Who is Marc Newson, one of the Ferrari Luce's designers?

Marc Newson (far left in the image above), co-founder of the design agency LoveFrom, trained in sculpture and jewellery design, and has a CV positively rammed with eccentrically eye-catching work. Clients include Louis Vuitton, Nike, Apple and Taschen. Then there’s the Lockheed Lounge, a riveted chaise longue inspired by aviation.

An example of that sold for £2.43m at an auction in 2015. He’s also a diehard petrolhead, whose car journey began with a Citroën DS19, and reached such heights as the Bugatti Type 59 and Vignale-bodied Ferrari 225 S. But if you think the Luce is his first car design, you’d be wrong.

Back in 1999, Ford’s then design boss J Mays became entranced by the work of this mercurial young Aussie, and won the approval of style-savvy CEO Jac Nasser to produce a one-off collab that sat way outside the strictures even of concept car creation.

The result was the 021C – named after the Pantone number for the orange it was painted – a city car vision that would look fresh if it landed tomorrow. “I never studied any formal kind of sketching, so my sketches are just like a mad person’s doodles,” Newson admitted at the time.

“When you don’t have that kind of classical experience in representing cars, and you don’t know the cues they use to give the drawing a sense of fantasy but reality, it’s really difficult to do.”