Ferrari exhibition A new London showcase demonstrating Maranello’s design magic
Ferrari: Under the Skin, Design Museum, London, until April 15
The Design Museum has opened an exhibition exploring the story of Ferrari design, marking 70 years since the Modena company built its first car. ‘Collector Ronald Stern approached the museum to create an exhibition around his archive,’ explained curator Andrew Nahum. ‘We broadened this idea to cover the history of Ferrari and Ferrari design, what it ought to be in the Design Museum.’
The series of linked display areas takes the visitor on a journey, revealing how the manufacturing process came to exist, how the cars fitted into people’s lives, how the cars found a market, and why people chose them.
Pininfarina 365P
Nahum is most proud of the section of the exhibition that’s filled with original design sketches and scale wind-tunnel models, and headed by a full-size wooden buck for the 1966 365P and a 2015 full-size clay model of the J50.
The wooden buck was created by Pininfarina for a proposed run of ten 365P Speciales at the behest of NART team boss Luigi Chinetti. In the end just two were built, the first in 1966 on what is believed to have been the chassis from 330 P2 raced at Daytona in 1965 for NART. The second was for Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli. Wooden bucks were used to assess a new design and for forming panels of low production run cars.
J50
Bringing the marque’s design technology up to date is a full-sized clay model of the limitedproduction J50, created in 2016 to celebrate 50 years of Ferrari in Japan.
The story of the part-painted, part-raw clay model is vividly brought to life through a film projection of its creation by a computercontrolled milling machine and final hand-scraping. Mesmerising stuff, rendered even more fascinating by an on-screen commentary by Ferrari design head Flavio Manzoni and modeller Bob Quinn.
‘It was great of Ferrari to allow us to film this,’ said Nahum. ‘I don’t believe there’s been an exhibition showing modelling before.’
250 GT and Testarossa
The Clienti section brings to life the glamorous world of Ferrari customers, with stills and footage on the walls depicting Roberto Rosselli and Ingrid Bergman, Peter Sellers, James Garner, Clint Eastwood and more with their cars ranging from a one-off 375MM coupé to a 365 GT4 BB. Cars on display include the 1957 250 GT Cabriolet owned new by F1 works driver Peter Collins and the Testarossa Spyder built in 1986 for Agnelli.
250 GT Sperimentale
The competition section, ranging from a 1952 500 single-seater to a 2000 F1-2000, tells the story of how Ferrari’s racing cars tried new ideas that later appeared on the road cars. For example, the 1961 250 GT Sperimentale shows the transition from 250 GT SWB to the 250 GTO. Although its shape was honed in the wind tunnel in pursuit of better aerodynamics, the Sperimentale proved unstable at high speed during practice for Le Mans, leading to hasty body alterations.