Ep 203 Rotary Engine Corvette | Reviving Cadillac | Concept Cars | GM Car Designer Kip Wasenko

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Episode 203 of the weekly Classic Auto Mall Show features General Motors Car Designer Kip Wasenko, the man who revitalized Cadillac Design and worked on the Rotary Engine Corvette in the early 1970s. Amazing stories of his career and a definite must-watch episode.

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00:00:00 Intro
00:01:29 Kip Wasenko Joins
00:01:40 Starting at GM
00:05:30 Designing Cars
00:10:15 Corvette Designs
00:11:15 Car Styling
00:11:50 Design Importance
00:15:30 Designing Cadillacs
00:25:25 Specialty Cars
00:27:24 Rotary Corvette
00:29:26 Lotus Project
00:32:09 Honored at Meadow Brook
00:33:10 Judging Concours
00:37:28 Where Cars Sold
00:38:14 No Reserve Auction
00:38:50 ’29 Model A
00:39:37 ’68 Skylark
00:40:52 ’90 300ZX
00:41:30 ’67 Austin-Healey
00:42:04 ’77 Super Beetle
00:42:44 ’71 Monte Carlo
00:43:06 No Reserve Auction
00:45:26 Casino Giveaway
00:47:27 Keith Martin’s Blog
00:48:46 Unrestored ’71 Jaguar
00:58:06 Sports Car Market Deal

Kip Wasenko started as a summer intern in the 1960s and talks about the outrageous mid-engine car he designed that summer and how Bill Mitchell saw his drawing and convinced him not to go to art school after he graduated and hired him upon graduation. Kip finished his final college classes and started at GM in 1968. He was the only intern that summer who was offered a job at General Motors. Most of the designers were graduates of Art Center, which is why Kip was planning on going to the Art Center after he graduated college. But Bill Mitchell saw his work and felt he was ready as a car designer without going to Art Center.

Kip talks about the early days of car designs and how everything was done with paper and pencil. He talks about his early renderings and how he would often exaggerate a particular part of the car and choose a view that emphasized a dramatic part of the design. They talk about how people often focus on a specific part of the car and how they would use focus groups to see what people liked or disliked.
Kip and Stewart talk about the 1963 Chevrolet Corvette with split windows that was designed by Bill Mitchell and how much better and more valuable it is than the 1964 model year when they made it a single window for function, but it hurt the appearance and popularity. They review the importance of the styling of a car.

When he started designing cars for General Motors he wasn’t allowed to go to the competitive studios because they didn’t want you influenced by their designs that way the brands had different appearances. He talks about how General Motors changed when Bill Mitchel took over because he made sure each brand stayed in their lane and had their own recognizable appearance.

The 1967 Cadillac Eldorado is also a topic of discussion and Kip tells how he changed the direction of Cadillac. He realized their demographic was dying and Cadillac wasn’t changing with the times, and he designed a Cadillac concept car that was a high performance, luxury touring car built on the Corvette chassis to go after Jaguars and Mercedes. It became the Cadillac Evoq and he designed it based on what he learned from Bill Mitchelll in the 1960s. The Cadillac Evoq won the International Design Award at the 1999 Detroit Auto Show.

He tried to save the GTO and Firebird and was responsible for specialty cars. He tells how he always liked Pontiac and once owned a Trans Am. Kip also tells Stewart about designing the rotary engine Corvette concept car in 1972 that appeared in Motor Trend Magazine in 1973. The rotary corvette was his first design patent, but he had left to design for Opel before it was unveiled. It wasn’t designed to replace the Corvette, but was supposed to be an addition to the line. The rotary Corvette likely influenced the design of the Porsche 928 that came out a few years later.
He was also involved in the Wildcat Buick as well as the M800 project with Lotus.

Keith Martin, publisher of Sports Car Market Magazine joins Stewart for his weekly segment where we bring his blog to life. This week the topic is his 1971 Jaguar E-Type Coupe and how the car has never been taken apart. The guys talk about is an old car is better if it’s never been taken apart and has low miles. Typically when a car is restored it’s because it needs to be restored. But a low mileage older car might be broken in just right. Original bushings were often rubber, but are often updated with polyurethane, but those can get brittle and shatter.
Our memories of driving old cars are better than they actually drove. We forget how poorly they really drove and handled. Modern cars handle and perform much better than old cars.