Design archaeology · 1994
The twelve-doorsupercar.
At three, I apparently identified the fundamental defect in the Lamborghini Countach: it could not carry all my friends.
My mother recently sent me a photograph from the family archive. In it, three-year-old me is standing between my cousins, wearing the solemn expression of somebody who has already seen the future of personal mobility and is disappointed by its packaging.
Beneath the photograph was a drawing I made at roughly the same time. At first glance, it is the usual childhood attempt at a supercar: a low nose, a long wedge and a roofline travelling urgently towards tomorrow. Somewhere in its genetic code, a Ferrari Testarossa and a Lamborghini Countach appear to have run past each other in opposite directions.
Then you notice the doors.
There are approximately six of them on the visible side. This is not a drawing mistake. It is a product decision.
Wedge nose
CountachSide drama
TestarossaWheelbase
Regional railDoors
≈ 12A better answer to a question adults ruin
Adults presented with the phrase “practical supercar” begin negotiating against themselves. They add two apologetic rear seats, enlarge the boot by eleven litres and call the result a grand tourer. The compromise is usually less practical than a family car and less beautiful than the supercar it inconvenienced.
I took the more intellectually rigorous approach. Keep the wedge. Keep the theatre. Stretch the entire thing until it is approximately the length of a suburban train, then give every passenger a private entrance.
The resulting machine could take the whole family to the dacha while making a credible attempt at a Nürburgring record. Judging by the ground clearance, however, it would reach the dacha only in dry weather and without the final three kilometres.
The design investigation
Two suspects.
Neither has an alibi.
Lamborghini Countach
The strongest evidence is the wedge. Marcello Gandini’s LP500 appeared in 1971; the production Countach arrived in 1974 and ended in 1990 after 1,999 cars. By the time of my drawing it was already obsolete in the strict commercial sense — and almost unbeatable in the more important discipline of being drawn by children.
Lamborghini describes its defining line as a single visual stroke connecting front and rear. My version preserves that idea, then uses it to connect front and rear postcode districts.
Ferrari Testarossa
The Ferrari supplies the horizontal drama. The Testarossa’s famous side strakes were not merely eighties jewellery: Ferrari says the enlarged side intakes required them. They turned a cooling solution into the sort of graphic device a child could remember after forgetting every mechanical reason for it.
My drawing contains a thicket of side lines. They run in the wrong direction, admittedly, but this is concept work. Technical feasibility would have been addressed after the next biscuit.
Forensic note
Are they definitely doors?
No. A responsible expert must concede that they could be window pillars, body strakes or the early work of a designer who had not yet mastered perspective, circles or restraint.
But the lines descend from the glasshouse towards the sill, repeat at passenger-sized intervals and stop where doors generally stop. In the absence of handles, hinges, a scale drawing or a living witness with reliable recall, the twelve-door interpretation is not proven. It is simply the only one worthy of the car.
Final design review
Beauty or practicality?
Yes.Seen as a real design proposal, the drawing is surprisingly honest. There is no agonised choice between beauty and usefulness. I simply selected both. Wedge from Countach. Side theatre from Testarossa. Length from a limousine. Capacity from a bus.
Which means I did not dream of escaping my friends in the fastest car in the world. I dreamt of taking them with me.
Thirty-two years later
The inspection continues
I now inspect actual cars. I measure paint, read fault codes and explain to adults why the dream in the advert consists of three shades of white and two independent biographies.
It may all have begun with this nameless twelve-door hypercar: a machine with implausible wheels, no hope of passing an inspection and a turning circle extending into the following municipality.
But everyone had their own door.
Sources
Photography
Family photograph and childhood drawing: Dolsky family archive.
Additional photographs: TXOMCS, Quentin Martinez, Jacob Moore, Fabricio Campos.