When Genesis chief creative officer Luc Donckerwolke introduced Le Mans legend Jacky Ickx at the launch of the company's new performance trim dubbed Magma, a few quizzical eyebrows were raised. Ickx, who won Le Mans six times and also stood atop many a podium in Formula 1 is a well-known figure in racing circles – but Genesis is hardly the first brand you think about when Le Mans is mentioned. What gives?
Well, as it happens, Donckerwolke and Ickx are old friends, perhaps even childhood friends, in a one-sided way. Both are of Belgian ancestry, so there's a shared connection there. But something more, too, as there's a 20-year gap between them.
Born in Lima, Peru, Donckerwolke's early childhood was almost totally bereft of any external automotive culture. The vehicles he was surrounded by were pragmatic trucks or perhaps the odd passenger vehicle. There were certainly no racing cars and definitely no Porsche 911s with steely-eyed Belgian racing drivers at the wheel.
Yet this designer is often held up as one of the key figures in helping transform the Hyundai group of automotive companies from makers of solid but uninteresting cars to genuinely exciting machines. In his own time, Donckerwolke is an avid vintage car collector, and before coming to Hyundai, he designed everything from Le Mans racers to V12-powered Lamborghini icons like the Murcielago.
At the same time that Genesis was showing off its new red-hot range-topping trim, the head of design SangYup Lee unveiled the NeoLun concept (pictured below). As a polished vision of what the immediate future for Genesis might be in terms of a flagship EV crossover, the NeoLun was inspired by traditional Korean porcelain.
Elegance steeped in tradition is just what you'd expect from a Korean-born project leader, especially one with a degree in fine arts, specifically sculpture. Korea is young in terms of automotive culture, and while newfound wealth has brought Ferraris and other exotics to Seoul, the traffic on the roads is largely homogenous domestic Korean crossovers. Like Donckerwolke, Lee was born in the 1960s in a place that was basically a desert for automotive enthusiasm. But as it turns out, he's the designer behind the fifth-generation Chevrolet Camaro.
There's a common theme between these two designers, and it's not that they both simply sought out what they couldn't find in their childhood. It's that they both did discover automotive enthusiasm as kids, but in paper form.
The Outsized Influence of Tintin
For a comic strip first drawn in the late 1920s, it's incredible that Tintin is still popular with kids today. Some of the elements of the stories haven't aged particularly well (good luck trying to find Tintin in the Congo in your local bookstore), but, for the most part, the adventures of the intrepid boy reporter and the hot-headed Captain Haddock are classics.
But Tintin goes beyond just the 24 albums you can buy today. When Donckerwolke was growing up in South America, Tintin was a weekly magazine, a little piece of Belgium shipped across the sea, doubtlessly eagerly awaited by the young designer.
Many other comics got their start in the pages of Tintin, and one of them was a short strip written by a French illustrator named Jean Graton. Graton first wrote for a Belgian weekly that was a little more slapstick humour – think Mad Magazine – but then later came on board at Tintin magazine and began writing pieces that were more oriented around action adventure and sports. In 1957, he created a character called Michel Vaillant, who was a racing driver.
Growing up in France, Graton had a deep interest in motorsport, and he poured all of it into his work. Not unlike Tintin's creator Georges Remi, he had an eye for detail and accuracy in cars and architecture that belied the sometimes simple stories that he drew. Vaillant isn't the most interesting hero, being a sort of well-scrubbed, flaw-free archetype that any young boy could imagine himself as. But there's a high level of realism to the racing and troubles with sponsorships and the like that a real racing team might endure.
Also, there's Jacky Ickx. Several real-life racers show up occasionally in the pages of Vaillant's adventures, and this is where Donckerwolke first met his hero and friend. In the pages of this comic, the young Belgian found excitement and action, complete with his own countryman hero.
And, lest you think he was the only one inspired by Vaillant, the comic is still incredibly popular today, with modern racing and even a spinoff series focused on the early racing exploits of Vaillant’s father Henri. Graton was also relatively forward-looking for his time and created a female racer back in the mid-1970s called Julie Wood, who raced motorcycles in motocross and eventually Honda Supermoto.
Asphalt Man
Meanwhile, Lee was growing up in South Korea surrounded by cars like the Kia Sephia and the Hyundai Elantra. For the latter, it wasn’t the current angular cutting-edge design, but the mid-’90s version that looks like a Saturn L-Series crossed with a jelly bean. Not very exciting.
For Lee (pictured above, right, with Donckerwolke, left), an interest in cars came via the Korean manhwas like Asphalt Man. A manhwa may be thought of as analogous to a Japanese manga, though Korean writing is read from left to right in a way that would be more familiar to Western audiences (in Japan, you read a manga in the reverse direction, starting with what would be the back page in a comic written in English).
Asphalt Man is a melodrama that tells the story of a family suffering trials and tribulations as the hero tries to live his dream of starting a car company. The younger brother flees to the U.S. to become a racing driver. The sister runs off with a U.S. serviceman. It's basically a soap opera, one of the enormously popular Korean dramas that became popular in China during the first wave of Korean cultural exports.
At the same time, Lee also had a chance encounter as a student with a Porsche in the central Itaewon neighbourhood of Seoul. It was the first one he'd ever seen in person, and he was transfixed. After school, he would apply to ArtCenter School of Design in California, a school that has produced a number of well-known car designers, from Chris Bangle of BMW to Tom Matano, designer of the original Mazda Miata. And, as it happens, ArtCenter is also the alma mater of one Luc Donckerwolke.
From Pen and Paper to Reality
Going from drawing to sheet metal is the journey of pretty much every clean-sheet car design, even if the pen and paper are mostly digital these days. Designers sketch the way sharks swim – constant creation and refinement are key to survival.
For Donckerwolke, that creativeness is like cracking open a new issue of his favourite childhood comic. His career has had many highlights, but one of the crowning moments must be seeing Ickx take the wheel of a car he designed.
For Lee, not being steeped in car culture gave him fresh eyes to reinterpret style and reimagine old ways. It's why the Camaro managed to be both modern and yet influenced by the original.
If you are a young designer thinking about your own dynasty designing cars, then don't feel guilty about taking some time away from your studies to read a graphic novel or two. It's basically research. Hyundai, Genesis, and Kia are all at the top of their game in the styling department these days. And it all started by never letting go of a passion that started young.
Lead image from: Musée Hergé
