Design Development: Bertone BAT 11 concept
by Nick Hull
16 Jun 2008
La Sip nightclub Geneva, March 2008: the undoubted star of the Geneva Motor Show makes a surprise debut, not at the show but rather to an audience of the world's top car designers. For one American dentist, it was the best evening of his life.
The BAT 11 concept certainly had an unusual debut, but one that typifies the tale of this amazing car. The American in question is Gary Kaberle, who owned the original 1955 BAT 9 car for over twenty-eight years. Kaberle came across the BAT 9 on a used car lot in 1963. "I was 17 years old, I'd just passed my driving test and I fell in love with it. I had to borrow $500 from my mother, $500 from my grandmother to buy it, and it initially served as an attraction at my parents little amusement park in Michigan".
Over the next twenty years, as his dentistry business flourished, Kaberle gradually restored the car and showed it at concours events throughout the states. Tragedy struck in late 1990 when he was forced to sell the car to pay for his wife's medical treatment for cancer. She died two years later. Spool forward thirteen years and one finds Kaberle nearing retirement and wanting to build a reincarnation of the car to help raise awareness of breast cancer. He therefore approached Bertone in November 2006 to design a successor to honor Debbie, his late wife.
According to Bertone Design Director David Wilkie the idea to do a new BAT had been discussed and rejected before but Kaberle's approach provided a unique impetus for the company. "This is different. It's a contemporary look at what could be a BAT, with contemporary surface language" explains Wilkie.
Based on a modified Alfa Romeo 8C platform, the prototype was done to a tight time schedule. The project was thrown open as a studio competition in September 2007, with all the designers contributing sketches for six weeks. A wide range of themes were explored, from pure reinterpretations of the original car to more aggressive ‘Transformer-like' blocks with retractable fins, not unlike something from the Batmobile movie of 1989. During November, three ¼ scale clay models were made and shortly afterwards the model of designer Valery Muller was chosen for the final exterior theme. "In fact, we chose the most extreme design" says Wilkie "Because we felt a Bertone should be dramatic". In order to prove the design wasn't simply a wild styling exercise but continued the spirit of the original ‘Berlinetta Aerodynamica Tecnica' cars designed by Franco Scaglione, Muller's ¼ scale clay model was also tested in the windtunnel at Turin Polytechnic and achieved an impressive Cd figure of 0.27.
The project progressed with regular contact not only with Gary Kaberle but also Alfa Romeo. "At the end of the day it's an Alfa Romeo and it's important that the company were happy with what it represents in terms of the brand" says Wilkie. In December, the scale model was scanned, surfaced and adjusted using Alias and then milled out directly as a 1:1 epowood model with full interior. Talking to CDN, Valery Muller explained "Most of the design had been done on the ¼ scale clay model. At full-size, we just had to adjust the rear wings to fit with the overall proportions of the car, and we worked out the little winglets in front of and behind the rear wheels".