NemesisC5

Fit-and-trim 75-year-old Bob Lutz has a reliable gut sense of what is a cool car and what is not.

Every recent business story about the veteran General Motors vice chairman mentions that he flies fighter planes and has had such a cool, confident life that he could make Arnold Schwarznegger cry uncle in a boardroom or in a bar fight.

Naturally, GM’s “product czar” would have garages full of cool stuff.

But before Lutz could attend to the garages where he keeps 13 of his favorite cars, hidden in the thick woods of suburban-rural Michigan, he had to wait. The first priority of the Lutz household, dictated by equestrian and chopper jock Mrs. Lutz, was to get the home’s closets redone with all the racks and shelves and neat stuff that would impress the design eye of Martha Stewart. “Denise’s closets look nice. Mine are overflowing and are a mess,” says the vice chairman of the world’s fifth-largest corporation.

Okay, now that the house is done, here’s the new place where the car guy hangs out when he’s at home, influenced only slightly by California Closets. The original building is a concrete-block multiple-use garage, neatly set below a chalet-style guest home far in front of the estate’s main house. The ceiling is low, the block walls unpainted, the electrical service surface-mounted. It’s bare but neat and functional, and inside reside the world’s two nastiest Vipers, acquired while Lutz was running Chrysler’s car business. (While developing the cars, Lutz once passed an unmarked Arizona sheriff at well beyond 90 mph on a twisty road out of Sedona and managed to talk his way out of the ticket. Cojones muy grandes.)

“I always wanted a Cobra,” Lutz explains. “At the time, the real ones were $600,000, and now they’re over a million. I refuse to pay more than a couple hundred thousand dollars for a car, when I can get a military jet for $500,000.” So he purchased an Autocraft Cobra with a Roush 302 V8 for $45,000 in 1985. “I was driving it with a ‘Powered by Ford’ badge on the front, which I removed because I was at Chrysler. I said, ‘If only Chrysler had this.’ Then I thought, we have the Dakota with a wishbone front suspension, new five-speed transmission, V10 engine coming, no reason we couldn’t at least do a show car. The first sketches were like a Viper, and I thought it was too far away from the Cobra. But they convinced me they didn’t want to copy the Cobra.” The Viper design grew on him.

The garage under the 1983-built guest house didn’t have room for enough of Lutz’s favorite machines, so he converted a second pole-barn building a few years ago. It’s also modest, has no full kitchen, no wine cellar, no big-screen entertainment center. The elephant in the room is a ’76 Pinzgauer from Austria’s Steyr-Daimler-Puch that can travel to places where Hummers won’t fit. The building’s smooth, white drywall is decorated with photos of the car guy’s favorite events and vehicles. The largest picture is a painting of the Viper concept coupe, with rear exhausts. “I had that in my office at Chrysler, which would now be inappropriate.”

Surrounding the Pinzgauer are the Cunningham C3 and C4R and ’85 Autocraft coupes, the personal, two-door transport tools of a person not addicted to speed but jazzed by the accomplishments of human beings who design things with which to traverse the earth while preserving its most precious commodity: time. Combine these with the Vipers—one a roadster with VIN 002 and the other the 99th of 100 special GTS-R coupes—and his Chrysler V8-powered Monteverdi, and you realize this car guy likes .50-caliber-bulletproof American versions of Ferraris.

The Lutz machines are not the fastest exotics that Miamiwood rappers bow to, but they’re historical, and history, we know, is the root of our esteem, our wisdom and our true confidence. They show the qualities of real car guys, not just rich guys. They also allow a peek into the gut instinct of the world’s most influential car guy.

While we all study the military Pinzgauer and the coupes for hints about how we, too, could become cool car guys, bear in mind that Lutz also has a simply weird ’62 Citroën Traction Avant and a ’34 Riley roadster, a tiny warbler that is the sleekest of the classic English designs, making early MGs look ungainly. Lutz is sensitive to size, having lived in Europe during his military service and stints running Ford of Germany and BMW sales. Unlike most so-called car guys, Lutz is not an engineer. That’s perhaps an important key to knowing what real people like to drive.

“The Mini is cool. But it ain’t a small Mini anymore; it’s 50 percent bigger than the Mini we remember. To see it in European traffic, the PT Cruiser looks huge. I can only imagine what the Hummer H2 looks like over in Europe.” Lutz keeps up with worldly auto tastes, having two garages each at his homes in Montserrat and Switzerland. He has a Cadillac XLR in the Swiss garages, a red Hummer H3 and a Pontiac Solstice on Montserrat.

He once visited a garage he thought was the Taj Mahal of car barns: “It was opulent beyond description, the cars displayed on cobblestone circles, in outdoor-looking surroundings, murals on the walls, palm trees in pots, street lamps putting focus on individual cars while the whole garage was bathed in a natural-seeming ambient light. It made me want to go home and burn my garage, and the house along with it,” he recalls.

Parked behind one of the three doors in the original Michigan Lutz garage is a Chrysler Windsor drop-top, a president’s car, even though the car guy has superseded that title now for some time. Next to it is a LaSalle open-topper, and behind another door is a rocketship ’55 Chrysler 300 and 11 motorcycles. The process of copying the car guy to mimic his instinctive sense of cool is not linear, logical or easy.

ultimategarages.net
The first car Lutz drove was a 1940 Ford flathead coupe, which he drove straight into a stone wall. You can forgive the mishap, however, with the brand-new flathead coupe—he was only eight years old at the time.

Lutz recalls that he was influenced by his father and his uncles, who were also car nuts. Not just shine-the-Chevy-on-Sunday car nuts but serious drivers. He remembers more than one Delahaye, numerous Talbot-Lagos and Alfa Romeos in the family driveway. “Luckily, the family was not poor,” he says. Packard “Super Eight” convertibles were his grocery getters, and an SS Jaguar 3.5-liter sedan got the Lutzes to church.

The LaSalle and the Windsor in the garage are not the actual cars he grew up with, but he remembers the originals. “When I was three years old, I could name almost everything on the road. The first time I saw a Graham-Paige, I remember asking, ‘What’s that?’ When I was four, we were starting to see the first aero-cars—’30s cars were all upright and square. Some of the later GMs were streamlined. My father said the square ones are the old ones, and the streamlined ones are the new ones. And I thought about it, and I thought, ‘How do they change shape?’ I would think that they’d get more square. I was equating it to human aging. My father was a banker; he invested heavily in the stock market before the crash and then sold it all because he didn’t like the way things were going. Then he bought everything back after the crash for 10 cents on the dollar. Father was a pretty good finance guy; somewhere I went wrong.”

Before he drove his first car, Lutz remembers imprinting his developing brain with a “monumental” collection of Dinky and Maerklin toy cars that he would push around on the floor before he could walk. He perfected the “varoom” noise while learning to speak. When he was slightly older, he used balsa wood to try to craft his perfect car, although he admits the results looked more like copies of bad Ferraris.

Fast-forward to 1961, and the budding car marketing whiz for Ford of Germany, GM Europe and BMW bought and restored a 1948 MG TC, which is still owned by his former wife.

Fast-forward again to 1980, when Ford turned a few front-engine Capris into high-strung road-racer Funny Cars, with extremely powerful 750-hp engines and wind-tunnel bodies, and the car guy actually drove the cars in a touring-car race at the Hockenheimring course when the professional drivers were excluded from the exhibition heats. He came within two seconds of the best lap times of master touring-sedan driver and notable champion Klaus Ludwig on the course, easily winning his races.

Styling, Lutz says, is most critical to a car’s success: “I was explaining to the [GM] board members why styling was so important, because they had asked, ‘If the rest of the car is so good, why is styling so important?’ And I said, ‘Look, I’m not supposed to say this, and I’ll probably wind up in human resources jail again (I’ve never gotten out), but the exterior design of a car is like seeing a beautiful woman across the room. If her beauty does not attract you, you’re not going to go over and talk to her and find out whether she has a nice personality or not. And if she’s ugly, she could have the nicest personality in the world, and you’re never going to feel the need to go over there and talk to her. Thus it is with cars. If the exterior design does not attract, you’ve got a hopeless case there. I could see the eyes rolling among the GM people, but the board thought it was okay.”

Engineering then becomes crucial, although pushing for breakthroughs remains an inexact science. “I only knew Ed Cole from a couple of meetings in Europe,” Lutz recalls about the inventor of the famed small-block V8 and the two-speed Powerglide automatic who became president and CEO of GM in the late ’60s. Nobody questioned Cole’s ideas, Lutz says, even the “less than brilliant” ones. “I have 10 ideas a minute, of which eight are bad, and I’m used to people pushing back, questioning my ideas. At first [when Lutz joined GM in 2001 as vice chairman], I’d put this crazy stuff forward, and the GM folks would say, ‘The genius has spoken,’ and they’d all start taking notes, not questioning me, and I’d say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” The company’s growing bottom line, however, has demonstrated a change in the former yes-man culture. “The only way I’ve gotten away with what I have at GM is because what are they going to do, send me to early retirement?”

John McCormick Bob Lutz with his German-built Alpha jet
These days, every week, Lutz flies both of his fighter jets, a Czech Albatros and a German-built Alpha, two-seat trainers that can pass 600 mph and 50,000 feet. He admits that the flying cuts heavily into the time he can spend driving his favorite cars and motorcycles.

“Every passing week that you don’t fly, you feel less and less like flying. It’s not like cars or bikes. In a car, if you’re out of practice, the car suffers, you don’t. In a helicopter, you can hover a little bit, three feet off the ground, until you get the feel of it again. On a motorcycle, you can take it slow going down the driveway. There’s no such thing as taking it easy in a military jet. Once that thing is headed down the runway, you’re committed. You better still remember how to do it.”

I had no idea Bob Lutz was such a performance enthusiast, it seems that the Corvette may be in good hands after all. Below is the link to the above article in AutoWeek

http://www.autoweek.com/apps/pbcs.dl...8/newsletter01

2KZ28CAM

No one can dispute the fact that he moved from Dodge to GM, and produced (or at least helped to, with Dave Hill), the C6 Z06, which "upped" the Viper in every category, despite the fact of his historical declaration that the Viper would one-up the Vette into eternity.

Now, his "underlings" have failed to produce anything that could <categorically> one-up the Z06, despite a three-year head-start.

And, the "new" Vette (whatever you want to call it) still promises to produce better results than the "oh, Sh*t" attempt by Dodge to stay in the hunt.

Sad, really. Good for us <GM/Vette enthusiasts> bad for them <the recently "dumped" Dodge/Chrysler unit>

Seems like the war has already been won, but some <like always> seem to want to play out the battles, nonetheless.

More power to them. Competition and challenge is a good thing.