Chris Humberstone: The Ghost of the Motor Show

While the Italians had their grand design houses staffed by men with expensive sunglasses and magnificent hair, Britain had Chris Humberstone working from a succession of anonymous industrial units in unfashionable parts of London. No chrome and marble showroom. No factory tours for motoring journalists. Just a drawing board, a telephone, and an apparently inexhaustible supply of ideas about what cars could be if only someone was brave enough to build them.

He designed concept cars that appeared at motor shows and were never seen again. He penned kit cars sold under other companies' names. He created bespoke luxury machines that carried dealers' badges instead of his own. The Italians got their names on museums. Humberstone got his in small print at the bottom of press releases, when he got it at all.

Being a freelance designer in Britain meant the establishment took credit for work done in anonymous workshops. Humberstone appeared unbothered. He was too busy actually designing cars to worry about who got the glory.

The Early Lesson

Humberstone launched his career while he was still a teenager. His first proper car appeared in 1966 when he was barely twenty. The Scorpion Sovereign was a handsome coupe based on a Triumph Vitesse, with clean lines and a fastback roofline that looked like it belonged on something costing three times as much.

The Bond car company, then desperately trying to move beyond their reputation for making three-wheeled carriages, decided they wanted it. They didn't want to pay Humberstone for it. They just wanted the design. So they took it, tweaked the details slightly, and launched it as the Bond Equipe GT. Humberstone, barely out of his teens and with no money behind him, took them to court and won.

The case established that Humberstone understood intellectual property law and that he wasn't the sort to be pushed around by established companies who thought they could help themselves to the ideas of freelance youngsters. Word got around. If you commissioned work from Humberstone, you paid for it properly, or you'd find yourself explaining things to a judge.

Ghosts at the Motor Show

Throughout the 1970s, Humberstone became a regular at the London Motor Show, appearing each year with something new and impossible. The Saluka in 1973 was a low-slung sports car with styling that looked like it had been lifted from a more optimistic timeline. The Quartetter two years later was even more ambitious, a four-seater supercar proposal that seemed to exist primarily to prove that British designers could think as wildly as anyone in Turin.

They were calling cards, demonstrations that Humberstone could conjure any shape you wanted if you were willing to pay for it. The cars would appear on a stand, journalists would photograph them, people would make interested noises, and then they'd be sold to private buyers or quietly dismantled for parts.

If you were a wealthy customer who wanted something unique, or a manufacturer who needed a design done quickly and quietly, you knew Humberstone could deliver. He was building a reputation as the man who could design anything, for anyone, without asking awkward questions about budgets or feasibility.

The Bespoke Business

He'd design kit cars that could be built in a garden shed using Hillman Imp mechanicals, then turn around and pen bespoke luxury machines for customers who wiped their feet on Persian rugs. For the famous London dealer H R Owen, he created the Owen Sedanca, a four-seater convertible based on Jaguar XJS running gear. It was a proper coachbuilt special, the sort of thing that Mulliner Park Ward might have produced thirty years earlier if they'd had access to 1980s technology.

H R Owen charged the sort of money that required appointment-only viewings and discreet conversations about payment arrangements. Just three were built between 1983 and 1984, each one slightly different according to the customer's requirements.

Humberstone never owned any of them. He designed them, supervised the construction, made sure everything worked as it should, and moved on to the next project. The customers got exclusive cars. H R Owen got the prestige. Humberstone got paid and went back to his workshop to draw something else.

The Glass Act

In 1975, Triplex Safety Glass commissioned him to design a car that would showcase their new windscreen technology. Humberstone built them the Ten Twenty Special, a razor-sharp wedge wrapped around Alfa Romeo Alfasud mechanicals. The body was fibreglass, painted metallic bronze, and covered in enough glass to stock a conservatory.

The remarkable bit was the interior. In a car with less interior volume than a modern supermini, Humberstone fitted six seats arranged in three staggered rows of two. The packaging required genuine three-dimensional genius. Every inch was accounted for. The seats were shaped to nest into each other. The floor was sculpted to accommodate feet at different heights. Triplex took it to motor shows across Europe, where people queued to sit in it and work out how six adults could possibly fit. The car was eventually sold to a private collector.

The Allard Gamble

By the 1980s, Humberstone could have settled into comfortable obscurity, designing the occasional special and collecting his fees. Instead, he licensed the Allard name and announced plans to build a ground-effect sports racing car for Group C competition. Group C in the mid-1980s was dominated by factory-backed Porsche and Jaguar teams with budgets that could have funded small nations.

The Allard JR was lower than most people's kitchen tables, wrapped around a turbocharged Ford engine, and featured enough aerodynamic complexity to generate proper downforce. The car was built, developed and tested, but it never entered the race.

The Later Years

Humberstone never stopped working. Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, he was involved in various projects that sound impressive in summary but never quite materialised as actual products. He worked for Rapport, the luxury coachbuilder, designing bespoke specials for customers who wanted something unique. He was involved in the revival of Spice Racing Cars, helping develop sports-racing machinery.

Projects would start, Humberstone would contribute his ideas and expertise, something would be built or at least partially built, and then it would fade away. Sometimes because of money, sometimes because of technical problems, sometimes because the people involved lost interest or fell out with each other. Humberstone would move on to the next thing, apparently unbothered by the lack of finished products or lasting recognition.

He had the talent to be mentioned in the same breath as the great Italian carrozzerias. He had the versatility to have headed up a major manufacturer's design department. He had the spatial intelligence to have revolutionized packaging in production cars. But he spent his career flitting between projects, creating visions that mostly disappeared, working in the background while others took the bows.

The Vanishing

He died in 1999, at sixty-three, leaving behind a legacy that's almost impossible to quantify. How many cars did he design? Dozens, at minimum. Maybe hundreds if you count all the proposals and sketches that never left the drawing board. How many were built? That's harder to answer. Some exist in private collections. Some were broken up decades ago. Some might still be sitting in garages somewhere, their owners unaware of what they have there.

The Italians got museums and documentaries and coffee-table books. Humberstone got a few paragraphs in specialist magazines and the occasional mention in histories of obscure British sports cars. He never became wealthy, never became famous, never got the recognition that his talent deserved.

For three decades he appeared at motor shows and in workshops, creating visions that others couldn't quite grasp. He's gone now, but if you look carefully at odd British specials from the 1970s and 1980s, at concept cars that appeared once and were never seen again, at one-off luxury machines built for customers who valued discretion, you can still see his fingerprints.