, a little more than its low estimate. This once-handsome Aston was parked for engine repairs in the 1970s after passing through a handful of owners.

It now appears to need a full restoration, including plenty of rust repair. Ten years ago, this probably would have been a parts car, broken up by a specialist.

With the value for a strong DB2/4 in the mid-$200,000 range, it’s

unlikely the buyer will be able to restore this example for any amount close to what a ready-todrive car would bring. The seller won this round.

Last but not least, the car we would most like to get some seat time in was Lot 236, a 2000 Vantage Le Mans. Number 29 of just 40 examples built, the Vantage Le Mans was made to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Aston’s 1959 win at Le Mans with Carroll Shelby and Roy Salvadori behind the wheel of a DBR1/2. Styling accents, including the ducts in the hood and the vented front fenders, recalled the race-winning car, and the 5.3-liter supercharged V-8 was uprated to 604 hp and 600 lb-ft of torque and was paired to an honest-to-goodness six-speed manual gearbox. The Vantage Le Mans brought a healthy $401,272. AM

SOLD: DND_PROJECT / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

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ASTON MARTIN’S NEWPORT PAGNELL WORKS FACILITY—ONE OF THE OLDEST AUTOMOBILE MANUFACTURING SITES IN THE WORLD, ACCORDING TO ASTON MARTIN—PLAYED HOST TO THE 18TH ANNUAL BONHAMS ASTON MARTIN SALE, WHICH FEATURES ASTON CARS AND AUTOMOBILIA EXCLUSIVELY. ALTHOUGH THE LAST CAR BUILT HERE ROLLED OFF THE LINE IN 2007, PRODUCTION WILL SOON COMMENCE AGAIN WITH THE NEO-CLASSIC DB4 GT CONTINUATION SERIES. UNTIL THEN, THERE WERE PLENTY OF CLASSIC ASTON MARTINS AVAILABLE AT THE BONHAMS EVENT.

1964 DB5

CLASSIC

FOU R C 4 s T O B U Y A N D H O L D

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W H E N T H E A L L- N E W C4-series Corvettes arrived for the 1984 model year, they almost instantly made up for all the Malaise Era indignities the model had suffered through the end of the 1970s into the early ’80s. Power was up, weight was down, and Chevy engineers had achieved their goal of hitting 1.0 g on the skidpad. The C4’s digital dashboard, chiseled bodywork, and revised 5.7-liter V-8 were ready and willing to take on the best in the biz. The C4 even found quick success on the racetrack, dominating competition from Porsche, Mazda, and Nissan in the SCCA’s Showroom Stock racing class from its introduction to 1987.

We spoke with Corvette expert Lance Miller, co-owner of Carlisle Events, which hosts the annual Corvettes at Carlisle weekend—the self-proclaimed “largest and most fun-filled Corvette event in the world”—about some of his favorite C4s for both driving enjoyment and profit.

$ LANCE MILLER’S TOP 4

1987-’91 Callaway Corvette AVERAGE COST:

$19,600-$28,400

AVERAGE COST:

BY RORY JURNECKA

If you wanted big power from your C4 ’Vette in the preZR1 days, you bought a Callaway. Impressed with the work Callaway had done turbocharging Alfa Romeos in the mid’80s, Chevy approached Callaway about boosting its L98 engines. The result was 345 horsepower in 1987 (a 105 hp increase over stock) that blossomed to 403 hp and 582 lb-ft by ’91. Miller says: “Callaways came with an RPO code B2K. They were twin-turbocharged and had a factory warranty.

How can you beat that?” Callaways were produced in both coupe and convertible form and feature varying degrees of custom bodywork, from mild to wild.

A

1990-’95 Corvette ZR-1 $21,600-$26,000

It was called the King of the Hill when it launched for the 1990 model year, and although the early ZR1’s 375 hp might not sound like much today, back then that was enough juice to do battle with some of the era’s top sports cars, including the Acura NSX, Porsche 911 Turbo, and Lotus Esprit Turbo. A turn of the special key on the center console gave the driver full power from the aluminum-block LT5 V-8 with a DOHC head developed

by Lotus. By the end of the ZR1’s run in ’95, output had risen to 405 hp. These cars still feel very quick today.

“ZR1s are more expensive to fix if you break them,” Miller says, but he insists that with proper care owners have little to worry about.

1996 Corvette Grand Sport AVERAGE COST:

$30,700-$33,000

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$20,000-$50,000

Constructed for a single-make Corvette Challenge racing series after the SCCA banned the C4 from competition at the end of 1987, these Challenge models were essentially spec cars driven largely by up-and-coming racers, including our very own contributor Andy Pilgrim. Safety concessions, lightweight Dymag wheels, and race-spec brake pads aside, these cars were largely stock—right down to the shaved Goodyear street tires. Miller owns several Corvette Challenge racers, and although they can’t be driven on the street, they’re excellent track toys that mark an important period in the Corvette’s motorsports history. “They only made 29 of them [for racing in 1989],” Miller says, “and they have potential for real appreciation.”

M A R K E T WATC H

AVERAGE COST:

’VETTES

Easily identified by its Admiral Blue paintwork, augmented by white stripes and red hash marks, the Grand Sport was a C4 send-off model and the first contemporary throwback to the Grand Sport race specials of the 1960s. Each car came with a 330-hp version of the LT4 engine and several unique touches—such as black five-spoke wheels and wider tires— were functional upgrades. Why are most Grand Sports worth more than ZR1s? “Supply and demand,” Miller says. “There were 1,000 Grand Sports produced compared to 6,900 ZR1s, give or take. The Grand Sport registry guys all hang tight together, and that community really builds value.” AM WOW: IRENA LEVITSKAYA / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

1988-’89 Corvette Challenge Racers

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HAS ALWAYS PL AYED A PART IN VEHICLE PERFORMANCE BUT NEVER MORE SO THAN TODAY

BY MICHAEL WHITELEY

RO PROGRESS

PLAIN AND

SIMPLE

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THE ART OF AERODYNAMICS HAS COME A LONG WAY IN RECENT YEARS. DECADES AGO, DEVELOPERS WOULD JUST STICK WINGS ON REAR ENDS AND SEE WHAT HAPPENED. TODAY THE PROCESS IS FAR MORE COMPLEX. AERODYNAMIC ENGINEERING INVOLVES COUNTLESS HOURS OF WIND-TUNNEL TESTING AND ADVANCED COMPUTER SIMULATIONS. BUT IF AERODYNAMICS IS NOW SO ADVANCED, WHY ARE THERE STILL CARS LIKE THE HONDA CIVIC TYPE R, COVERED IN GAUDY ADORNMENTS, WHEN OTHERS SUCH AS FERRARI’S 488 GTB DON’T FEATURE ANYTHING NEARLY AS OBVIOUS?

300.00

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PRESSURE (Pa)

GETTING DOWN WITH

FORC E

The blue area underneath the wing shows faster moving air creating a lowpressure zone, the higher pressure above forcing the wing down.

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T O U N D E R S T A N D H O W aero works, look to the skies.

The same principles that keep aircraft aloft are used to stick cars to the ground. The curved profile of an airplane’s wing deflects airflow, forcing some air over the top and some under the bottom. Because the top surface curves more, the air has to travel farther and therefore faster than the air going underneath. According to Bernoulli’s principle—invoked in Swiss physicist and mathematician Daniel Bernoulli’s 1738 book, “Hydrodynamica”—air traveling at a fast speed has a lower pressure than slower-moving air. This pressure difference means the wing is pushed upward, producing lift and keeping an airplane in the sky.

Turn the wing upside down, and the same principles push a car harder into the asphalt, giving more grip. The most common example of this is downforce generated by the humble fixed wing. Using the same simulation tools that top manufacturers use to design their cars, we can illustrate how a wing makes downforce.

In this two-dimensional computational fluid-dynamics simulation, the blue area underneath the wing shows Bernoulli’s principle at play.

The faster-moving air creates a low-pressure zone, forcing the wing down.

However, before you bolt a wing to your car, take a minute to consider the red area on the wing’s leading edge. Unfortunately, all of this downforce comes with aerodynamic drag.

Manufacturers often quote their cars’ drag performance using a metric called the drag coefficient, or Cd for short. The lower this number, the more easily the car slips through the air. It’s important because there is a relationship between speed and drag: The faster you go, the harder the air pushes on your car, squared. This is one of the reasons why the new Bugatti Chiron has 300 hp more than its predecessor, the Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse, but can only manage 6 mph more in top speed.

→

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M A N U F A C T U R E R S U S E countless aerodynamic control surfaces to create downforce, and we would need to write an aerodynamic bible in order to cover them all, so for now we’ll stick to the most wellknown: the fixed wing.

The fixed wing’s first automotive use stretches back to the 1920s with the Fritz von Opel RAK 2. This speed-record machine used 24 rockets to reach 147.8 mph. Learning

A.J. MUELLER

WINGING IT

PROGRESS

directly from the folks in the aeronautical industry, Opel added two upturned airfoils to the sides of the RAK 2 to keep the vehicle from lifting off the ground.

It took until the late 1960s to see the first appearance of the more conventionally mounted, fixed rear wing courtesy of Colin Chapman and his successful Formula 1 chassis, the Lotus 49. Midway through the 1968 F1 championship, Chapman bolted an expansive rear wing directly to the rear suspension, above the engine and driver to reach clean air—in other words to move it out of the aerodynamic wake produced by cars running ahead of it on the track.

This initially gave Lotus a vastly superior competitive edge, but it was soon banned due to a collection of serious crashes.

ACTIVE

The McLaren P1's sleek and flowing curves are a product of advanced simulation and optimal aerodynamic design.

AERODYNA M ICS

C O N V E N T I O N D I C T A T E S A N Y part that generates downforce will have some drag associated with it. So how to achieve the holy grail of aero, to have downforce in the corners and no extra drag in a straight line?

This is where active aero comes into play.

Active aero is any aerodynamic control surface that provides the best of both worlds. For straight-line speed, a wing can either retreat into the bodywork—minimizing drag—or extend to give downforce in the corners. A great example of this is the McLaren P1’s active rear wing. When minimal drag is ideal and at low speeds, the wing sits flush with the rear bodywork; at higher speeds, it is lifted via two hydraulic struts, generating downforce.

In Race mode, like with the new Ford GT (see page 44), the wing reaches its highest position and most aggressive angle of attack, forcing the P1 into the ground for extreme lateral grip. The wing also folds forward dramatically under heavy braking to provide an airbrake effect.

Probably the first instance we can find of this type of tech is on the 1966 Chaparral 2E. This race car used a large rear wing that could be augmented to offer more or less downforce when needed. Nissan took this type of tech one step further two years later with its grand prix-winning R381 chassis.

Nissan split the rear wing left to right to offer different levels of downforce for the inside or outside wheel.

115 The 1960s aero design, seen on the Chaparral 2E, above, and the Nissan R381, didn't take much more than a flat airfoil with two struts holding it high.

SPOILING THE FLOW N O T E V E R Y D E V I C E attached to a car’s rear is a true wing, though.

Spoilers are more common than wings on modern road cars, but they are quite different. The most important surface of a wing is the underside, where the greatest pressure difference is realized. Spoilers don’t have an underside; they simply deflect airflow from its path and are used mainly as pop-up devices on road cars. This helps with stability at higher speeds by separating the airflow at the trunk lip. A good example of this is the three-piece split spoiler seen on the 2017 Porsche Panamera Turbo.

When we consider that a wing’s underside is the most important surface for producing downforce, we stumble across an issue with conventional wings: Most are connected to the car via two struts located underneath. The pillars can actually take away up to a third of the wing’s performance since the struts disturb airflow over the underside. This is why we see top-mounted or “swan neck” wings on some race cars and even hypercars such as the Koenigsegg One:1. These mounting positions make the most of the air flowing over the wing’s surface.

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S TAT E O F T H E A R T M O D E R N A E R O I S so advanced that we can get a whole bunch of downforce without having to resort to large appendages that cause lots of drag. Take the Ferrari 488 GTB: It creates 50 percent more downforce than its predecessor, the 458 Italia, with no brash add-ons. It achieves this with clever aero tricks such as using Ferrari’s blown spoiler.

In the 488’s case, air flowing over the roofline is guided down past the engine cover and into an opening in the rear bodywork.

This air is then passed over an internal spoiler, which can have a much larger angle than if it were on the surface. Not only this, but the blown spoiler also takes advantage of something called the Venturi effect. This occurs when air squeezed into a smaller area is accelerated. Combining the blown nature of the spoiler and acceleration due to the Venturi effect, the 488 GTB’s rear spoiler outperforms a conventional fixed wing.

The McLaren MP4-X concept showcases some of the most advanced tech that we might see for Formula 1 and beyond in the future.

PROGRESS

FUTURE AERODYNAMIC TECH

The understated rear end of the formidable Ferrari 488 GTB contains a very hard-working blown spoiler.

ACTIVATE THE PLASMA FLOW CONTROLLERS WHEN EXTRA GRIP IS DESIRED, SHUT THEM OFF WHEN IT ISN’T. This type of tech could increase a car’s downforce dramatically without creating as much drag and aero disruption as modern active wings do.

Activate the plasma flow controllers when extra grip is desired, shut them off when it isn’t. Even with them switched on, their flushness with the car means they create less drag than conventional or active wings and spoilers as they also have no moving parts and no frontal area, the latter being aero efficiency’s nemesis. Although only mentioned briefly by McLaren in relation to its 2016 MP4-X F1 concept car, this technology shows a lot of promise and has caught the attention of the likes of NASA. But don’t get too excited. It presently needs very high voltages and wouldn’t be efficient in a performance car—at least, not yet. AM

117 AUTOMOBILEMAG.COM

S O W E ’ V E S E E N the evolution of fixed control surfaces, from permanently mounted rear wings to modern active aero. Where do we go from here? One answer seemingly straight out of science fiction could be the way forward. Introducing plasma flow control.

Plasma flow control is still in an early research and development stage but shows potential for use in ultra-performance cars. Electronic devices placed inside the bodywork—as to not affect airflow—can manipulate the surrounding air with no moving parts. High-voltage alternating current is passed across two electrodes, which creates lowtemperature plasma. This plasma can ionize air molecules passing over a surface, speeding up the airflow.

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T H E B AC K PAG E CATC

Tell us about your experiences in the U.S. before you took the top job here.

KZ: My very first time in the country actually was when I was 19, and I flew over from Germany to Los Angeles and bought a car there. People laugh about it because I bought an Oldsmobile Delta 88 for $800 with my best buddy. Then we took three months traveling from L.A. to New York.

We zigzagged the U.S. being fascinated by this country.

HING UP WITH

K L AU S ZELLMER PRESIDENT AND CEO, PORSCHE CARS NORTH AMERICA MIKE FLOYD

K L A U S Z E L L M E R has held several positions outside of the U.S. during his 20-year career with Porsche, but he has had a soft spot for America ever since a seminal visit in his teens.

Before taking the company’s top post in North America, Zellmer, 49, most recently was CEO of Porsche Germany from 2010 to 2015 followed by a brief stint as head of overseas markets, which put him in charge of operations spanning 72 countries from Asia to Africa.

Over the past 18 months, he oversaw the completion of the Porsche Experience Center in Los Angeles and helped guide the marque to record sales in the U.S. in 2016.

CATC H I N G U P W I T H / K L AU S Z E L L M E R

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Did you expect to end up in this business, even back then?

KZ: I started studying business and automotive marketing, and I was awarded a scholarship to go to Florida in the beginning of the ’90s. That’s where I actually realized I was always a car guy. I was working with my own cars during school already. Enhancing them. Selling them. Buying some more and selling them again. So I was always fascinated by that, and then working in the U.S. you realize how advanced—even 20 years, 25 years ago—this market already was in terms of competition and bigger dealer groups. It was always part of my agenda that I’d love to work in the U.S. for Porsche someday, and that dream came true one and a half years ago.

How have the Porsche experience centers in Atlanta and L.A. helped your business so far?

KZ: We want to provide an environment that is ideal to really experience the brand in all its facets. Be it on the track, on-road, off-road. To the limit. Beyond the limit. With a professional instructor to really take the cars into a situation you normally don’t encounter on normal roads. So that really is something that gets the heart racing of all customers in that sort of environment.

We had 46,000 people visit the Atlanta Porsche Center last year.

We already have 10,000 people who visited Los Angeles [since November 2016]. Does it sell cars?

We think it does.

What are your dealers asking from you?

KZ: I think we have a very good relationship with our dealer partners, and we really consider them dealer partners and not just dealers. If you ask them currently what we need to do for them to make more money, it is deliver more 911s, for example. We’re

short, consciously short, on 911s because we’d much rather under deliver, under supply.

To what extent do you want to do so?

KZ: Now the formula actually is that we want to deliver one car less than the market is willing to take. That doesn’t always work, but that’s our principle we work with.

What else would a dealer ask?

They’d love to have more Macans because that car is really strong.

We are bringing new people to the brand. Close to 70 percent of the entry-level model Macan buyers are new to the brand.

How is the production version of the Mission E car progressing?

KZ: Our Mission E car will live up to its brand values. We’re the first ones to deliver an 800-volt system, a range well beyond 300 miles, acceleration that will live up to our customers’ expectations.

Less than 3.5 seconds from 0 to 60 mph. The charging time is less than 20 minutes up to an 80 percent charging level of your car, which is also something that nobody else can deliver. By the end of the decade, we think the technology will be right to fulfill or exceed the expectations of Porsche customers. If you look at the performance criteria of electric cars, that’s very close to what Porsche loves, what our customers love.

Then there’s the anti-electric, the latest 911 GT3 that was just revealed.

KZ: If you drive it, it’s a track machine—500 horsepower, naturally aspirated. We’re taking it even to another extreme by offering customers an optional manual gearbox [unlike the previous GT3]. When you compare manual versus a double-clutch system, the double-clutch from a rational point of view makes more sense. However, the customer has all the choice. If customers want to be more engaged, lose a little time on the track or while accelerating, they can have it.

What do you like to do when you’re not on the clock?

KZ: My only hobby at the moment actually is my family. Now, I am a car guy, and I’m turning 50 this year, so my big project this year is to find a 1967 911S that I would like to purchase and give myself as a present. AM

Th e En d

INTRODUCING THE FIRST-EVER LEXUS LC 500 WHAT STARTED AS PURE CONCEPT, LAUNCHED A NEW ERA OF PERFORMANCE AND DESIGN. The LC 500 is a collection of visionary ideas. 10-speed Direct-Shift transmission. Near-perfect weight distribution. An innovative suspension system that defies conventional logic, accommodating available 21-inch wheels* within a ground-hugging profile. The LC is also an uncompromising approach to design. Although the first seat design was technically perfect, it was the 50th prototype that had the exact fit and feeling to complement the unique LC driving experience. This intense dedication to craftsmanship and innovation results in a level of refinement you’ve never felt. A sound you’ve never heard. And a feeling you have yet to experience. Introducing the first-ever 5.0-liter V8 Lexus LC 500 and Multistage Hybrid LC 500h.

Experience the future of Lexus. Experience Amazing. lexus.com/LC | #LexusLC

Options shown. *21-in performance tires are expected to experience greater tire wear than conventional tires. Tire life may be substantially less than 20,000 miles, depending upon driving conditions. ©2017 Lexus

“ EXQUISITE” -Joshua S., Hurst, TX

A L L- N E W M A Z D A C X- 5 How do you enhance the already bold, distinctive lines of the all-new Mazda CX-5? By crafting Soul Red Crystal Metallic, a new signature paint that achieves an even higher level of energy and vividness. With one glance, Joshua had just one word to describe it all. Why do we create such alluring details? Because Driving Matters.

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