The Hofmeister kink. The Hofmeister bloody kink. It appears in lists of ‘favourite car styling cues’ with monotonous regularity. That and the shark-nose grille. It seems either that BMW have been credited with more than their fair share of design hits. And, I admit, rightly so.
But could mankind’s adoration of the design output of Bavaria not be drip-fed by constant exposure, just like a piece of music will be embedded in your psyche after you’ve heard it a hundred times on the radio, on TV spots and as you walk past storefronts? It took a good thirty years for BMW’s design language to markedly change, but which time it had become part of the landscape. No wonder the best of classic BMW styling is universally hallowed.
Sometimes its easy to forget about the fallen. Those cars which have been lost in the fickle mists of time. When I recently saw this track-prepared Triumph 2500 I remembered just how strong a visual statement it made.

A product of Michelotti’s drawing board, the MK1 Triumph 2000 was a thoroughly contemporary looking car when it was launched in 1963, where a good number of its rivals still looked like they were firmly rooted to the 1950s. However it wasn’t until the design was revised – following the release of the Triumph Stag – that it gained the striking front end treatment that this example wears.
We speak of corporate identity like it’s a recent thing. Audi take it to extremes where it takes a tape measure and a lot of patience to actually tell each of their current models apart; Lexus have taken it way beyond breaking point by making their grille so repulsively individual that nobody could have the slightest interest in copying it.

Triumph established a corporate look in the 1970s for its upmarket models, the Stag and the 2000/2500 range that really succeeded in setting it apart from the rest of the BMC range. Even the handsome Rover P6 somehow looked more contrived and, with its deliberate design homage to the Citroen DS, in some ways it was actually less original.
We often speak of cars which, aesthetically, were ahead of their time and I think this, especially shorn of its old-fashioned chrome bumpers, is a prime example. Just like the NSU Ro80 I reckon it would respond well to a modern reinterpretation, probably not taking a whole lot of reworking to look like something that could be sold today.
What do you reckon? What car for the past could, in an alternative reality, so easily be a car of today?
(All images copyright Chris Haining, Hooniverse 2016)