History The Turtle That Swallowed Tomorrow

Ryan submitted a new blog post:

The Turtle That Swallowed Tomorrow

Continue reading the Original Blog Post

 

A couple of years ago I was interviewing a retired Detroit designer when he casually looked at a rendering, frowned for a second, and said, “It needs to be a little more… turtled.”

I had absolutely no idea what the hell he was talking about.

So he told me the story.

When Bill Mitchell sent General Motors’ request out to the Italian design houses, the brief was deceptively simple: build something with unmistakable Italian sensibilities, but don’t lose the GM design language. Somewhere along the way, Bertone handed Mitchell the final sketches for the Testudo at about the same time he was signing off on the production lines of the C2 Corvette.

He laid the two drawings side by side.

The Corvette suddenly looked… busy.

The Testudo had all the same aggression, all the same athleticism, but it had been stripped of the visual noise. It was cleaner. More confident. More sophisticated. Mitchell loved it.

The story goes that it sparked an internal conversation about simplifying the Corvette itself, but somebody higher up the food chain supposedly reminded the design staff that Americans didn’t buy sophistication. They bought chrome, horsepower, and visual excitement.

Whether that’s exactly how the conversation unfolded or not, the phrase apparently survived.

From then on, whenever Mitchell thought a design needed to be cleaner, calmer, or simply more elegant, he’d tell his designers it needed to be “turtled” a little.

 

The three cars that jump out at me the most are the Ferrari Daytona, the AMC Pacer, and the Porsche 928.

The Daytona took the basic shape and sharpened it into a knife. The Pacer did something completely unexpected, stretching the proportions vertically until the idea became almost cartoonish. The 928, though, feels like the most honest descendant. It doesn’t copy the Testudo so much as continue the conversation Giugiaro started back in 1963.

And those are just the obvious examples.

The more you look, the more you realize the Testudo’s fingerprints are all over automotive design from the mid-1960s well into the 1990s. Sometimes they’re impossible to miss. Other times they’re little more than a roofline, a greenhouse, or a subtle relationship between the nose and the cabin. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them.

Which makes perfect sense.

Giorgetto Giugiaro spent the next three decades teaching the rest of the industry how to see. His own work became the vocabulary of modern automotive design, and nearly every designer who picked up a pencil afterward spoke at least a little of his language, whether they realized it or not.

 

But really, all of that is almost beside the point.

The Testudo isn’t interesting because it influenced a Ferrari, a Porsche, or even an AMC Pacer. That’s just history doing what history does. The part that keeps gnawing at me is how closely the Italian coachbuilders and the great American customizers were chasing the same idea without ever really standing in the same room.

The Italians approached it from the future. They started with a blank sheet of paper and asked what an automobile couldbecome. The customizers approached it from the past. They started with something Detroit had already built and asked what it should have been.

Different paths.

Same destination.

I find an enormous amount of value in both schools of thought, and I respect the hell out of both art forms. But I also think the really magical cars live somewhere in the overlap, where an American customizer borrows just enough of that Italian obsession with proportion and restraint to stop thinking about modifications and start thinking about form.

Harry Westergard understood this instinctively.

He wasn’t building cars to showcase his metalworking abilities, and I doubt he ever stood back at the end of a project counting the number of modifications he’d made. The chops, the fades, the peakings, the filled seams… those were never the point. He simply chased the line until the line stopped asking for anything else. That’s why his cars have always felt strangely timeless. Park one in 1948 and it looked modern. Park the same car in 1960 and it still looked modern. Even today, they don’t feel dated because they were never built around fashion. They were built around proportion.

The same thing can be said for Sam Barris, for the guys at Valley Custom, and, in more recent years, someone like Gary Howard. They all seemed capable of looking at a car from thirty thousand feet while simultaneously obsessing over a sixteenth of an inch.

I’ve been preaching some version of that sermon for years now, probably to the point of exhausting everybody around me. But for whatever reason, looking at it through the lens of the Italian coachbuilders made the whole thing click in a way it never had before.

 

I like challenging myself. If I’m not learning something or looking at the hobby from a different angle every now and then, I start repeating myself, and that’s a dangerous place to be. The downside, of course, is that since you people have somehow agreed to read what amounts to my personal journal every morning, you occasionally get dragged along for the ride.

This wasn’t really a story about a Ferrari.

Or an Italian designer.

Hell, it wasn’t even about the Testudo.

It was about perspective. Specifically, the perspective of an Italian coachbuilder versus that of an American customizer, and the realization that the very best cars seem to appear where those two ways of thinking overlap. One side teaches restraint. The other teaches at***ude. Put them together and, every once in a while, you end up with something that doesn’t belong to any particular era.

You end up with something timeless.

At least that’s where my head was wandering today. Tomorrow it’ll probably be somewhere else entirely.

 

The achilles heal of the Testudo? At the end of the day, it's a Corvair under all that beauty. Not that there is anything at all wrong with a Corvair, but...

 

A far better example in my opinion is Dean's Mantaray:

 

I feel like I've written about it no less than 50 times, but have only featured it once on the journal... way back in 2009:

https://www.jalopyjournal.com/?p=3698