THE OCTANE INTERVIEW
Porsche design renaissance man Harm Lagaay
IN AN ERA WHEN most superstar car designers were Italian, a Dutchman with global roots but little design education found a way to crawl to the top. Harm Lagaay’s path to car design – and key cars including the Porsche 924, 968, 993, 996, 997, Boxster and Cayman, plus the BMW Z1 and Ford Sierra among others – was an unconventional one.
Lagaay (or Lagaaij in the original Dutch) was born in The Hague, South Holland, on 28 December 1946, but thanks to his dad’s work for Shell Oil he spent his early life in Ecuador and Venezuela. In the 1950s he went to an English-speaking primary school in Brunei and in the ’60s a boarding school back in The Netherlands.
‘My youth is a bit of a mixture of all these cultures and languages,’ he begins in perfect English, with barely any accent, ‘and I don’t really have Dutch roots.’ His passion for cars started at a very young age, maybe because there was such a lack of interesting ones where he lived. ‘In the countries where I was a child there were no really fantastic-looking cars; they were very ordinary looking.’ So he searched in magazines for better ones.
While not as rawly talented as his sister – ‘She would draw everything, I could only draw cars,’ he self-deprecates with a twinkle in his eye – he nonetheless stuck with his art. After high school he studied automotive technology and business at the Institute for Automobile (IVA) in Holland from 1966 to ’68, ‘…where they fortunately also let me draw cars during the technical drawing lessons’. But, as so many others who came of age in the ’50s and ’60s also discovered, formal education on how to design cars was scarce.
‘In the States you could learn at Art Center Pasadena, but the automotive design course was very small. In England, there was the Royal College of Art with two people. So I had to learn it all by myself. I looked at whatever was being done and visited motor shows. When I saw the Lancia Stratos Zero [Marcello Gandini’s legendary 1970 concept], I went absolutely nuts. My knees started shaking. “That’s what I want to do,” I said.’
While this goal was still a pipedream, he found work doing technical illustration and documentation, first for oil data research company Olyslager, then for French car brand Simca’s Dutch importer. In the evenings he
honed his sketching, and for two years he travelled in his spare time to show his portfolio to the big Italian design studios: Ghia, Pininfarina, Bertone, Michelotti and Italdesign. ‘In those days you could only get a job within Europe in another country if the company were willing to state that they really needed you,’ he points out. ‘It wasn’t the European Union; those studios had to take an Italian student. But when I applied to be a designer at Porsche, they were willing to write a statement that they really needed me.’
So in September 1971, aged 24, he started as a junior exterior designer at Porsche and quickly impressed his new employer. ‘Believe it or not, after a few months I was already responsible for a complete exterior, which was the Porsche 924,’ he says. ‘I won the competition out of four designers making proposals. Suddenly I was responsible for a full-size model, which was beyond my abilities, so a senior designer helped me with the car. Which, if I may say, has aged pretty well.’
After six years at Porsche, Lagaay wanted to learn about design management in a bigger organisation – Porsche’s design department was at that time only about 25-strong – so in mid-1977 he moved to Ford’s Cologne design centre, where the exteriors of European Ford models were created. There Lagaay worked under Patrick le Quement (who would go on to head Renault design in the late 1980s) and rose to manager of the advanced design studio.
‘This was the most exciting part of that Ford period,’ he says. ‘Patrick was a great chief designer and we got involved in the Fiesta (Mk2), the Escort (Mk3) and the Sierra. The Sierra was a revolution in terms of design, even though everybody was in love with the old Cortina [that it replaced].’
In 1985 he got an unusual job offer from a former Porsche colleague who had switched to BMW and would later become CEO of Aston Martin: Ulrich Bez. ‘Ulrich said: “I’ve founded something very special, a new subsidiary called BMW Technik.” He said BMW needed innovation and some kind of department, separate from the head office, to do skunkworks. Having subsidiaries was not new, but to allow a bunch of people to do crazy projects was. So he asked me to set up a design studio in an empty building a kilometre away from BMW ’s HQ in Munich.’
Didn’t the move feel like a risky one, coming from a big organisation like Ford to the thenmuch-smaller BMW? ‘Oh absolutely, a total risk,’ Lagaay laughs. ‘I almost turned around
and went back to Cologne. But then I thought: “Wait a minute. This is a chance of a lifetime to do it my way.” Overnight I had to find designers, modellers and design engineers. The studio wasn’t even a studio, so I had to think about windows, floors, doors, furniture, equipment and so on. I did everything. This was a day-andnight job, but looking back we found some really talented designers from all continents. One of the methods of recruiting was to take the fastest BMW, usually an M5, pick them up at the airport, then drive at a crazy speed and say: “This is BMW. Join us.”’
The Z1 – with its doors that opened by retracting vertically downwards into the sills to create a more open feeling, and interchangeable plastic body panels – became a cult hit. Lagaay remembers the design process fondly. ‘It was a fantastic team effort,’ he enthuses, ‘the right people, in the right place at the right time. And no intrusion. The engine position wasn’t moved around. The suspension was fairly free. There was a lot of innovation and fantastic motivation.’ He believes the Z1’s fortunes were ultimately curtailed by not having a right-handdrive version and by it being built in a factory for prototypes, not a proper production line. Consequently, it was very expensive to make. It cost as much as a Porsche 911 of its day, but had only the 168bhp of a 2.5-litre BMW 325i engine. Only 8000 or so were made.
In his three years at BMW Technik, Lagaay also worked on a Z1 coupé prototype that, with its sporting yet high-roofed design and a raised ride height, presaged the ‘sporty’ crossover craze that followed 25 years later. However, when boss Bez was tempted to jump ship back to Porsche, he again asked Lagaay to join him. Starting in January 1989 as chief designer for Porsche Style, Lagaay was given the remit to reorganise the whole studio.
He arrived at a time when Porsche was struggling. ‘The 911 had become a 964 – an allnew car, but which looked the same as its predecessor. Technically it wasn’t the big statement it should have been, and it was more expensive to build. The worst came in 1993 when sales were so low that the company was for sale. People don’t realise that today, but Porsche was almost at the end so we had to do some quick projects: the 968, the 928 GTS and the 993. The 993 rescued us in the first phase to get the 911 back on track.’
The significant visual changes for the 993generation 911 that Lagaay oversaw, involving many new outer panels, made him change his thinking on how the 911 as an ‘icon’ should develop. ‘I think the 911 is one of the most iconic and most attractive cars in history, but each generation has to change in a big way. Smaller steps don’t work.’
Steadying the 911 ship in those years was important, but it still wasn’t enough to resolve Porsche’s profitability issues. Salvation came from an idea to make two new cars – the 996 and the Boxster – with 33% commonality of