Features

This world of Daniel Simon's, it's clearly a good one. If you had to pick somewhere to spend your down time, you could do a lot worse than a place full of outrageously beautiful machines, piloted by impossibly beautiful women. That reads back like the neatly distilled essence of adolescence, and, for Daniel, it probably is. But we're not casting judgement here. Quite the reverse. We want a shot.

Daniel Simon is a car designer by trade, having been properly schooled in this micro-niche before finding work with the VW Group on top-secret and highly experimental future concepts. He is said to have been onto something big when a reshuffle of bigwigs saw the project canned, and his concept consigned to VW's vault. (Think Raiders of the Lost Ark, minus the Nazis, obviously).

But turning off the money didn't stem the creativity. Simon's mind is evidently an extraordinary place, and left to its own devices, it's conjured up a whole alternate galaxy. This is a place where he can build machines to his own radical and exacting specifications. It's a place where bean- counters never pull the plug, and where scantily clad female pilots are in abundance. Welcome to Galaxion and the pages of Cosmic Motors.

Now you might sniff a trace element of the pervy as you first flick through, but the girls in Galaxion, Simon's own fictitious galaxy, are but a post-coital cigarette to his true fetish. Bizarre yet beautiful machines are born forth in incredibly intricate detail - the product of an obsession that transcends mere craft and passion and strays right into the realms of sexuality. And it's a kinky sort of fetish. Says Simon: "It's like putting Barbarella, James Bond, Star Wars and an F1 car in a blender." (There's that recipe for perfect adolescence again.) "It's my personal escape from the real design business. And I can play God!"

Simon had what most of us would consider an unusual background. He grew up behind the Iron Curtain, born into a family of ship-builders, and didn't even see Star Wars until the Wall came down and he was 23 years old. But his fire was already stoked; the sci-fi trilogy merely fanned the flames.

Inspiration has also come from pioneers of the real world, lending his work a vital element of authenticity and plausibility. "Among my favourite vehicles from Planet Earth are the things that try to break records or conventions: the Auto Union Streamliner, the Thrust SSC, offshore speed boats, the SR-71 Blackbird, the Saturn V moon rocket or, if it has to be road-legal, the McLaren F1."

But it's not just a visual experience for Simon. "Going to the pits of motorsport events - after smelling and hearing race cars, I always leave with plenty of ideas... my audience loves the smell of fuel, the sound, the heat, the hinges, the tubes."

His graft at VW didn't hurt, either. "You learn attention to detail and the celebration of quality. This reflects best in more expensive VW groups like Bentley or Bugatti. I want to transfer that to my fantasy vehicles and related products. The price and extra work is high, but the results pay off."

The machines, made by CoMo, a company turning out race craft, luxury explorers, even V8 motorbikes, are an extraordinary collision of fantasy and reality. Products of another age, of course, using technology that doesn't exist, and yet laboriously composed and detailed so as to pull the audienceas deep into his mind, his world, as possible.

The question remains as to why a man employed at the spearhead of automotive design even needs to escape so utterly from reality. And his answer is insightful, if a little bleak: "The real future might be sad for us designers. I always say the real futuristic vehicle is no vehicle.

In a wireless digi-future, moving is meaningless and expensive for most of the population." No wonder he retreats to Galaxion, then. And thank God he's prepared to take us with him...

Cosmic Motors, published by Design Studio Press