1981 De Lorean Gullwing Coupe
Around the mid-1970s John DeLorean, a senior executive with General Motors, had a strong desire to build a rear-engined two-seater coupe using a Ford V6 as the power source. He envisaged it would have many high tech features. Its body would be of unpainted stainless steel mounted on a chassis built from a lightweight composite material.
The stylist selected to design the body was Giugiaro who had designed the Tapiro for Porsche in 1970. Although the idealised specifications were based on strong safety conscious intentions the concept of gull-wing doors didn’t quite fit within this ideal.
De Lorean was able to persuade the British government to act as his backer since it was planned to manufacture the car in Northern Ireland where it would give a strong boost to their ailing economy by creating a number of new jobs. The factory was set up in Belfast and received a lot of help from Lotus. Colin Chapman modified the original design to produce a car that could be readily produced.
A new body moulding technique was developed by Lotus with different materials and they also made the rear-engined design workable by giving the DeLorean a backbone chassis. The use of stainless steel cladding and the gull-wing doors were retained and pilot production commenced in mid-1980.
The modified design used a 2.8-litre V6 engine sourced from Peugeot-Renault-Volvo. It developed 116 kW and 234 Nm of torque, through a five-speed gearbox. The new car had coil spring suspension, plus all round and ventilated disc brakes on all four wheels. Top speed for the European specified model was 216 km/h and it accelerated from a standing start to 96 km/h in just over eight seconds.
Thanks to input from Lotus the DeLorean’s handling was surprisingly good as a dedicated sports car should have been. Larger rear tyres reduced the inherent oversteer and with a little better design input it may have become the ‘ethical car’ which DeLorean’s worthy intentions initially envisaged.
Early in 1982 after many production delays and scandals involving DeLorean’s drug offences the company collapsed. A little over 5000 cars had been produced, about 4000 of which were shipped to the USA in a detuned form to meet US regulations. Ironically, some sold at well above.
