Dying Is Easy, Inspiring The Future Of Ferrari Design Is Hard
I may be going out on a limb here, but I would guess that something like half of the men in the developed world have drawn, sketched or doodled a Ferrari at some point in there lives. Given this seemingly inborn tendency, you’d think that young, ambitious design students would jump into a Ferrari design challenge with shockingly distinctive, radically passionate, heart-wrenchingly beautiful designs, matured by years of fixation on the most aspirational sportscar brand in the world. And yet… many of the designs at the Ferrari World Design Challenge 2011, depicting a “Ferrari of the Third Millennium,” seem like they could be any brand’s “car of the future.”
Some may put this down to the fact that these are design students, not the trained teams that come up with Ferrari’s current designs, but I have another explanation: good design, even for something as frivolous and over-the-top as a Ferrari, has to have function at its core. But what is Ferrari’s function in our uncertain future? What is Ferrari without V-12s? Where does performance go in the next millennium when the current “base” Ferrari hits 60 MPH in just over three seconds? How can a brand like Ferrari maintain its exalted position without breaking down major performance barriers in each generation? Rather than knocking these students for their sometimes-disappointing designs, let’s take a moment to appreciate just how tough their task is.
More by Edward Niedermeyer
Comments
Join the conversation
Although I am currently in the developed world, my Ferrari doodling years were lived in the third world. And 100% of the doodling was about the F40. Even today, if you asked me to sketch a Ferrari, you would see a badly drawn F40. The Ferrari design language for me is still the F40 and the Testarossa. All those curves look weird.
As far as the future of the brand, I feel like a set of guiding principles and spiritual definitions can help. Ferrari is the [nearly-X-rated] Italian Jaguar. So, if a Jaguar is Kate Beckinsale in a tight black dress, -looking over her shoulder at you. Then a Ferrari is Monica Bellucci in high-gloss red latex bridge paint, standing on the backs of 2 asphyxiated gilded pygmy lutists, licking a stream of honey off the leg of prosciutto being dangled in front of her face on a flax rope by Federico Fellini, during the guitar solo of "Nessun Dorma".
This just goes to show that the same sick convergent evolution that turned the current run of Jaguars into overblown Camrys is at work here. Let the engineers, focus groups and bean-counters design your cars and you'll bleed every drop of passion out of them. A Ferrari should be a little senseless, but hot blooded. That is, it must look hot-blooded. When I look at these designs, none of them stand out, and none of them say, "Ferrari". Not really. Warmed-over Banshee, half-melted Aventador perhaps. There's even some boiled Chevy Express in there. . . Nothing that would get Enzo's blood moving. Exhibit one: The Alfa-Romeo 8C. Classic beauty, Italian verve. It may not post the biggest numbers, but if sheer numbers at any cost is your game, you're not really shopping Ferrari anyhow. My suggestion for the students would have been to look toward the classic Ferrari designs of the 50's and 60's, instead of the less than stunning lines of the 90's to now. Ferrari design should be about classic ideals of passion and verve, not the Jetsons in red.
This is clearly not the actual Ferrari studio. No Cayenne or Panamera fighters in sight!