911 is no role model for McLaren

There comes a point when a long-lived success like the Porsche 911 becomes a caricature of itself, some argue. Certainly a well-known trio of UK TV presenters subscribed to that view.

Although the changes to the 911 have been significant under the bodywork – albeit sticking to the tried and true formula – the body itself looks more like it has been on a program of botox, collagen and silicon for the past 50+ years.

Porsche's commitment to one aesthetic ideal leads to boring car design, argues Frank Stephenson, Design Director at McLaren.

"For a designer, the worst thing is to get stuck in a rut – and start producing cars that are predictable in design. So when you see the next car you say: 'Yeah, it's nice, obviously it's another McLaren'," Stephenson told motoring.com.au at the formal opening of McLaren's new Melbourne dealership last week.

"That is the easy way to design a car, but that is also the boring way to design it; [it is] the best way not to alienate your current customers, unless they do get bored and want something new – the reason why the 911 sticks around for so long, you get your customer base... they don't want to change it.

"But I think in this segment here you have to give the customer, each time he sees a brand-new product, the feeling that he's getting something better than it's ever been before.

"Of course, every car you do is the best you can do at that moment. But the last thing I want for us to do in design is to be too predictable."

Stephenson makes a further interesting point about the 911. Porsche had planned to end production of the 911 at the end of the 1970s, but the car has outlasted the 928 and other front-engined models from the brand, such as the 944 and 968. Where... when, indeed, will it end?

"There's nothing wrong with the design," Stephenson says. "It's absolutely beautiful and gorgeous, [but] think of the 911 in 2100; what's it going to look like? Probably similar to what it looks like today."

The McLaren stylist does concede it might be running on hydrogen and electric power by then...

Even lay people can pick a Targa from a Turbo from a GT3 in the 911 range. Some can even distinguish a 964 from a 993 from a 991. Will it take McLaren a few years yet before that level of fine-detail recognition becomes second nature?

"I don't think so..." Stephenson replies. Being the designer-in-chief for the brand, he naturally sees each and every model of McLaren as being distinctively different, but often it's the finer differences that distinguish one model in the range from another, as in the case of the 570S versus the 570GT.

"That's the danger; if you do create too much of a family look it sort of starts to paint you into a corner. And then you get into a problem like Aston Martin, where they had to do something like DB11.

"Not to criticise it, but they had to break out of that look that they have. It's much harder to do once you establish [that kind of style]. It almost looks like a radical approach to changing your design identity."

Stephenson says that it doesn't have to be that hard shifting the corporate styling theme a few yards further down the track.

"If we just get into that philosophy of every time some new technology allows us to incorporate it then the resulting look will move on with that too."

So McLaren styling will change on an evolutionary basis then? No Bangle-esque leaps into the great unknown for customers?

"We've kind of established a McLaren look now. The main thing is 'shrink-wrapped'... what we're doing is instead of creating a lot of beautiful, sensuous surfaces in the car, the car's looking very athletic.

"It's got that sort of... 'the knuckles poking through' [style]. Almost, the philosophy of having the hard points of the car – where you have the suspension, the visibility angles and the engines and the wheels and everything – taking a sheet and just let it drape itself over the hard points, and that kind of becomes the shape of the car.

"We're taking surface away rather than trying to shape it to have a beautiful shape. It's more or less sucking the air out of the car. And that way it looks a little more athletic."

That sounds rather like the stylist at McLaren is held to ransom by engineering choices. Stephenson doesn't see it that way at all.

"I love the challenge of doing it. The engineers are doing their job... and we're very tight and close with engineering. So they can ask us 'where do you want us to put the exhaust coming out of the car?'

"If we have like a 570 we put them down low, if we have the 650 we put them up in the middle... two pipes, for example. With the P1 – the hypercar – we just put a single [pipe]...

"You can start to identify elements just by certain ways of treating elements that can move around on the car.

"The thing is our engineers sit in the design studio with us – which is completely unusual in car design. Normally nobody's allowed in the car design studio except for the car designers and the big boss, I guess.

"Because we're kind of tight on time, we have to make sure that everything we design is buildable, but not in the buildable sense that we've done it that way before, or it's the best way to do it currently, that we know how.

"We get the engineers in the design studio so that we don't spin our wheels too much, getting the design to be able to be built. But the engineers are thinking like race-car engineers at the same time, not like 'we don't know if this is going to work, so we're not going to do it'.

"It's the race-car engineer mentality where 'anything works, we've just got to throw the right amount of brains [at it] – or find a way to do it'.

"So that kind of engineer working alongside the designer – the crazy engineer working alongside the crazy designer – makes innovation happen.

"It's not like we do a design and then send it off to engineering to see if they can make it work. That is the worst way to design a car, for us, I think. That's why probably we don't do the concept car approach, where we design the ultimate, beautiful McLaren, send it off to a motor show, and see what the public thinks about it; and then send it back to engineers and it gets watered-down because it's not do-able.

"If we can make that concept car design work as a functioning car from the very beginning then we're cutting out a lot of development time."

As a sign of the way the McLaren corporate look may evolve in future – and in harmony with hand-in-glove consultation with engineers – Stephenson mentions the McLaren headlight.

"Looks like a McLaren logo. You can do it forever, and it becomes boring, basically, after a while.

"[There is] That initial wow factor when you see it, but after a while you start having to think outside the box, because new technology comes along; lasers are coming... frees up the packaging, makes you able to do a lot different design.

"You have to build up, for a family-feeling look, you have to use some design cues, but they're always going to be evolving. The last thing we want to do is be predictable."