Simcoe: on Hurricane

One of Holden's highest profile exports is not a car -- it's Mike Simcoe. Rated among the most senior and respected General Motors designers, Simcoe is back from Detroit and resides in Australia these days, but arguably he wears one of GM's most important hats – executive director for international operations design. When you realise this is the arm of the company that largely commands mass market light and small cars, you understand why what Simcoe says counts.

Ever the enthusiast, Simcoe was front and centre when Holden unveiled its reborn Hurricane show car in Melbourne yesterday. It was an unofficial reunion for Simcoe with the car - as a 12 year old it played a part in cementing his passion for car design.

More importantly, Simcoe says it played a key part in the 'graduation' of Holden and the Australian car industry as a whole.

"I was into cars anyway but unless you went to the motor shows there was no... access [to something like this] other than in books... So this [the Hurricane] was tangible, it was there -- and it wasn’t roped off. You could actually touch the damn thing," Simcoe told motoring.com.au

"I think we understood [cars] from a design perspective [in 1969]...what the car was all about, but I’m not sure that as a country we were terribly sophisticated with that sort of thing... So it [Hurricane] really did get towed around to country towns on the back of a trailer by two or three engineers. And it was put in dealerships and displayed so that people could get a sense of, you know, what Holden’s future was all about.

"And when the car was put in the dealerships [it] would have been [next to] things like HKs and stuff...By the way, it’s half the height of an HK... It’s something that those guys [dealers] would never have seen… That the public would never have seen before..."

The project to restore the car is also important, he says. In particular Simcoe says Hurricane is an important rallying point for Holden's corporate culture.

"There's enough impetus within design and I guess a passion about all the products; not just the new concepts that we’ve done, but about the heritage as well [to get the Hurricane restored]. But for some time there’s been a lot of talk about how do we get, how do we reinforce, the Holden culture and go back and start to collect some of these cars.

"There was always talk of a heritage centre... That’s on the backburner now but it’s still something you’d like to do. Because people who work here, who’ve worked in here for long enough to sort of be invested in the brand realise without things like this, the young folk who are signing up into Holden now, or joining Holden now, have no, no real tangible understanding of the past.

"There’s books but there’s something raw and quite emotional about a physical product. And so to keep saving these vehicles, saving the heritage is just as important as doing new [concept] vehicles," he said.

Now it is complete and ready for a second public debut – at Melbourne's Motoclassica this weekend.

Simcoe says the Hurricane won't be locked away again. "It will find its way into shows and you can guarantee that there’ll be dealers out there in who want access to the car.

"There’ll be heritage shows – not just automotive but design shows that start to pull on these things," he said.

"Even of itself, it's an icon that hasn’t been available for [Holden and other] people to use. Now it exists, it will get drawn on.

"There’s a huge and a growing field for, for a look into the past. Not in a bad way, not in a longing for the past, but looking back and saying, “Okay, what do we see back there?”

See gallery at motoring.com.au of Making of the Holden Hurricane

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