The ultra-minimal car concept is something I've been working on for a while. Functionally, this body design deals mostly with reducing the drag of exposed chassis components, directing cooling for the ESC and motor, and ensuring good airflow through the front and rear wings. I also want it to be easy and quick to fabricate, so the shell needs a minimum of panels and parts; no enclosed volumes, no roof, fenders, etc.

A round of refinements tightens the GTR coupe bodywork to a more aggressive and more coherent form language. Nearly every surface of the original concept model has been changed; curved shapes are pulled more taught and angular, simple angular intersections are now radiused to help them flow. The interplay of these forms also creates a stronger connection between the GTR and its cousins, the LMP prototype and ARX off-roader.

Prototyp is celebrating its fifteenth birthday with what is effectively a re-launch: a completely new website, new model designs, and new project cars. All of which deserve a new graphic theme and a new logomark.

Long-time friend of Prototyp and aerodynamicist Michael Fuller was recently sketching an evolved, custom-bodied 962 variation. This 962 would leverage late-era IMSA GTP aero approaches seen on the Nissan GTP ZX T, Dyson's DR2, and Joest's 'red baron' 962.

I needed a shell for the Traxxas to keep dirt/rocks/sticks out of the central chassis during off-road adventures. I figured I should make it cool, too...

The GTR Coupe is an aggressive dual-purpose drift and road-racing body-shell concept for the Traxxas chassis. The design makes use of the same aerodynamic downforce airflow treatments developed with the LMP body to cancel out lift and minimize drag at speed, yet remains stable and balanced even in low-speed maneuvers.

The most recent build of the LMP revealed more dimensional problems between the source CAD model and the physical chassis. Since several parts were going to need to be revised, I made the update an opportunity for further refinement of the design concept.

Running more LMP renders through Decim8 . These revisited and refined the intricate color-blocking from the early experiments. Takes a little squinting and imagination to filter out the noise, but some really interesting patterns and textures emerge.

The Traxxas LMP model got to see some simulated wind tunnel time. Autodesk Labs has a lightweight CFD simulator available for a limited time. It'll take a 3DS or STL model and run computations in a fixed-ground tunnel environment. The results are perhaps not absolutely precise but for my purposes insightful enough.

Decim8 is a brilliant iOS app designed to destroy photos through a expansive set of processors and filters. Aside from curating the selection and sequence of these filters, there is very little in actual user control. The variables built into each step ensures that no two outputs are the same.