Art Center Car Classic features the world's great automobiles

It seems like we say this every year, but this year it's truly fitting: this was the best Art Center Car Classic ever.

Consider that the show covered both ends of the Corvette spectrum, from Peter Brock and the rise of the original “Mitchell Corvette” -- which was right there parked on the grass -- to General Motors designer Pete Thomas and the new C7 parked not far away, with the Mako Shark and the '63 split-window Sting Ray lined up between.

A couple car lengths from that was the debut of the finally finished Peter Mullin Bugatti Type 64, a spectacular re-imagining of Jean Bugatti's unfinished final car done by Art Center students and Transportation Design chair Stewart Reed.

And all around those cars, on the Art Center's sprawling Sculpture Garden, were almost 100 other classic cars, bikes and motorcycles representing the best of the Art Center's efforts over 80 years of teaching transportation design. While Art Center students didn't design every car on the lawn, the school has had a hand in probably over half of the cars extant in the world and certainly a good portion of the really cool ones. Alumnus Frank Stephenson, for example, designed the Ferrari F430, McLaren MP4-12C, Maserati MC12 and even the new Mini and the new Fiat 500. Freeman Thomas designed the New Beetleand the Audi TT. Chuck Pelly did the original Scarab. Think of a cool car and it's probably an Art Center car.

Every year many of these guys return to Pasadena, to the school's hillside campus above the Rose Bowl in a sort of homecoming for automotive designers. Every year there are themes and discussions and interviews. This year, no less a car guy than Jay Leno -- who also has some other job somewhere -- sat on the stage and interviewed Pete Brock, who was at GM as the Sting Ray was taking form, and Pete Thomas, who was there as the C7 took form.

“Bill Mitchell (head of GM design at the time of the Stingray's creation) would always compel you to do more,” Brock said. “He just loved the whole aura of being over the top.”

Brock said the Corvette was dead in the water after the first model ran out and there was little management support for a C2 until Mitchell came along.

“Bill Mitchell saved the Corvette,” Brock told the crowd. “He went to Italy and saw the Disco Volante and the Farina Cisitalia with their strong belt lines and he said, 'We're gonna do a Corvette.”

Brock described how the project was done in secret in a basement studio then brought up behind a false wall in the studio's tool room.

“That's where the car was done.”

You can read all about it in Brock's new book on the subject Corvette Stingray: Genesis of an American Icon.

Another icon was discussed and revealed next to the 'Vettes – Peter Mullin's beautiful new Bugatti, a 10-year dream project to finish Jean Bugatti's final car, which was left uncompleted upon Bugatti's death in 1939. What would have been the third Type 64 was only a rolling chassis with a 3.3-liter straight eight when Mullin bought it in 2003 and set out to add a body. Mullin approached Art Center's head of Transportation Design Stewart Reed, who chose eight students to submit designs. Mullin chose one that was an evolution of the Type 57 Atlantic. The car body was put together by Detroit-based Automobile Metal Shaping, which used a mahogany buck on which panels were fitted. The project in its partially finished form was shown two summers ago at The Quail. The Art Center Car Classic was its finished debut.

“I'm thrilled with the way it came out,” said Mullin. “It gives you an appreciation of art cars of the 1930s.”

In addition to the Type 64 and the mahogany buck on which it was made, Mullin brought two more cars from his collection, a 1939 Type 57C Aravis and a 1939 Type 57C Atalante.

As if simply having excellent taste and the means to pursue it wasn't enough to admire in him, Mullin is also the Art Center's most generous patron, having the week before bequeathed $15 million to the school. What a guy!

But there were more than Bugattis and Corvettes to ogle -- everywhere you turned on the Sculpture Lawn was something uniquely cool, from hot-rod roadsters to artist Randy Grubb's latest creation, the shiny aluminum Decopod scooter. There were DeLoreans to Citroens, Fiats to Ferraris. There were five Bugattis, two classic '70s Citro

By Mark Vaughn