Never Say Never

In my experience as a former design tutor there are two things you should never do. Never give someone a broad brief to do a design task, then penalise them if what they produce disagrees with your narrow expectations. And never say 'never', because nobody can predict what the future may hold.

Back in 2005, when sports cars were sports cars and the three year old Porsche Cayenne was seen as a fad that would fizzle out, Ferrari ran the first international design competition for 4 competing design Universities to showcase their visions of the future of Ferrari cars. This was called “Ferrari: New Concepts for the Myth”. The competing Universities in alphabetical order were: Art Center Pasadena (USA), Coventry University (UK), IED Instituto Europeo di Design (Italy), and TCA Tokyo Communication Arts (Japan).

For all the young students it was an incredibly exciting time working on a brief for such an iconic car brand; a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The UK cohort from the Coventry MA in Automotive Design was briefed in person at Graypaul Ferrari in Nottingham UK by Ferrari’s then Design Director, Frank Stephenson. Ferrari had directed Graypaul to grant the students ‘access all areas’ to soak up the essence of the brand. Can you imagine being a car design student in your early twenties and having the freedom of a Ferrari dealer’s showroom?

(Coventry Students Briefing at Graypaul Ferrari. Images: Author)

For the next ten months the students at all the institutions across the world put their hearts and souls into the project. There was no 3D CAD and milling at the time. Students used clay, sculpting their designs with hand and eye, then casting traditional GRP models. It was a labour of love culminating in twenty 1:4 scale hard-resin painted models which were shipped to Maranello for the Final Presentation and Awards Ceremony. These were not simply vacuous styling models, but properly researched and packaged cars designed to advance the Ferrari visual language whilst demonstrating technical and ergonomic innovation.

One of the Coventry groups bravely decided to take on the challenge of creating a four-door, full-four-seater GT car with its engine mounted midships like many of the Ferrari sports cars of that era. The only other four door Ferrari to have existed was the one-off, front-engined ‘Pinin’ created by Pininfarina in 1980 (see below) but which had sedan proportions and was never approved by Enzo Ferrari for production.

(Ferrari Pinin by Pininfarina 1980. Image: evo.co.uk)

Through 2D artwork and a 3D clay model the Coventry team worked hard on the innovative proportions, passenger space and the engine installation, and then clothed the mid-engine package in a beautiful body. They were determined to make a four-door car that looked like a Ferrari and with the V12 in the ‘right’ place. They named their proposal the “650 Berlinetta Sportiva”

The excitement continued to build as the students prepared for their trip to Maranello to be reunited with their models and to present them to the senior management of Ferrari. The designers of the “650 Berlinetta Sportiva” from Coventry could not wait to deliver their vision of a full-blooded Ferrari that might be used every day. It genuinely stood out from all the mid-engine 2 seaters and 2+2 GT cars, so the team was eagerly looking forward to presenting it to the Ferrari Chairman and receiving his feedback.

However, what happened came as a surprise to everyone. The Chairman of Ferrari was being taken along the line of models speaking warmly and with interest to each group in turn. But he took one look at the beautifully fabricated “650 Berlinetta Sportiva” model and, after the briefest of introductions to the three Coventry students who had worked so hard to make it, showed no further interest and moved to the next group saying tersely that, “Ferrari will never make a four-door car”. The three students were disappointed to say the least. His reaction was unexpected and a real shame because a design should still be judged on its merits even if you may not agree with the approach taken, and nowhere in Ferrari’s brief did it say that a four-door car was totally off limits.

Those three young students had put ten months of hard work into the project to resolve a sophisticated exterior and interior design on top of a difficult package. They could have taken the easy path and simply styled a car using the other tried and tested Ferrari formulae and proportions. Instead, they took a risk and tackled the brief that even Pininfarina had struggled to deliver, a four-door sports car that was deserving of the Ferrari badge. And most people thought they did it well. Fortunately the judges from Ferrari Design and Engineering did like it which compensated for the disappointment of their Chairman's reaction.

But Karma can be patient.

The automotive market has moved on. The Porsche Cayenne of 2002 (and the rather more humble Nissan Qashquai launched in 2006) introduced the world to a new type of car, the 'sports utility vehicle' which has since become an enduring, if controversial, sales phenomenon. Among all the volume manufacturers, even high-end luxury marques such as Bentley, Rolls Royce, Aston Martin and even Ferrari’s arch-rival Lamborghini have introduced SUVs to meet the more practical demands of very wealthy customers with families and money to spend.

In September 2022, finally succumbing to consumer pressure, Ferrari unveiled its first ever production four door, the ‘Purosangue’. Not just a four door, but a four door SUV! That makes two rather surprising firsts.

Yet, seventeen years ago, three young Coventry University Automotive Design MA students, George Koukos, Chris Lavelanet and Tom Matic produced their own beautiful vision of a low-slung, four-seat, mid-engine V12 Ferrari with four doors that conformed to the true Ferrari ethos, but it was rejected out of hand at the time by the boss of Ferrari.

Maybe now, as Ferrari prepares to do a four-door car for real, the time is appropriate to take one last look at what might have been. I will reiterate that the "650 Berlinetta Sportiva" was an entry for a student design competition run by Ferrari in 2005 so this is NOT a secret abandoned Ferrari proposal. Pictures from the competition (including CAD model of the proposed interior) can be found online in the public domain if you look hard enough.

In summary I have pulled together a few key images of the superbly-finished painted physical model (see below) so you can judge for yourselves if the “650 Berlinetta Sportiva” should have been deserving of the prancing horse badge back in 2005...even if it did have four-doors.

The arrival of the 2022 ‘Purosangue’ SUV shows that, for all a company’s grand history and ethos, heritage and hubris, in today’s car industry where the customer is king you can never say ‘never’.

(Student Competition Entry - the "650 Berlinetta Sportiva" Image: Author & JO)