There was a senior engineer who would come into a design presentation with a little 6in steel rule and a slide rule (pre-calculator days!) and measure our sketches. When I worked in the studio as chief designer at Lotus in the ’80s, we were just starting to develop a sketching style where we exaggerated the wheel diameter of our proposals to give the designs more dynamism. > Blue brakes and an evo Nürburgring gathering – evo Archive Chunky 15in steel wheels and knobbly tyres said ‘off-road use’, skinny 13in wheels with plastic wheel covers shouted ‘city car’, 15s or even 16s suggested something a little bit sporty, whilst 18in wheels, as were fitted to Ferrari or the McLaren F1 were seen as ultra high-performance indicators. These were simple times when by looking at the wheel/tyre combination you could tell what the purpose of the car was. Aircraft experience during the Second World War led to the development of magnesium race car wheels by Halibrand in America, whilst in the UK in the 1950s Dunlop produced cast aluminium alloy race wheels for Jaguar.īy the 1980s, cast alloy wheels were either optional extras or, on high performance cars, part of the standard specification of the vehicle. The origins of today’s alloy wheels are now 80 years distant. That sounds obvious, but this brilliant, probably 3000-year-old invention immediately implies motion. The wheel and tyre package is what defines the car as being a land-based machine those four perfectly circular elements are fundamental to telling us what it is that we are looking at.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |