Firebird III
Excerpt from Of Firebirds & Moonmen: A Designer's Story from the Golden Age – Norman J James
Harley Earl - Firebird III Concept Definition
Early in 1957, we began hearing that GM was going to feature another corporate show car in the next Motorama, and that we would be involved. Since we had moved into the Tech Center, Bob McLean had become more active in building his organization, adding an advanced engineering and a marketing group. As a result, he was spending less and less time with us. His executive office was in the front administration building, a short distance from Harley Earl’s second floor corner office. One morning, McLean came into our studio with an assignment. It would be to develop a new design concept for the next Motorama, some eighteen months hence. It had yet to be decided whether it would be a running or a non-running vehicle. Our studio had been asked to prepare some original concepts, but they would only need to be done at a low level of effort because of our reduced staffing.
As we were set up at the time, apart from a few supporting people, Stefan [Habsburg] and I did all the basic design and development work for our studio. Stefan handled all the technical/mechanical aspects, as well as schedules and interdepartmental memos. Essentially, he was acting as McLean’s assistant studio head without title. As the only designer, I was responsible for all the styling. We all freely accepted inputs to our work from other team members, regardless of what hat they were wearing.
On this particular day, McLean called Stefan and me into a closed-door meeting to advise us that from now on, his participation would be strictly administrative, performing in a purely managerial function. He told us that he would give us an assignment and a completion date, and that he would not personally become involved in the design process. As he explained it, it would be as if he were a customer in a fine restaurant. He would place an order for what he wanted and that we would prepare and serve it to him. If he did not like what we served, he would send it back to have it prepared correctly. He then added with emphasis, "I will not go into the kitchen and cook it myself!" With this preface, Stefan and I then set out to develop some ideas for the new Motorama car.
At the time, electric vehicles were becoming "hot items" so we set about doing a small electric "sporty" vehicle, all in good taste, i.e., without tail fins and having very little chrome. After playing with a few full size front and side views, we felt we had a good configuration. I prepared drawings and had a full-size space-frame wood mockup built. It was of notched egg-crate type construction, similar to that used for flying model airplanes, except without a skin covering. McLean scheduled a review of our model with Harley Earl shortly afterward.
When Earl entered our studio, he selected a nice comfortable Bertoia wire chair in the center of the studio and sat down. McLean started going over the design features of our design in meticulous detail but Earl didn’t even appear to be paying attention. When McLean finished, Earl began talking, describing the characteristics and features that the new car would have, totally ignoring what had just been presented to him. It was evident that a lot of other discussions had already been carried on and decisions made.
He indicated first that it would be a running car and, in fact, it would be the third of the Firebird series of cars. It had already been designated as the XP-73, in accordance with internal project naming protocols. Working with research staff, we would incorporate a regenerative gas turbine engine, very similar to the one used in the Firebird II. Engineering staff would also participate, by building an auxiliary power unit (APU) comprised of a small 10 HP four-stroke two-cylinder combustion engine driving a 115V AC three-phase electric generator, a 1,000 PSI servo hydraulic system, and a 3,000 PSI hydraulic spring suspension system. The clever feature was that when it was on the show circuit, they could run the generator backward, as an electric motor, from readily available "house current." In this way, all the electrical and hydraulic subsystems depending on the APU could safely be demonstrated indoors without having to run the gasoline engine.
As to its appearance, he wanted it to be similar to the Pontiac Club de Mer show car of the 1956 Motorama (a two-seat open roadster with twin windscreens), but of course, it would have to be a little bigger to accommodate all the mechanical systems. He then went on to describe the show environment he wanted to create. He explained how all Motorama tours started at the Waldorf Astoria in the main ballroom, offering New Yorkers a free auto show and that GM would also exhibit its new product line. He said, "People will stand in line, four abreast, completely around the city block, just waiting to get inside. Once in the ballroom, it will be so crowded around the car that they will not be able to see it all and will have to stay for the next show, just to get a better view." This would make for a bigger and better crowd. As to the visual impression he wanted the car to make, he wanted it to be spectacular; it should be "what you would expect the astronauts to drive to the launch pad on their way to the moon." Stressing what he meant by spectacular, he added, "You know, when you go to Las Vegas to see a stage show, you don’t expect to see your wife on the stage . . . you expect to see a real 'floozy.'"
As Earl was describing this, he was still seated and we were all standing around in a circle, listening attentively. As he was talking, I was trying to visualize the images as he was creating them. I apparently had a silly grin on my face because he suddenly stopped talking, looked at me directly, and innocently said, "No, I’m serious," and then he continued with his monologue, as a cold chill came down over my face. When Earl finished, he and McLean left the studio; Stefan and I looked at each other and based on his Las Vegas showgirl comment, I said, "Well, if we don’t put fins on it then someone else will."
This is a reconstruction of the first Firebird III sketch prepared following Harley Earl’s "vision."
While we were waiting for technical specifications to arrive from Research Staff, I started making a few sketches, the first of which was a literal attempt to capture the image of a crowd scene around the car, as Earl had described it. Rather than just showing a "blob" of people, I tried to add graphic interest to it by placing breaks in the crowd, showing glimpses of the vehicle rising high enough to be seen through those breaks. These could be fins, open hoods, Mercedes 300SL-type raised doors, etc., that would create an attractive crowd composition. Part of the rational was that protruding fins or things, toward the crowd, would threaten their personal space and help create those natural breaks, teasing observers beyond.
There were other sketches, some showing a moon rocket in the background. I had recently been inspired at an air show by a Nike surface to air missile, mounted on its launch rail. It was a two-stage missile and had tandem sets of quad fins, one set in back and the other set midway up the missile. What struck me was that because it was lying on its launch rail, the arrays were clocked forty-five degrees out of square, while the paradigm was that rocket fins were square to the world (horizontal and vertical) so my sketches started taking on this new look.
Shortly, details started arriving from the staffs on the chassis specifications such as wheelbase, track (tire separation), profile drawings of the APU, engine/transmission packages, the joystick controller that Research Staff had been developing, and tire sizes (the rear wheels were larger than the front). We added our ninety-fifth percentile Oscar and started to size our basic vehicle, working full scale, and placing the cardboard templates of these items onto the vertical boards. The engine/transmission/differential package was positioned amidships behind the passengers and made for some very difficult proportions to work with. Following Earl’s direction, we adapted the Pontiac Club de Mer theme. Neither of us was very happy with the way it was working out, so we started considering some of the earlier theme sketches I had worked up.
This is a copy of the original sketch that set the Firebird III theme.
The most attractive sketch I made was inspired by the North American F-100 (nose inlet), and by the Nike angled fins set at its midbody. Because of the side-by-side seating, the body section was stretched to an exaggerated width, giving it near surfboard proportions and terminating with a stark “stovepipe” front end. Another sketch on the theme was a three-quarter rear view, showing the car suspended from a hoist, the wheels partially retracted—a moon rocket standing in the background. In these versions, the Club de Mer twin windscreens had evolved into twin blister canopies, separated but astride an upwardly flared center body section, coming in above the shoulders in the interior. There were only a few sketches made around this theme, and these were now the ones that Stefan and I were thinking about trying in full scale.
This also appeared to be a good time to try another idea I had been mulling around with for some time; that of developing a way to create something original by changing the (design) process that defined it. The standard method of starting a new design was to stretch out a large sheet of vellum on the long vertical board, then, working with a soft pencil, sketch out the design features with bold heavy multiple strokes. One would then have to step back some distance, in order to see what it looked like. The designer would then return to the board to erase bad lines and sketch in better ones, repeating the process until they were satisfied. Then a clean sheet of vellum would be overlaid, and hard sharp lines traced over, using sweeps and curves. My concern with the process was that the eye would integrate the eraser smudges as contributing design features; however, these "effects" would be lost in the final hard line drawing.
Committed to trying the new technique, we requisitioned an assortment of heavy brightly colored yarns (which they had to go out to buy) and several boxes of pushpins. These materials arrived a few days later and we were ready to give it a try it. We began by again pinning the cardboard cutouts of the Oscar, wheels, engine train, APU, etc., on to the girded vellum. We then created lines by tying loops at both ends of a string of yarn and pinning them at the start and end points of the intended line. There was enough stretch in the yarns so that they could be made to represent curves and shapes by placing intermediate pushpins, transversely stretching the yarn into multiple short cord segments. In this way, we were able to sketch out the design line features around the components. It was surprising how quickly the general proportions were laid out, and how easily they could be changed. Of course, there were no longer any residual traces of erased features to detract from the design.
I also found that, aesthetically, I could more readily see the mathematics or the purity of the line by judging the pin placement and spacing (progression). A line could be accelerated to imply motion or direction by uniformly diminishing the spacing between pins while keeping the same angle, or by progressively changing the angles between pin segments or by combinations of both. Where I wanted to relate a surface to some feature below, I would create an "event" at that feature by symmetrically or asymmetrically causing the mathematics of the line to mirror or change as the line passed the event within.
Lockheed F-104 Starfighters at an air show. The most striking feature of the F-104 was the downward cant (anti-dihedral) of the wings.
It was the first time I had ever tried this technique in a study and found to be surprisingly easy to use. The yarns were arranged, trying to replicate the primary theme with the Nike quad fins. A slim body profile evolved with a large overhang at the front end because of the APU. I was also trying to achieve a lightness that I observed at the same air show, of an F-104 Lockheed Starfighter, as it was taxiing along an apron, its needle nose bouncing lightly and the free space below it making it feel light, as if floating on air. The midship location of the engine/transmission package posed another problem, however, since it pushed the rear wheels too far back. The quad fin feature was keyed to the concept that I wanted the fin roots to absorb most of the rear wheelhouses in order to make the body slimmer. This placement, however, resulted in a very long, "barren" extended rear overhang.
Stefan and I were concerned about this very large plank after body, and I was having trouble getting the form right. At this point, Stefan walked up to the board and said, "What if we try something like this?" and proceeded to add on a large central dorsal fin and two trailing lower fins. As he was doing it, I thought, "You can’t do that! You can’t integrate a three-fin feature with a four-fin feature." However, I also noticed that it created the mass balance that the design was crying for. I went up and reproportioned the tail elements, then we both stepped back to see what we had created. It was starting to look good, so I developed string drawings for the corresponding front, rear, and (half) plan views, reworking all the line events so they would all occur correctly in all views. Once it was worked out, we called McLean to come down and see what we had.
He arrived shortly and appeared pleased with what he saw. From Earl’s last instruction, we were obligated to show him the upscale Club De Mer so McLean told us to continue with it, but he also authorized our building a second mockup to the new design.
My task now was to convert all the stick lines into lofted surfaces. I first penciled in the straight segments between the pins and outlined the cardboard template features on to the background vellum. Then, putting a clean grid sheet over the work sheet, I began to develop smooth equivalent lines with sweeps and curves, trying to maintain the character of the stick drawing below. The fin lines and other crisp features were correctly positioned in the end views, and holding those points, I developed cross sections, fairing into these points. The station cuts for these sections were first selected in the side view, based on which grid stations would best represent the body in form and character.
In the front view, I placed two passengers in what would be a tight sports car-like cross-section so as to leave me enough room to develop the midbody quad fins and stay within the maximum eighty inches street-legal width. The design philosophy taught at Pratt was to have a high wide point in the body cross-section so as to make it appear light. The ideal GM look was basically long, low, and wide. I knew that in no way would we get away with a high section, so I tried for an optical illusion. The predominant body section was made to have a low pear shape, essentially throughout the whole length, but I structured the upper set of quad fins to flair into the body shape, almost as a catenary curve to appear to be lifting upward at the shoulders to lighten the form. The lower sets of fins were developed for a different effect. They were placed at and opposing the pear-shape bulge, behind the engine inlet scoops, with their shapes vectored to give an apparent upward supporting push to again, help lift it.
Placing the side scoops at this bulge, at the lower forty-five-degree highlight line, offered additional benefits. Stefan had explained to me that aerodynamically it was not necessary to "scoop" the air for an inlet. A simple opening at the side would suffice if we were to stand a small blade outward, downwind of the air stream. This would create a high-pressure zone over the inlet and divert the flow into the inlet. The leading edge of the scoop was made to stand out from the body by a small amount to effectively function as the small blade. The amount of body material that was removed ahead of the scoop also had the equivalent effect of removing a three-quarter-inch layer of fat, thinking of it as a living creature. In the rocker panel area (normally below the door opening), the apparent body section would also appear about half-inch higher from the ground, where the scoop rolled under. The eye would see the inset body section as the real form and effectively mask the real bottom.
Since the quad fins would hide the largest body section, the eye would visually read the "fifty-inch section,” that full section taken at the passenger's head, as the defining character of the vehicle. [McLean had a theory that any design could be characterized by its fifty-inch section, i.e., a section cut taken about fifty inches behind the dashboard and used to show passenger head, shoulder and elbowroom. The most distinguishing characteristic would usually be the tumblehome or the tip in angle of the side windows]. My driving design objective was to achieve lightness by maximizing the (negative) space between the ground and the underbody, trying to capture the grace of that fighter plane I saw on the taxi strip.
With the rocker panel, section tucked in so deep and door openings cut in low, it was necessary to define a healthy center spine for primary, and a shallow outrigger platform for secondary structure at the door. I had envisioned that some kind of Mercedes 300SL type upward swinging door would have to be developed, but that it would have to be more complex because of the blisters. The door and blister trim openings would also have to be optimized to reduce the actual door size to an absolute minimum.
Working again in the end views, I set out to refine the body sections, which was more a matter of establishing a design protocol to control the design. Two focal points were defined, roughly through the passenger abdomens, which would be about at the center of their body masses, and about these axes, all sections would be related aesthetically, much as planetary orbital mechanics are all related as a function of the Sun’s mass and their distances from it. Holding the same focal points for all sections, in effect, created a set of straight parallel axis (like rails) running through the vehicle. The straightness of these theoretical lines would actually be judged by the visual integration of the body surfaces or sections in their final form. Any section out of character in the stack would create a wiggle or sag that would detract from the strong directional theme. In the final resolution, these theoretical lines were tuned to have a slight upward and forward thrust. Directionality cues from the side view were achieved by having the equivalent axis of the forward fender/wheel opening, blisters, quad, and tail fins all progressively sweeping further and further backward, the further aft they were. One problem that remained was that the backward tilt of the passenger blisters was contrary to the normal teardrop shape expected in good aerodynamic form.
Constructions with a progressive "rake" in design elements, as shown in end and side views.
The sections were all developed and crosschecked in three views, until all the basic forms were pretty well defined and conformed to the design protocols just defined. I would next have to design a mockup to these lines.
Usually, mockups were made up of plywood templates located ten inches apart, each following the surface contour and being one inch deep. The inside trim line would represent the engineering clearance allowance for the mockup components inside. These templates would be assembled on top of a stiffened plywood platform, mounted on castors. A five-inch grid pattern scribed on top would help locate the section templates and components inside. The Club de Mer version was built in this typical construction.
Mockups were usually made for engineering purposes, but this time, my objective was to create a full size "space sketch," Rowena Reed style, to assess the visual impact of the mass relationships. For this, we again deviated from the GM practice. Because the underbody area was so critical as "negative space," I elected to build a freestanding central cruciform frame from 2" x 10" beams and have them totally contained within the body form supported on four large castors. The beams were scribed with five-inch stations lines to locate the body templates. The cross beam was positioned so that Bill Dennis’s long contoured passenger seats could be hung tightly ahead of the cross-member. I made a drawing of the cruciform and sent it to the shop to be fabricated.
For the body templates, clean vellums were placed over the developed sections and separate tracings made for groups of templates. The body sections were those already selected for their defining characters. The fin and fender edge features, by their very nature, were strongly definitive, but they had to be reproportioned to their true size because of the foreshortening that occurred in the side view. For all templates, the exterior edge was maintained at the surface, but the internal edge was selected strictly as it would enhance the specific visual characteristics of its features. Another housekeeping protocol had to be established to determine how the templates would be notched out, egg crate fashion, so they would nest to each other and not try to occupy the same space.
Some of the features like the nose and side inlets were considered to be more dominant as design details and so I drew them up more carefully and precisely, so the wood shop could shape them three dimensionally out of a soft poplar wood. These parts would then be painted to a high-gloss white finish, while the rest of the templates would be painted in a flat light gray. The reason for this was that I wanted the eye to linger on these scoop details a little longer as dominant design elements. On other details, the blisters were simply defined by thin cutout Plexiglas sections. The wheels and tires were standard painted fiberglass replicas with flat spots on the bottom so they could just stand free—directly on the floor. As the final drawings were going to the woodshop, the cruciform frame was delivered to our studio, and the first body templates were starting to arrive. I could expect the rest of the templates over the next few days and the fancy painted parts a few days later, but we had enough so that we could start assembly.
I called the shop and request that two woodworkers be assigned for the next few weeks to assemble the mockup. They sent two good men, Ray Domkey and Don Schlack. They would stay with the project for as long as we needed. We had the parts but no overall layout so I had to identify each part as it came in and tell them where it belonged. The form began to take shape over the next two weeks. The cruciform frame proved to be very effective, as the mockup literally detached itself from the floor and took on life, yielding back valuable negative space. As new parts were added to the mockup, they would be hand painted in a latex paint. The high quality poplar details, after being fit, were sent to the paint shop for their high gloss lacquer finish and were then reinstalled. At the same time, of course, we continued to develop the Club de Mer mockup. We finally progressed far enough that McLean felt it was time to schedule a review with Harley Earl, so he told us to get ready and he set up the meeting.
To our knowledge, Earl had not been in our studio since that kick off meeting, however, it was generally understood that he made the rounds of the studios after hours, and knew everything that was going on. Both mockups were freshly painted, the studio cleaned, and the data sheets posted for both designs. We were ready.
The mockups were arranged so that when Earl entered the studio he would see his Club de Mer version and then, as he cleared into the general area, our mockup would come into view on his right. I was standing beside our mockup at the moment he came in, and clearly remember his brisk straight-back strut, with a slight forward lean, his tall frame, then entering into a right lean as he swept into banked turn, coming full round to a stop beside our mockup. There was no mention or discussion at all about the other mockup. He smiled and appeared pleased. His comments were direct and positive—this would be the Firebird III!
The original form of the mock-up as it was presented to Harley Earl. The most noticeable differences from the final mock-up (shown below) were the flat "stovepipe" nose inlet and the flared-up body between the blisters.
This photograph of the mock-up was taken later after incorporating Harley Earl’s suggestions, and after the blisters were modeled in clay and after clear Plexiglas shells were made.
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