An engineering blast from the past... and the future
THE man behind the car of the future – John Delorean’s name is now mostly identified with the famous time travelling machine from the hit 1980s movies. In Back To The Future, the big joke was that eccentric scientist Doc Brown had managed to build a time machine from a Delorean.
But this is the fascinating story behind the car’s real life inventor, John Delorean, and his doomed attempt to build the sports car of the future.
An American entrepreneur, inventor and engineer, Delorean had film star looks, a famous fashion model wife, Kelly Harmon,
Delorean employees pose with the 1,000th car to be shipped to the USA before loading onto the Pearl Ace at Belfast docks, 1981 an enormous ego and buckets of charisma that drove him to rival the giants of the US car industry.
He had risen to become Vice President of General Motors, the biggest car firm in the world at the time. But he took a shocking gamble and left to set up on his own, starting the Delorean Motor Company in 1973 in Northern Ireland.
But millions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money later, his Belfast business ended in a trail of corporate waste, greed, fraud and, incredibly, an FBI cocainetrafficking sting.
Using rare and unseen footage, with insider interviews and colourful news archive documenting his life and career, this is an in-depth psychological profile of Delorean.
He was a man who rose from the ghettos of Detroit to build his American dream in war-torn
Belfast. But just like many of Doc Brown’s experiments, that dream quickly went up in smoke...