High Performance by Peter Grimsdale

Author:Peter Grimsdale [Grimsdale, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781471168475
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

26

SPUTNIK

My father’s 1922 copy of the Boys’ Book of Motors never filled me with much excitement when it was originally handed down to me. The fine colour plates showed ponderous machines with wooden-spoked wheels and pram-like hoods. But a second look several decades later revealed an extremely prescient observation made by its engineer-author, Wilfred Gordon Aston, in a paragraph headed ‘A peep into the future’: ‘In the old days one could say that a motor car was a thing which was nearly all mechanism, upon which passengers managed to seat themselves. It will not be long before it will be possible to describe a motor car as a vehicle full of passengers, only room has managed to be found for an engine and transmission mechanism.’

It would take at least thirty years for Aston’s premonition to come true. History does not record whether the young Issigonis had this book. Since it was one of very few general studies of cars available at the start of the 1920s, there is quite a high chance that he did, but if any words can be said to encapsulate Issigonis’s genius, it is those of Wilfred Gordon Aston in 1922.

These are Issigonis’s own words:

You know many people assume, quite incorrectly, that the first thing a car designer does when thinking of a new car is to sit down and doodle on a pad of paper until he has arrived at a pretty shape, and only then to start thinking of it seriously. This of course is totally wrong. What you do first is to lay out or sketch out how the people in the car are going to sit down. You must do this before you can start – only then do you sketch out and try to estimate how much room the mechanical parts are going to take. When you’ve done all this, which takes quite a long time, then you begin to think of the appearance . . . In fact you build the car around the people and the engine.

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