Vauxhall Marks Legendary Designer At FOS

Welburn has been responsible for 2,500 GM staff in its design centres across the world, from America to India to China, and has overseen the styling of every GM vehicle, from trucks to concepts to production cars.

To celebrate the remarkable longevity of one of the world’s most important designers, Vauxhall held a 'Meet the Presidents' evening at its huge experience centre by Gate One at the festival.

Joining Welburn on stage, against a backdrop of the new Vauxhall GT Concept shown at Geneva this year, was Mark Adams, the Brit in charge of design for the brand.

“Every designer wants to design a Corvette, but it’s not easy”, said Welburn. “It needs to perform but you need to have great space inside.”

“The hardest cars to design are small cars”, Mark Adams told assembled guests. “There’s the fuel economy, packaging cost, feasability…”

If anyone knows how to do it, however, it’s Adams; the Corsa and Astra run Ford close for top spot in the British sales charts time and again.

For both Wilbur and Adams, the Sixties marks their favourite decade for car design, yet both are excited about future challenges. “Electrification is going to transform the cars we’re designing”, said Adams. “I’m excited about autonomous driving challenges”, added Welburn, although his favourite GM car of all time remains the ’63 Corvette Stingray split-window Coupe.

Should any small boy with a penchant for drawing cars be reading this, just how does one go about becoming one of the world’s foremost designers, we ask Welburn?

“It’s a corny story”, he says, “but I’ve been drawing cars since I was two and a half. My parents took me to the Philadelphia car show when I was 11, and there was a car that blew me away: the Cadillac Cyclone concept. I wrote them a letter to say where should I go to design cars, and that was it.”

“I was about 16”, says Adams. “And there was a competition in Autocar to design a car.

“I didn’t trust the idea of doing an art degree, so I ended up doing an engineering degree. I was at Ford at the time when I said I wanted to be a designer and go to the RCA [Royal College of Art]”.

Welburn has a word of caution, however. “Don’t go into automotive design because it’s something cool; go into it because you have a real passion for it”, he says.

The results of that passion are clear to see from Adams; the Vauxhall GT Concept behind him won critical acclaim from everyone when it was unveiled earlier this year its futuristic shape and bright red tyres catching the crowd’s attention.

“This car is already influencing some stuff that we’re doing”, he says. “We’re using it as inspiration. It’s about the surfacing, some of the graphic treatments; it’s so bold.”

Last year was the 50^th anniversary of the original GT. “We really wanted to return to it”, says Adams. The Sixties had some of the purest, most sculptural cars, but no way are we bringing retro design cues into this car. We needed to reinvent it, to do it in a very modern way.”

Speaking of modern, how does Vauxhall go about realising the concepts of the future? “We have our studio split into production and advance studios”, says Adams. “The advance studios can go 20 or 25 years forward if you want.” They have advance studios in Europe, the States and China. Isn't there a danger, though, that concepts that look too far ahead will give away trade secrets?

“There is a danger you give away your thinking to others”, says Welburn. “But it’s a way to test the market and give a preview of a concept that’s coming. It’s also great internally, so we take that risk.”

Visitors to the festival can catch all the Vauxhall concepts down at their experience centre by Gate One, which is also a great place to hang out with young children - creche, anyone?

Photography by Pete Summers