a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2949 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: An Austin Reimagined For The Quarter Mile

Those fantasy hot wheels cars were almost certainly Ed Roths.

If they weren't ed roths, they owed a lot to his inspirations.

The problem with most crazy cars like that is they're pretty much awful to drive. Marcello Gandini didn't even know how to drive when he penned the Lamborghini LP500, which became the Countach four years later.

Visibility is shit. There are these foot-wide sills you have to climb over. The thing was skinned in aircraft aluminum so if you leaned against it, it'd dent. The windows didn't quite roll down enough to pass a Coke through, let alone pay at a toll booth. And there wasn't enough grill surface area to cool a lawnmower, let alone a 5L V12. But the design is so evocative that it ended up on boys' bedroom walls for 25 years:

Normal cars are boring. But there are certain compromises between "looking at it" and "looking out of it" that tend to preclude orange-tinted windows.