When Infiniti released images of the Prototype 9 concept last week, the automotive internet wigged out a little. Nissan’s luxury unit had gone back in time and brought forth an electrically powered vision of a Grand Prix past that never existed, which could have been a terrible idea. But in the creative hands of Nissan’s senior vice president of global design, Alfonso Albaisa, the result turned out to be a bold, tasteful exercise in what-iffery that we’re more than a little bit in love with. Prior to its debut this week at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, we caught up with Albaisa and the Prototype 9 on a windy runway in Alameda, California, to gather a few more details about the magnificent machine.
1. It started with a text. “There was no memo,” explained Albaisa. “Amelia Island was coming up, and Allyson Witherspoon [former Infiniti Americas marketing director] was like, ‘Why don’t we do a barn-find type of thing? Just keep it in the back of your mind.’
“I said, ‘Oh, okay, I’m really busy, right now isn’t the best time.’ Then, just by chance, I stumbled on a document that showed the first Japanese Grand Prix car from 1936 or something. I didn’t know! I always thought [Japanese Grand Prix racing started] in the 1960s! So then we thought: Oh! Perfect! Now we have generally an era.”
2. That grille is even more intense than you realized. The outermost bars of the grille are actually the leading edges of that gorgeous side blade/hood vent. The hood ornament was designed to look like what Albaisa described as “maybe the first one that they did.”
3. It cribs parts from an actual Infiniti. Although it makes use of the Nissan Leaf’s motor, the battery system consists of two packs from the Infiniti QX70 hybrid, which fit within the long, narrow nose of the car better than the Leaf’s pack.
4. The influence is 1940s, not 1930s. While prewar and immediate postwar Grand Prix cars shared an aesthetic, Albaisa claimed the car was really influenced by what was happening in manufacturer race shops after the Second World War. The driving position was exaggerated a bit, pulling influence from planes such as Howard Hughes’s H-1 Racer. In spirit, it also draws from the Tama, an EV produced by Fuji Precision Industries, the predecessor organization to the Prince Motor Company, which was absorbed into Nissan in 1966.
5. It has to be one of the very few machines of its aesthetic to have an ethernet port. The yellow Cat6 cord coiled around the polished shifter looks like an abject anachronism, but it serves to connect the electric powertrain to external computers.
6. The body’s construction was a mixture of manual labor and modern machinery. The car was designed in CAD. And while the hood was formed by a seven-axis dieless forming machine, the rest was shaped by hand, with the aid of a CNC laser cutter. The laser cut out flat pieces of sheetmetal based on the CAD wireframe grid, which were then welded together and hammered into shape by Nissan craftsmen at the Oppama factory, which, fittingly, is the company’s oldest plant.
7. The wheels are steel. In the 1950s, most racing machines were rolling on aluminum Borrani wire wheels, but postwar GP cars still used steel, so that’s what Infiniti used on the Prototype 9.
8. The gauge cluster floats within the center of the steering wheel. The car actually has two wheels: a simple wood-rimmed, era-correct wheel for taller drivers like Albaisa, and the unit we photographed, which carries the car’s gauges in a round, engine-turned pod in the center of the wheel.
9. Those steampunk brake drums aren’t drums at all. The Prototype 9, like the latest Nissan Leaf, is capable of single-pedal operation. But when stopping power beyond the car’s regenerative braking is required, there are modern discs hidden under the retro-modern finned brake drum housings.
10. It was, at most, supposed to be a foam model. Little did Albaisa or Witherspoon know what a hit the project would be within Nissan. And while the best concept cars are often whimsical by nature, Witherspoon’s whim, Albaisa’s discovery of that old document, and the enthusiasm of the craftsmen at the Oppama plant conspired to bring a functional machine of pure joy and beauty to the world. We stumbled around the thing for an hour or so, and there’s not a bad line on the car. Who wouldn’t want to drive it? We’re awfully glad that doing just that is a possibility.
from Car and Driver BlogCar and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/2uOiVGi
via IFTTT
0 comments:
Post a Comment