DESIGNER GENES

WU-HUANG CHIN probably isn’t a name you’re familiar with. Yet the Taiwanese stylist might just have penned the most beautiful car ever to hail from Japan, the FD3 generation Mazda RX-7. He began working on the vehicle’s development in 1988 when organic aerodynamic shapes were in vogue. Chin’s brief was to evoke the sensuality of Jaguar and Ferrari racers of the 1960s. “We didn’t want to borrow any heritage from others, instead we looked at the Cosmo Sport, the first and second generation RX-7s and tried to continue this Mazda rotary heritage,” he explains. “The air outlet on the front fender behind the front wheel was a theme I pushed for right from the beginning. This leads to the lower door cut which curves up and flows into the B pillar. The movement of these elements gave the design a dynamic stance. The outlet was meant to extract heat from the engine compartment. It also hints at the front-midship layout of the rotary power plant. The outlet was carefully sculpted to have an organic look as if the car was a living creature and this was its breathing orifice. At one point of the development, I was told by engineering that an outlet for the engine room was not necessary and we had to take this feature off the clay model. As you can imagine, it took a lot of character away from the design and we were all disappointed. Luckily, the brake engineers told us later that they needed to vent the hot air from the front brakes away from the engine room and exhaust it via ducts on the front fender, much to my relief, I got my air outlet back! Before the RX-7, we were working on a few blue-sky projects searching for advanced design themes. One of these was the RX-44. Mazda was experimenting with hydrogen rotary engines at the time. I did a futuristic sedan powered by a 4-rotor hydrogen engine. It seats 4 persons in a diamond pattern with the driver up front at the centre. To hint at this seating arrangement, I put 4 bubbles on the roof of the car in the same diamond pattern. Later, my boss Tom Matano did a 3 passenger mid-engine super car powered by a 3-rotor engine. He put 3 bubbles on his model. When we started the RX-7, which was a 2-seater powered by a 2-rotor engine, It was only natural for us to put 2 bubbles on the roof. Tom and I have since referred to it affectionately as the ‘double bubble.’”