Alfa Romeo Disco Volante, Case Study
Year: 2022 | Project Status: Finished | Credit: Designer
Study in Scarlet – A study in automotive styling aimed at recreating the spirit of the original Alfa Romeo Disco Volante from 1952 based on a modern day package and set of dimensions. For the purpose the wheelbase and overall dimensions from Ferrari F12 Berlinetta were used and a new coachbuild body was created.
It started as a simple and passionate sketch that gave birth to the project which originally was intended as an internal experiment only.
Since the revival of the coachbuild business in the past 15 years or so, the sports car companies are using these opportunities to create low-volume and high-return projects in order to satisfy the demand for this growing market and elevate their brand image. Thus wishing of recreating the original 1952 Disco Volante on an existing modern chassis is not just a dream, but quite a possibility.
Miroslav decided to base this on a chassis that’s already available within the Fiat group – Ferrari’s V12 front engined platform that underpins car such as F12 Berlinetta or 812 Superfast. Therefore with small to reasonable effort this case study can be turned into a reality.
The main challenge was to find a good balance between the iconic features from the original 1952 Alfa Romeo Disco Volante and execute them in a new modern way – the car was neither to look like a restomod or be retro inspired cyberpunk design. It had to be pure, expressive and full of flavour. Great restraint was also necessary in order to keep it free from any aggressive styling that is very common trend in the automotive design in the present days.
One of the most interesting features is the chrome strip wraps around the car and slices it in two – a theme borrowed from the original car – that works not only as a styling element, but helps integrating the door handle and the rear end lights. The clean and expressive front hood design was a straight forward execution, but to find a simple and matching rear end to the vehicle was not an easy task.
3D model done in Autodesk Alias – a combination of SubD & nurbs modelling. Rendered in Autodesk VRED in GPU mode with NVIDIA RTX 3090.
Images of the the original Alfa Romeo Disco Volante serving as inspiration.
Previous slide
Next slide
