More than 30 years after George Miller’s original Mad Max film starring Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky hit the screens turning both the American-born Australian actor and his jet-black Ford Falcon XB GT351 coupe-based Interceptor into movie icons, Ford’s local division in partnership with Top Gear Australia magazine, has revealed two concept studies for a modern day Interceptor.
The company formed a group of designers led by chief designer of passenger cars for the Asia, Pacific and Africa region, Todd Willing. The team created several of studies that paid tribute to the styling cues from the original XB Coupe Interceptor, but ultimately, only two made the cut. The winning designs were penned by Nima Nourian and Simon Brook.
Our entire team was very excited to be involved in this after-hours project and they approached it with a great deal of enthusiasm – even those that were too young to remember the first Mad Max movie,” said Ford Australia’s Melbourne-based Asia, Pacific and Australia Design Director, Chris Svensson. “We had a special screening of the original movie so they could understand it.”
In the next phase, Top Gear Australia magazine readers will have the chance to vote on which design they’d like to see being turned into a scale model, which will be revealed to the public later this year.
Commenting on his design, Nima Nourian said he tried to pay tribute to the original 1979 Interceptor while looking into the future.
“There are some great scenes in the first movie with high-speed chases and clashes with the bad guys, and I thought I’d take that one step further,” he said. “So instead of having weapons and machine guns, we’ve got an industrial strength taser that’ll zap cars dead and out of the way.”
Simon Brook said his concept takes styling cues from today’s FG Falcon series with touches from the original Interceptor. “I wanted to keep it clean and aerodynamic in its essence, but still brutal and tough,” he said. “During high-speed pursuits, the wheel’s inner spokes on my design would pop out and start ripping up other cars,” Brook said. “They’d do some serious damage to other people’s vehicles.”
Despite the designers’ claims though, we must say that we fail to see the resemblance between these two concepts and the original 1970s Falcon XB GT-based Interceptor.
George Miller is currently preparing a fourth installment of the Mad Max franchise called “Mad Max 4: Fury Road”, so there’s a fair chance we may see the winning concept making it on the big screen.
