Also in my garage: industrial artworks

By Martin Buckley

| 10 Jul 2025

Classic & Sports Car – Also in my garage: industrial artworks

Richard Carp founded HC Classics in 2017, pairing a love of old cars (his fleet includes a Range Rover, an early Jensen Interceptor and a rare Renault 6) with his background in industrial design.

Today’s superb restorations and ambitious recreations, such as the Peugeot 504 Break Riviera, follow an extraordinary career during which he once happened upon a cache of motoring artworks.

Richard studied design at university in Coventry and trained at Philips in Eindhoven.

His first job was as an interiors designer at VDO in Frankfurt, in 1980, with a client base that included most German and Scandinavian car makers.

The Renault 6 is part of Richard Carp’s eclectic fleet

Later, Richard was design manager at Ogle, covering vehicle and aviation interior projects: Renault trucks, British Aerospace Jetstream cabins, as well as first and business class ‘pods’ for the likes of British Airways and Virgin.

“At VDO, we were developing the back-lighting on needles, Visual Display Units as opposed to LCD at the time,” he says.

“This was from 1980-’85 – I came in on the tail end of the Porsche 928 with the moving binnacle.

“VDO was an engineering company, by and large, with five or six designers.

“The equivalent of Smiths in this country, it has now been gobbled up by a big multinational but was then still owned privately, by a woman called Mrs Schindling.

“I did a lot of visual training while I was at university and from there moved on to Philips, where the quality of the visuals being worked on was absolutely phenomenal.”

The steering-boss-mounted clock (middle) catches the eye in these old artworks from VDO

“Remember Sid Mead? He was a futuristic artist who also did album covers,” continues Richard.

“He worked for Philips in the design department, one of 50 of us operating in great secrecy.

“As soon as we had finished some concept designs, you could guarantee that they would reappear in China the week after.

“That was where I learned to produce quick renderings.

“I took that experience with me to VDO, with my box of Magic Markers, and educated them how to do it.

“Just a technique, but gradually we were increasing our ability to produce visuals that the clients loved.

“We also had a big modelmaking department. Very quickly the modelmakers would create a mock-up and fit it into an old car that was knocking around.”

Do you recognise this Rolls-Royce limo concept? Richard would love to know more about it

“While I was there, I stumbled across all these old artworks and, as a leaving present, because they were so pleased with what I had done, VDO gifted them to me,” he says.

“I’ve got a whole portfolio full of them, dated from the mid-1950s onwards.

“Some are fairly mediocre, but others are beautiful. One even shows a VDU system – in the ’50s!”

Some of the renderings are of private car dashboards, others for commercial vehicles.

They are mostly large-scale drawings showing Detroit-inspired dashboards with ribbon or semi-circular speedometers; one displays the numbers almost floating in a Perspex rectangle, and somebody had a preoccupation with putting the clock where the horn-push should be in the middle of the steering column.

“A few have signatures,” says Richard, “but I don’t know who the artists were.”

They are all worthy of framing, but the drawings that intrigue him the most are the front and rear three-quarter renderings of a low-slung Rolls-Royce limousine concept, created in the Virgil Exner ‘neoclassic’ idiom and – presumably – dating from the late 1960s or early ’70s.

Can anyone throw further light on its origins?

Images: John Bradshaw

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