The Giugiaro Esprit shape is an
archetypal example of the Folded Paper design
wonderfully reminisent of that glorious 1970s period of
sportscar production
The sketches above on the
left are Giorgetto Giugiaro's original first renderings of the
striking new Esprit form
On the right Giugiaro is pictured somewhat later than when he penned the Esprit, around the time of his Lotus Etna design
As the son and grandson of well known Italian
figurative artists, Giorgetto Giugiaro was naturally destined for
an artistic future - during his studies at the Turin Art School,
he enjoyed drawing caricatures of cars and they were displayed at
an end-of-year school show
Dante Giacosa, the Technical Director of
F.I.A.T. happened to see them and immediateIy realised his
talent - by 1955 Giorgetto had joined the company's Styling
Office
In 1959, at the age of only 21, he was offered the position of
manager of the Bertone Stylinq Centre and from here he designed
spectacular coachwork for Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Ferrari,
Jaguar, Maserati and other reputed marques
After six highly intense years at Bertone, he moved
to Ghia but he was driven to launch his own company, Ital Styling,
at the end of 1957
The name was changed
to Italdesign
one year later and has since always been one of the leading
players in the field of automobile design
Giorgetto Giugiaro's work was acknowledged in 2000, when he was awarded the supreme title of "Car Designer of the Century" by a panel of 120 top motoring journalists worldwide
A Lotus Europa chassis was modified to match the dimensions of the
new M70 car and it wasshipped it to the Ital Design studio in
Turin, where Giugiaro could work on the body design
By 1972 the first
protytpe of Project M70, known as "The Silver Car",was ready to
be revealed at that Year's Turin Motor Show
Here's Colin Chapman, pictured with Giorgetto Giugiaro and "The Silver Car" outside some flats in Turin (a secret meeting perhaps?)
Ital Design had been working on the Lotus concept
car and the Maserati Boomerang over this period and showed them
both, on their stand at the show
The Ital show car, the Silver Car, used aluminum
alloy body panels but prouction of the final M70 design at the
Lotus factory was to be done with a fiberglass body - in view of
this, members of the Lotus design team under the leadership of Oliver
Winterbottom, relocated temporarily to Turin to work
directly with the Ital Design team, who had little experience with
GRP construction techniques
Click the image on the left for a gallery the Silver Car's interior
Here is a picture from 1972 of the original clay mock-up of the Esprit from Tony Rudd's book
This appears to be full sized, as is normally the case for a clay model a 1/4 scale model was also constructed and taken to the MIRA wind tunnel for aerodynamic testing
Colin Chapman had suspected that the wedge shape,
although low on drag, would produce postive lift at higher wind
speeds and this was confirmed at MIRA
Changes were made to negate this and also world wide
compliancy changes were also made, one of which was the increase
of the windscreen angle from 19 to 24 degrees for USA regulations
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Click here for the next part of the Esprit developement - The S1 and S2