At Motoring Weekly, one of our favourite motor museums is in northern California - the Blackhawk Auto Museum where we first encountered the Alfa Romeo BAT cars: the "Berlinetta Aerodynamica Tecnica" design studies. All three, the BAT 5, BAT 7 and BAT 9 were designed by Franco Scaglione. Scaglione was born in the middle of the First World War on the 26th September 1916. His … [Read more...]
Tom Tjaarda
Last year the world lost one of the most prolific car designers, Tom Tjaarda. Tjaarda was born in Detroit in 1934 - his father worked in the Lincoln division of Ford and his claim to fame was that he worked on the Lincoln-Zephyr cars from the late 1930s. He had designed a vehicle that Ford used as a basis for their Zephyr. The Tjaarda surname came from a Dutch background with … [Read more...]
Malcolm Sayer
This designer’s legacy can be summed up by those immortal words from Enzo Ferrari about the Jaguar E-Type: “The most beautiful car in the world”. Malcolm Sayer was an aerodynamicist at a time when aircraft knowledge was flowing straight to racing cars. Ask many people who he is and they probably won’t know his name, yet his design work lives on in the industry. Born on the … [Read more...]
William Towns
William Towns was a British designer who penned a small range of interesting cars. He was born in 1936 and started his automotive career at the Rootes Group in 1954, initially as an interior designer working on mostly seats and other small components. He was then included in the team that started the design process for the range that became the Hillman Hunter - however he … [Read more...]
Alf Lysholm
Alf James Rudolph Lysholm appears to be the least known engineer who developed a piece of kit that can now be found in many different applications: planes, trains, automobiles - even refrigeration units! In fact, by far the majority of web sites that discuss Lysholm have simply cut and paste a very small item from Wikipedia. His life though, was far more than just a couple of … [Read more...]
