By John McCormick / Autos Insider
Who has the best job in the automotive design business? Arguably it is
Frank Stephenson, design chief at Ferrari and Maserati for the past two years.
Stephenson kicked off a logical effort by LA show organizers to make the event
reflect southern California's reputation as the nexus for advanced design
studios from numerous world automakers.
Stephenson, a BMW designer prior to joining Ferrari, was responsible for the BMW
X3 SUV and the Mini. At Ferrari his work to date includes the F430 and Maserati
MC12.
The job of shaping the two sister marques involves some careful differentiation.
Ferraris, he says, have to be "absolutely the sexiest cars we can dream off a
sketch pad. Maserati is just as exotic. It is the ultimate GT car. Like a well
dressed athlete, you can see the tension underneath the clothes."
Feeding off Ferrari and Maserati's strong racing and road car heritage plays a
big part in the design process, but Stephenson disdains the term retro. "We're
pulling out of the treasure chest of the past," he says, "but not compromising
the future character or performance of the new car."
The mantra among Ferrari's small design staff (which effectively includes the
famous Italian coach builder Pininfarina) is to be on the leading edge of trends
and to stimulate other members of the development team. "The product has to be
fresh 10 years from now," Stephenson notes. "Our goal is to never stop driving
the engineers up the wall."
One key advantage Stephenson enjoys over most of his contemporaries is that the
development budgets of the models he designs are almost as exotic as the cars
themselves. "We're lucky not to have someone tell us it's too expensive to
build," he says.
In his relatively short spell at Ferrari/Maserati, Stephenson has designed two
of the better looking products to emerge from Italy's most famous sport car
maker. But in the eyes of many observers, including myself, he also has to live
with two of the least successful and least sexy Ferrari designs in recent years,
the Enzo and 612 Scaglietti.
As for the LA show, Stephenson's talk was a promising start down the road to
becoming the center of debate on future design trends. For a show that can never
hope to compete with Detroit, or even Chicago, for sheer volume of new model
introductions, a focus on design makes good sense.
John McCormick is a columnist for Autos Insider and can be reached at