As part of his YouTube series looking into the world of car design, legendary automotive designer Frank Stephenson has put digital pen to paper to create a unique vehicle for Grand Theft Auto V.
The idea for the car, which goes by the name of Frankenstein, actually comes from a previous video, in which Stephenson cast a critical eye over the designs of GTAV. As with other entries in his channel, which look at not only cars he’s designed but efforts from other designers — both standard and modified — he didn’t pull any punches.
However, that prompted fans to request that Stephenson produced his own car for the game, and although he’s not had an official conversation with Rockstar about it yet, he’s obliged with his most recent video.
Describing the GTA car design ethos as “take two cars, mash them together, and pray like hell that you don’t get sued”, Stephenson has revisited his own 30-year body of work to create the Frankenstein. However he hasn’t just stuck with two cars, and has come up with a vehicle based on six of his own creations.
Stephenson has had a hand in some of the best-known and most striking cars out there, designing cars for Ferrari, McLaren, Maserati, Ford, FIAT, and BMW, and several find their way into his final creation.
With the GTA universe not really requiring such concerns as safety, and the design aggression of the most powerful cars in the series turned up to 11, the Frank Stephenson Frankenstein certainly seems to fit the bill.
You can probably tell that the general overall design of the car is the Maserati MC12. However the middle section comes straight from McLaren, with a combination of the P1 safety cell and the MP4-12C side intake.
The aero is an interesting pairing of two of the most aggressive of Stephenson’s designs. Firstly there’s the rear wing from the Ferrari FXX, but above and forward of that sits a pair of “whaletail” spoilers from the Ford Escort Cosworth.
At the front there’s a little more Ferrari, with the F430’s front airdam, and the front wings cut into the door section in the same way as the Escort Cosworth’s.
Although he’s generally pretty satisfied with the result, Stephenson does revisit the design towards the end of the video, noting things he might do differently on a second pass. That might mean we’ll see a second generation of Frankenstein at some point in the future.
One important thing to note though is that Stephenson has made the Blender files for the car freely available to all, stating that he got out of supercar design because not enough people were able to experience and appreciate the results.
That means you can create your own car mod of the vehicle in Grand Theft Auto V if you wish, and we’re sure plenty of GTPlanet readers will be doing that right about now.
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