Intervista a Frank Stephenson...

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AutoWeek Q&A with Ferrari and Maserati design director Frank Stephenson

As design director for Ferrari and Maserati, Frank Stephenson freely admits he has one of the world’s best jobs. He elaborated during his appearance at the 11th Annual AutoWeek Design Forum sponsored by Johnson Controls during the Detroit auto show in January:

AW: How would you say that your design experience is different now than it was when you were first starting out?

STEPHENSON: The design world has always changed, even before I started it was a whole ‘nother world. It’s like everything, it evolves. The process when I started was, strictly speaking about design, was always that we did clay models, we did hand sketches, we basically took the points off a clay model and then applied the surfaces on the clay model. Now what we’re trying to do is come to the market a lot quicker with the car. What has evolved is almost doing everything electronically, if you can, and if you have to go back and manually adjust something, you do it. It’s gone from the manual age to the computer age. So now we basically design on a computer and we create the cars on a computer and we do a lot of the evaluations on computer. It all happens quicker, and in a certain respect it is maybe even better, because you can always try something and if it doesn’t work, you can go back a step. When we did a sketch and we tried a different color and it didn’t work, we threw away six hours of work and started over again.

AW: What inspires you?

STEPHENSON: Designers are all of different breeds. There are some guys who like to innovate and there’s other guys who like to recall the past. There are other guys who don’t want to push forward, they want to go retro. It’s just basically what you think as a designer is the right way to go. For me, personally—and I’m just lucky enough to have the same philosophy as the company I’m with—my approach to most of my design projects is always to keep a link to the past into the future. Don’t forget the past but still innovate. For my sense, it’s more about evolutionary design. It’s a natural process. Everything evolves: humanity, animals, orchids, everything. It’s always an evolutionary process. Erratic mutations whenever there’s an emergency—that’s not a good sign.

AW: What are some qualities that you would say are essential in a car designer?

STEPHENSON: Never be satisfied. Never ask for permission, just ask for forgiveness. Extremely emotional, passionate people, are the good ones—very into what they’re doing. And basically it’s not a job, you live it 24 hours a day. Sunday afternoons I’m walking down some street in some exotic or different town and I’m influenced by the littlest things. And I try, maybe, if it pleases me or makes me feel good, to use that in some sort of way in design.

AW: How does the F1 program influence the work you do?

STEPHENSON: Well it does influence because I’m almost obligated to use it. Because if I want to innovate, I have to look at what’s the newest, most modern technology and that always comes from the racing side, because there, the budgets are a bit higher. They’re constantly experimenting on what the best aerodynamic aids are, how to reduce the weight of materials, the best handling and suspension, the best gearbox, the best electronics available, so that for me is where I get a lot of ideas from. On the other hand you have to be very sensual. You have to have a feeling for form because you have to sell that design.

AW: What are the most iconic cars in the Ferrari-Maserati Group and some characteristics that they share?

STEPHENSON: First of all, the exotic-ness. We try to make every Ferrari and Maserati iconic. We got pretty lucky or it was just a bunch of creme de la creme guys working together and it happened to them that way. There’s a whole lot of myth in the Ferraris and Maseratis—a whole lot of that special aura or whatever you’d call it. It was probably a lot due to very passionate people building very exclusive cars and using their hearts more than their heads. That’s always going to create a special kind of product.

(Fonte: AutoWeek)