Less is more for Peter Brock who helped build and design iconic sport cars

At 81, Peter Brock’s hang gliding days are behind him. “But it was pretty thrilling to be up there on a thermal with an eagle,” the American recalls. “In fact, it was more exciting than anything else I’ve done.”

That is saying something. After all, Brock had a brief career as a racing driver, but also a much longer one as both a builder of racing cars and – the feats for which he is legendary in petrol-head circles – as a designer of cars too.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, even his hobby turned into a design challenge: by the time he quit it, he had rethought the wing tips to create a hang glider with greater stability, and built a team that won six out of the seven world cross-country championships it entered.

But it’s the cars for which he is lauded. And small wonder: Brock – who was head-hunted to join General Motors’ then groundbreaking design department when he was just 19, then their youngest ever appointment – helped develop the Shelby Cobra and designed the Corvette Sting Ray, the Datsun 2000, Datsun 240Z and the prototype for what would become the Triumph TR7. Perhaps most famously, he also designed the Shelby Daytona Coupe – still available in kit form as the Brock Daytona – with its revolutionary, distinctive, bluntly chopped off rear end. It’s a design echoed today in many cars, including the Toyota Prius.

“The most beautiful cars are expressions of aerodynamics – and the great thing about the period I worked in was that it was all about aerodynamics,” says Brock. “That chopped off back end meant messing with some lovely flowing lines that just weren’t aerodynamically efficient. That blunt end was ugly but kind of beautiful for the way it worked. Other designers had that kind of idea before but the time was right when I proposed my take on it. Even then it wasn’t easy to convince people. Any new idea gets laughed at first, but it becomes self-evidently right.”