BMW design secrets
When circles aren't as round as they seem
At that same 1-series launch (see other evo news story here), British designer Kevin Rice, shaper of the whole 1-series range, explained a few visual tricks used by designers. One such applies to those wheelarch openings which are designed to look perfectly round, following the shape of the tyre. In reality they never are quite round because it would look wrong. They are always slightly distorted so they look right once the curvature of the body sides and valances is taken into account. Rice also revealed that in the 1980s, some cars were made deliberately slightly asymmetric when viewed head-on because it made them look less threatening and more organic. Both the contemporary BMW 7-series and the first Mazda MX-5, for example, have front wings which are not a mirror image of each other. Evo knew about the BMW but had always assumed it was a mistake. Apparently not.
