The MOTOR Awards 2021: Best Design

Welcome to the MOTOR Awards 2021, where our team offer a tip of the hat to those that displayed automotive excellence in the last 12 months.

Best Design Winner: Porsche 992 911 GT3 front suspension

Of course there will be those who will just roll their eyes and claim that in fitting proper double-wishbone front suspension, Porsche has finally caught up with the 1934 Citroen Traction Avant. That would be to ignore the fact that, at that time, the MacPherson strut hadn’t even been invented and its genesis was an exotic piece of engineering from the aerospace sector.

What’s most significant about changing the 911’s front suspension design is that the 911’s front suspension design has been changed. This just doesn’t happen. More than five and a half decades have elapsed with every roadgoing 911 featuring strut font suspension, so to change that design is possibly even more of a departure than switching the 996-generation carfrom air to water cooling.

Porsche is a company that recognises tradition and heritage, so for the company to radically change part of its DNA is a big step into the unknown.

Designing and building the double wishbone suspension isn’t particularly difficult. Porsche has been doing just this on its RSR Le Mans race cars, and the advantages are easy to identify.

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More subtly, because the MacPherson design puts all the braking forces into the damper, you need a very stiff damper, reducing the number of options for the chassis engineers. With a double wishbone design, the damper sits between the two forged aluminium wishbones and benefits from their anti-squat and anti-dive protection.

What has been a particular issue for Porsche has been the physical space on the Zuffenhausen line. Yes, line singular. Aside from Taycan, which is built separately, the rest of the cars built at the Zuffenhausen factory go down one line and, given that they’re all 718s and 911s, they all have strut front suspension. Until now.

With incredibly tight tolerances for the robots and rigid scheduling, a whole new means of building a front suspension hasn’t been easy to productionise.

With this thorny problem cracked, does this mean that future Porsche sports cars will all feature double wishbone front suspension? We wouldn’t bet against it.

Honourable mention: Nissan Z tail lights

A nod to the past without going too far into retro kitsch, the capsule-style tail lights of the latest Nissan Z mirror those of the much-loved Z32 300Z. Look closely and the design of the new car’s grille makes a similar tip of the hat.

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Honourable mention: Maserati MC20 wheels

Could this be the start of the three-spoke revival? Back in the ‘90s, tri-spokes were on everything from hot Fiestas to RAV4s, Saabs and Vipers. Then, they just died out. We saw a toe in the water with Alfa Romeo’s MiTo, but it might well take the swagger of Maserati to bring them back. On the MC20, the three-spoke design looks stunning.

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