STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

Heard melodies are sweet, but unheard memories are sweeter. It’s for me the same about cars. Of course, style, design, technology and even performance are interesting. But the truly fascinating stuff is mysterious: the people and places cars take you to in the imagination. I enjoy the shape, noise and the occasional tingling of the pineal gland. But even more I enjoy the dream world you enter in a classic (or even just an ‘old’) car.

An example. One of my best drives ever was in a humble nuova Cinquecento, a mere 19.4km up the ‘scenic’ SP19 from Taormina to Savoca in Sicily – the village’s extremely atmospheric Bar

Vitelli is where Coppola filmed memorable scenes of The Godfather. There was something complete about this drive: nothing needed to be added to or taken from the experience to make it better.

I know the old Cinquecento well: my wife had a patinated yet badly behaved example. Now she has an electric 500e, perfect for cities but not for heroics: the electric Fiat never performs a journey more exciting than from home to Waitrose. Nor will it ever.

And when I think of the Cinquecento, my mind wanders to the extraordinary people punctuating Fiat’s long story. Dante Giacosa, whose career began with the original Topolino before Mussolini’s war and ended with the Fiat 128, a design that has some claim to have produced the best small car ever. Few have had such sway over an industry as Giacosa: engineer, designer, industrial diplomat, test-driver, manager, personality.

Or take his contemporary, Mario Revelli di Beaumont (see Octane 227), whose Franco-Italian name gives away his origins in Piedmontese nobility. His father designed machine guns, but in 1940 our Mario put his inherited weapons down and created a unique single-volume design for a taxi that predicted the Fiat Multipla and therefore every minivan since. Then he got distracted by other stuff, but filed an early patent for central locking.

In contemporary car culture, quirky genius is not being nurtured. But during the high summer of the Age of Combustion, eccentricity flourished both in cars and in aircraft. Engines made to reciprocate by explosions stimulated eccentric genius in the way that the whirr of electricity does not. Take, for example, Nick Comper, born in 1897 and the son of an architect who specialised in flamboyant church Gothic. But young Comper sought heights different to a cathedral’s pointed arch. He designed aircraft, including the Swift, a neat high-wing monoplane that in 1931 broke the London-Sydney record in nine days and two hours. He instructed jet pioneer Frank Whittle at Cranwell. But though brilliant, Comper died after setting off fireworks in a pub in Kent. He’d said he was from the IRA and there to blow-up Hythe’s town hall, was promptly knocked to the ground, hit his head on a kerb and died of a brain haemorrhage.

Another example from aerospace: Nevil Shute, ‘Chief Calculator’ of the R100 airship who became a novelist. With his full name Nevil Shute Norway, he founded Airspeed, manufacturer of military trainers. In his autobiography he wrote that the great thing about designing around combustion engines in the 1930s was ‘aeroplanes would fly when you wanted them to, but there were still fresh things to be learnt in every flight’. He found the successful calculation of the stress on a spar to be a religous revelation, even if it was on a beer mat. In his day, it took about six months to take a ’plane design from concept to first flight.

But my favourite from this B-roll of combustion celebrities is the baronet Sir Leslie Marr. After studying engineering at Cambridge, Marr took up painting and joined the circle around David Bomberg, one of the great figures in modern English art. They made gutsy pictures of dark solemnity. Then, on a whim, Marr bought a Connaught A-Type and competed in the 1954 and 1955 British Grands Prix. In 1956, he came fourth in New Zealand. A world-class painter and racer? Like Damien Hirst qualifying for the Indy 500.

Something about the cheerful anarchy of combustion made this antic school of genius possible. The cold logic of electricity will never incubate such eccentricity. Besides, our world now has many satisfactions, but it is not tolerant of the spontaneous creativity that could take a ’plane from beer-mat to 15,000ft in 24 weeks.

For today we have only Elon Musk. It is splendid that Musk does not care a rat’s patootie for convention and manners, but you suspect he might be unreliable in an emergency. And to appreciate his art, you need a high tolerance for megalomania and no allergic reaction to nut jobs. Still, he is unique. A solo voice. And this is why we have heard his melodies too often.

‘ELON MUSK DOES NOT CARE FOR CONVENTION, BUT YOU SUSPECT HE’LL BE UNRELIABLE IN AN EMERGENCY’

STEPHEN BAYLEY The individual for whom the term ‘design guru’ could have been coined, Bayley was the founding director of London’s Design Museum and his best-selling books include Sex, Drink and Fast Cars and Taste: the Secret Meaning of Things.