‘I HATE THAT WORD “RETRO”’
Frank Stephenson, one of the world’s most in-demand car designers, devised both the new Mini and reborn Fiat 500. Here he talks about the tricky logistics of revisiting iconic car designs
Frank Stephenson comes across as a genuine car enthusiast, motivated by a passion for heritage and driving excitement, rather than a caricatured po-faced car designer. He addresses me across the desk in his study surrounded by potplants and 1:18-scale models of his favourite cars, rather than stark modernist sculpture and odd furniture. He doesn’t communicate in aloof corporate designer-speak. He talks of car designs – his own, those he admires and those he detests – with the zingy candour of a motor-show punter. ‘I don’t have a boss any more,’ he says with a roguish laugh, alluding to the establishment of his own studio after an in-house career with the likes of BMW, Ford and Ferrari, ‘so I can say what I like!’
Stephenson was at BMW in Munich when the German firm bought the Rover Group and tasked itself with succeeding the adored but superannuated Mini. ‘The Germans were seen in England as taking over a British icon, so there was a lot of pressure to get it right. Reinterpreting icons is the most challenging task for any designer. You’re handling the crown jewels of a company. Get it wrong and you alienate their customers and damage their reputation. ‘Mini was too important to subject to the usual design process,’ he says. ‘Three proposals are normal for the likes of General Motors and Toyota, but BMW opened the Mini design up to an international competition which resulted in 15 proposals - five from Munich, five from BMW’S design studio in California, four from Longbridge and even one from Giorgetto Giugiaro. This was unprecedented in the history of automobile design.’ Corporate duty has prevented Stephenson from properly explaining the pressure he was under beforehand. ‘There was a huge amount of in-house friction, clashes between the English and German ways of doing things,’ he recalls. ‘Eventually my design was picked, but I was working in Munich. To ease the situation with Rover, I had to be relocated to the British studios. I was reminded of that Kevin Costner film
where a cowboy goes to live with a Native American tribe. There was a lot of resistance to my design and I was told, “It should’ve been designed by a Brit.” But Sir Alec Issigonis wasn’t British either.’ Stephenson’s American accent belies a cosmopolitan sense of nationality – born in Morocco to Norwegian and Spanish parents, Stephenson grew up in Turkey and Spain before relocating to California for university, then establishing his design career in Germany. He would’ve been a stark contrast to most Longbridge lifers in the mid-nineties.
‘The design brief was minimal – it had to be 3.6 metres long – the only way a small car could achieve a five-star crash rating in the US – and look like a Mini,’ he confirms. ‘My approach to the design wasn’t used by any of the other 14. Issigonis was an engineer with a “style be damned” attitude, but his Mini design became cool for how it looked. It would’ve been arrogant to throw away what made it desirable. I didn’t have to worry about the engineering. I knew they’d make it fun to drive.
‘The Mini’s design hadn’t changed since 1959. This isn’t usual in the car world, so I set myself the task – if the car had changed every ten years, what would it look like now? So I first sketched a Mini as though it had been redesigned in 1969, then another one for 1979 – reflecting the fuel crisis and safety concerns – then 1989, and ultimately for 1999. I did this over the course of four weeks in 1995. The main inspiration behind this thinking was the Porsche 911, a car that has never gone out of production, but evolved considerably while retaining a strong sense of itself.
‘So my 1999 Mini is not a pastiche, but an evolution. You can see this in the clamshell bonnet and wraparound glass. These were modern innovations that physically could not be done in earlier eras. The car could not be a Fifties throwback – some cars are but mine isn’t – so I hate that word “retro”.
Looking at Stephenson’s Mini design now reveals a host of striking details that suit the shape beautifully but owe nothing to the Issigonis original – the bonnet bulge and side vents, for example. ‘They were actually chosen much later on when we realised we needed to extract more air from behind the wheelarches, so they had a legitimate function,’ says Stephenson. ‘The clamshell looks like it references the Jaguar E-type – my favourite car design of all time, incidentally – but it actually replicated the weld line of the original Mini. Attaching the headlights to the clamshell avoided panel gaps.
‘The wraparound glass is a modern architectural element, used to hide the structural beams in a skyscraper. On the Mini, the roof, glass and body sat in three layers, undisturbed. Again, this use of glass on the outside of the roof pillars would not have been possible in 1959, adding further to this sense of modernity. The only issue the engineers had with my design was the windscreen rake angle. They wanted to lean it back further to reduce drag, but to maintain the right shape it had to be more upright. In the end we compromised to just the right amount. We got the shape right, and the upright windscreen is a design feature of modern Minis to this day.’
By contrast, Stephenson’s subsequent experience designing the new Fiat 500 couldn’t have been more different. His success at BMW led to one of the most desirable appointments in the car design world – director of Ferrari and Maserati concept design and development in Modena, at a time when Italian marques were edging away from using independent design houses like Pininfarina and moving their styling efforts in-house.
‘In 2006 I was called to a meeting in Turin with the new Fiat CEO, Sergio Marchionne,’ Stephenson recalls. ‘He said, “Frank, I don’t know much about cars, but I do know about money. And
‘I cried my eyes out that night. I felt I had Fiat’s future on my shoulders’
we need a new car on the road in ten months that will sell in big numbers, or Fiat will tank. Our only current success is the Panda. Can you design me something?”
‘I must admit, I cried my eyes out in my hotel room that night. I felt as though I had Fiat’s future resting on my shoulders. You can’t design a new car in ten months – it’s a three year process!
‘But then, I thought about the Panda. It was Fiat’s only big seller at the time, so I figured we could do a facelift, putting new panels onto its existing hardpoints, but approaching its design in the same way I did with the Mini, imagining a design evolving through time in ten-year increments.
‘The 500 was an obvious choice for this really. It put post-war Italy on four wheels, and its appeal connects new drivers with their parents and grandparents. But there was another important factor in terms of making it a bestseller – it needed to be neither masculine nor feminine, but, like the Mini, customisable by buyers in the showroom in whatever direction they wanted to take it.’ Unlike the Mini, it would also involve imposing styling from a rear-engined car on a front-engined, front-drive platform.
‘Volkswagen had done its New Beetle, and got this all wrong,’ Stephenson says candidly. ‘This rear-engined design on the Golf platform had made the dashboard too deep and the boot too small. Then they were hit with serious lawsuits in the US when it turned out back-seat passengers were being injured by the tailgate when it closed because their heads rested against the rear windscreen – of course, the Beetle shape was never intended to be a hatchback. VW couldn’t afford to redesign it, so it had to supply all its US hatchbacks with stickers warning rear-seat passengers to lean forward when the tailgate was being shut.
‘It was also too feminine in its approach, what with the flower vase on the dashboard, the lack of an affordable performance variant and customisation options, and its marketing in general. Studies have shown that while women don’t mind being seen in a masculine-looking car, men don’t like being seen in an overtly feminine car, and of course customisation means the customer can take it in whatever direction they want to personally. But by designing such a feminine car from the outset, VW shot itself in the foot.
‘Thankfully, the shape of the original 500 was pretty upright at the back, so was the Panda platform we were limited by, and we knew we had Abarth on-board to do a pocket-rocket version that young men would want. Beyond that, it was merely a case of ensuring the car had enough overt design cues to make it instantly recognisable as a Fiat 500. And it worked – it turned the company’s fortunes around and soon became Fiat’s biggest seller. Now the company patterns its other cars around it.’
Talk of iconic design features gets Stephenson thinking about his earliest days as a professional designer, at Ford in the early Nineties when he worked on key details, rather than the car as a whole entity. Interestingly, his very first job involved reinterpreting something iconic – the high-rise rear wing of the Eighties Sierra RS Cosworth three-door which had to be evolved into that of the Escort Cosworth, .
‘I was straight out of college, young and wild!’ quips Stephenson. ‘I saw the biplane wing concept and thought of the Fokker DR1, the World War One triplane, figuring that adding yet another wing would produce even more downforce in the same way the third wing gave the plane more lift, as well as developing the original concept. I felt it would also give the car more personality than the old Sierra Cosworth which, although distinctive, was very functional and styled-by-engineering. But it didn’t work out in the end. Ford always wants to take money
out of projects to maximise profitability, so the Escort Cosworth ended up losing its middle wing. But it looked awesome with it!’
Reinvention isn’t just a lucky design brief to Stephenson, it’s an entire design philosophy. ‘Every marque has its iconic cars, which characterise it in the eyes of customers, and so every one of them could draw upon this sense of identity to appeal to buyers. It’s an approach that could have saved companies in the way that the Mini and 500 did. Can you imagine if Saab had revisited the original 96, for example? The company might still be with us today, especially if it retained all that cool quirkiness that made its cars appeal to architects. I hope Lancia takes this approach with its relaunch. Its history of car design is the best in the world. I’d love to see a new Fulvia and Flaminia.’
It doesn’t work for everything though. ‘You’re playing with fire with some icons. Walter Da’silva is one of my car design idols, but he put his hand to redesigning the Miura and was shot down. No-one had anything good to say about it; it must’ve been horrible for him. The Miura is Gandini’s masterpiece and reworking it backfired. You have to be careful about how touchy people can get, but you do have to lose your fear. It’s not just a case of coming up with a modernised design – you have to ask yourself why it has endured as an icon, before picking up the recipe, doing your own version but making sure you don’t lose the flavour that made people love it in the first place.’
So, which designs would Stephenson like to apply his Mini and 500 design process to next? Immediately his mind turns to
‘You have to be careful, but you do also have to lose your fear’
France, ‘Citroën 2CV, Renault 4, Renault 5,’ he says. ‘People love those cars. But any reinterpretation would have to retain their sense of cheap simplicity and minimalism. In this sense I think Mini missed a trick in not also reinventing the Moke in this way. A modern Moke could be a truly classless car, very cheap and simple yet also perfect for wealthy people in the south of France. Land Rover got this wrong with the new Defender too.’
He also thinks of America. ‘The Corvette, especially, is not what it used to be,’ Stephenson opines. ‘The new mid-engined version could not look more complicated if it tried, with lines everywhere for no reason. I’d return it to the simplicity of the original Sting Ray. The same goes for the Mustang – it looks too fussy and lumpen now. They looked back to the original 1964 design, but there’s a lovely cleanliness to the 1970-71 cars that could be revisited too. Entire muscle-car models and marques could be brought back – Chrysler could do a Plymouth Barracuda, and I’d love to see a new Ford Torino.’
But while reinvented icons seem to have mined the Fifties and Sixties, are there any from more recent years that Stephenson thinks may inspire a revisit in future? ‘I’d love to do a new Honda NSX, drawing upon the original’s intensity, reflecting Senna and the VTEC,’ he says. ‘The Alfa Romeo SZ and Nineties Fiat Multipla too.
‘And don’t get me started on BMW, making so much of a grille. Air intakes are much more efficient now, and can be made so small. Designing a car around a big grille is completely unnecessary nowadays, they’re design for design’s sake.’