Designers profile

Flavio Manzoni
Ferrari Design Team

An interview with the design team of the award-winning concept car

Red Dot: To what extent does the Ferrari Vision Gran Turismo give an insight into the future of the brand? 
Flavio Manzoni and the Ferrari Design Team: Ferrari has always designed and produced cars that are “visions” in and of themselves. Some of these models have become milestones in automotive history. For us, therefore, designing a “vision” also means making it a style manifesto for the future of the brand exploring new forms of expression that, thanks to their uniqueness, can create a completely new platform. The collaboration with the Gran Turismo video game series represented a concrete possibility to bring to life a project developed within the Advanced Design area of our Style Centre, with the aim of prefiguring the Ferrari Super Car of the future.

The concept is intended to be a lexicon of a new Ferrari design language. What are the most important new vocabulary?
When designing the Ferrari Vision Gran Turismo, I challenged my team to let their imagination run wild. The car was conceived with the idea of being the most beautiful car ever designed, while at the same time embodying a new stylistic philosophy. It is the result of intense internal research to develop the Ferrari language and elevate it to a higher level of innovation. The starting point was what we call the “speed form” and I strongly wanted it to be characterised by a kind of contradiction from a stylistic point of view, in that it should be based on very geometric, very incisive, even angular lines, but subtending an organic volume. This contrast has a visually disruptive effect, because generally an organic object is associated with very soft and plastic forms. With this speed form, however, I wanted the plasticity of the surfaces to be linked to the geometric rigor of the lines.