Paris Motor Show previews Holden Viva

Australia has injected excitement into the Paris Motor Show with one of the most outrageous concept cars in the French capital.

The Chevrolet WTCC Ultra Concept Car is the work of talented young GM Holden designers Ewan Kingsbury and Breony Crittenden, who stood beside their creation in Paris this week as it was revealed to the world.

It was displayed in Paris with a turbo-diesel engine and stripping away the pumped-out bodywork reveals a good-looking coupe that could easily be turned into a South Korean production car.

It is also a fully operational car, not just a plastic body dropped over a set of wheels.

The WTCC racer is the latest work from a Holden team that has won a worldwide reputation for its talent and commitment on a range of concept and production cars stretching back to the Suzuki-based Cruze and including the latest Efijy show stopper, VE Commodore and the conversion work on the production model of the Chevrolet Camaro.

Kingsbury was the lead designer on the body of the new Chevrolet and Crittenden did the cabin, renewing a partnership that saw them working together on the Torana concept car that was produced in Australia and is still the model for a mid-sized future car stretched out of the VE Commodore mechanical package.

The Australian connection on the WTCC car includes designer Max Wolff, who developed the original concept and early design work in South Korea, and the design department workers at Fishermans Bend, who produced the scale and full-sized clay models for the car.

The interior was done in Melbourne by a digital sculpting team working entirely on computers.

They were not in Paris this week, but the last big international motor show this year was flooded by Australians touting the cars that will be coming Down Under in the next few years.

Australians led the work on the WTCC Ultra but Peter Bramberger, design manager at GM Holden, says the car is the most global project undertaken by General Motors.

"The way the WTCC Ultra took shape is indicative of Chevrolet's international alignment and intentions as a brand," Bramberger says.

Apart from the Australian and South Korean input, the WTCC Ultra includes model work in India, technical input from Chevrolet's race team in Britain and a final construction team in Japan, which also builds the Daewoo T2X and S3X four-wheel-drive concepts.

And the project was co-ordinated from the United States by GM's global design chief, Ed Welburn.

But it is Kingsbury and Crittenden who know the most about the car and what it means.

"A car's proportions are the biggest factor in its appearance, so all the early work concentrated on this area. Correct proportions are vital, they can make a car look fast even when it's standing still," Kingsbury says.

"The intention was to give the concept a fresh, exciting and aggressive combination of surfacing and graphics. All the lines on the car accelerate rearward of the front door, to give the car more speed, and keep the visual weight in the correct position."

The work on the interior was matched to that concept.

Crittendon notes, "We opted for raw dark surfaces by using unpolished metal or matte carbon fibre inserts. By doing this, we kept a little secretive about the material, and called this design principle the 'stealth them'."