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- Hey, I'm Chip Foose. We're here at Foose design
and today I'm gonna talk about proportions in design
and let's just call them things that don't belong.
Recently I was asked about,
you know, when I first look at a car that I'm gonna build,
what comes to mind?
And, you know, how do I decide what we're gonna change?
Well, usually things just jump out at me
that I think those don't belong there.
And you know an example is,
you look at a Ferrari Testarossa, you know,
1980s Ferrari Testarossa, the front overhang on that car
is a city block long
and your ramp angle is you have none.
And it's things like that, that the first time I saw
that car I thought, why would they do that?
But you know, it worked for the design of the car,
but it doesn't work to drive the car,
enjoy it or not destroy it.
And when I'm typically looking at a car,
it's things like that, that jump out.
And for this example,
I'm gonna use a 1970 Plymouth CUDA,
we built one for the metropoulos brothers
here at Foose design
and when I first looked at that car,
I noticed that it had a long front overhang.
It had this box have a door handle on it
and the daylight opening which is a window,
the side window has a real sharp corner in the back
that doesn't go with that beautiful stock top.
And those are the things I really wanted to change.
I'll go ahead and do a sketch of what I'm talking about.
And hopefully show you what I, what I am talking about.
We'll get a basic proportion of the car here
as it is stock.
When I talk about proportions,
I'm talking about,
you know, how long is the wheel base versus the body
and the overhangs and it's all the surface areas
that you look at.
Sometimes there might be a surface area
that looks out of proportion because it looks larger
than it should be on the car.
And that's what the front overhang does to me on the 70 Cuda
and also that side glass,
the rear corner, that sharp angle,
it just looks out of place
and the box of a door handle, you know,
you can do something that's much more elegant than that.
You know, I don't mean to bag on the Cuda
because I absolutely love the 70 Cuda.
It is my favorite year.
I've had one.
I unfortunately sold it to one of my customers
because he bugged me for so long about getting it,
I finally caved in and sold it to him
after we had built the Terracuda.
You know, it was an expensive car to build
for the metropoulos brothers.
And I knew I was never gonna be able to spend
that kind of money to build a car for myself.
So I let mine go because I had the opportunity
to do what I really wanted to do to a 70 cuda
and I love the way their car came out.
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I'm gonna overlay this
so I have clean version of what I wanna show you.
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So this is just a quick sketch
but on a stock 70 cuda the things
that really jumped out to me
that needed to be changed
were and I've got a drawn soft here,
there's a very sharp corner right here on that car.
Now the 70 challenger had a soft corner here
and a sharp corner in the front.
But the Cuda has a beautiful soft corner at the windshield
rolls back and it's got the sharp corner here,
has a real hard square door handle
and to me, it looks like the car hit a curve
at 40 miles an hour and drove that wheel back.
You've got this long front overhang.
So I'm gonna go ahead and sketch right over top of this,
of the several changes that I would make to it.
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So real simply just by moving that front wheel forward
about two inches is all it needs
because you're losing two inches here
but gaining two inches in the back of it,
pulling that wheel lip forward.
You know, if you look at the stock
Cuda and you take the proportions of the front fender
where that stock wheel was,
the front overhang was just as long as the rest of it
and to me that whole body to look balanced
you should have a little more weight
in the back of the fender.
So by bringing it forward,
you got a shorter front overhang
and longer behind that wheel.
And when you bring the car down,
you know, typically, a designer will take this A pillar
and go right to the center line of that front wheel.
So pulling that wheel forward
really helps to balance the car out.
And you don't have that really long overhang,
so your ramp angle is much more improved.
Now on the door handle itself on the metropoulos brothers,
we got rid of it completely.
Now in 1969, Jaguar had a beautiful door handle
that I've used on several cars.
If we'd have put a door handle on that car,
I would have used that door handle.
On this car, we completely got rid of it.
But to me, making that door handle
have the same proportions as a body style itself.
You look at this body it's a long thin shape
by putting a thin long door handle to me they work together,
that square doesn't go with the shape of body.
Now in the back,
just softening that daylight opening or that back window
really helped to balance the shape of the top
to work with that,
they did it on the challenger, like I said,
but on the Cuda, they kept that one really square.
I know it differentiated the two cars
but I think they should have on the Cuda
softened both of them.
Simple little things
but really made a big difference on that car.
You may be wondering,
how did we actually make that top soft?
It was very simple.
The A pillar is a separate molding from the drip rail.
And I wanted that chrome trim to come around
and look stuck.
So I took a left and a right front A pillar molding,
and we actually flipped them from side to side.
So the left is on the right
and the right is on the left,
and we soften the back
and then shortened them
to actually just come down to the end of the body
and then re-rolled that stainless molding a little bit
and did the sheet metal work that it took
to actually put that on there but it was a real simple fix.
And to me,
it just really helped
to make that car look so much more elegant.
You know that the door handle isn't a whole lot of work
but when it comes to the front wheels
and moving those two inches forward,
that is a lot of work.
But when we built that car,
we actually had Art Morrison build a complete chassis
for the car.
And I told them then,
go ahead and put all the front suspension
two inches forward.
So when we got the chassis here
and we dropped it underneath the car,
the wheels were already pushed forward,
then we just simply cut up forward
and down on the front wheel lip,
pull that forward,
re weld it and then make a new piece to weld into the back.
It's really simple.
We made a lot of modifications to the 70 Cuda
But from the second I saw it
those three things really jumped out
and I knew I wanted to address them.
And it's not that I'm making changes to make changes.
I'm making the changes to make it better.
I don't want people to look at the car and say wow,
they did this and this.
I wanted them to look at the car and think
why is that car so much better than I remember it?
and then they discover what we actually did.
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