Bored of the deluge of perfect photographs pouring out of motor shows? We’ve taken some old and strange film cameras to Geneva to show you another side of cars. Well, of supercars anyway.
Given that the Geneva Motor Show has been the birthplace of many icons of rock-and-roll fascination—both the Miura and the Countach were introduced here—it’s surprising how humorless, sanitized, corporate and depressingly adult the event is. Patterned shirts and rumpled hair did not make easy our entry past the gates, and that was before we produced our documents.
“These are a joke,” a stern lady by the name of Michelle greeted us with a smirk after inspecting our letters of editorial confirmation. No glossy magazines? No big-money advertisements on expensive paper? Then, upon my insistence, she visited jalopnik.com, and the joke was on her. “But you look so young” was all she could come up with as we waved her goodbye.
All photography by Máté Petrány.
In a sea of navy blue suits and black pro cameras, we went prowling the showfloor with a Lomography Fisheye 2 and two old Minoltas loaded with Kodak T-MAX 3200 film to capture something of Geneva supercars which elude modern cameras with their nuclear-powered image processors and Volkswagen-perfect optics.
What we’ve collected in this gallery are not professional photographs, but they show the Pagani Zonda, the Lexus LFA, the Bugatti Veyron, the Koenigsegg Agera and the Lamborghini Murciélago SV in ways which escape perhaps the majority of modern cameras.
Like how the scoops on a Lexus LFA are obviously inspired by melting icebergs.
Even though it’s been around for a while and our Mr. Wes Siler has already driven it, it was the first time either Máté or I saw an LFA in person. It’s shocking in the way only Italian cars can be. Full of completely weird details.
But the last word in weird goes to the Pagani Zonda Cinque Roadster. On display was number three of five and we kept circling around it for two days, unable to resist its pull.
Nobody does carbon fiber like Horacio Pagani.
The Zonda’s grand-piano-sized AMG V12, topped with the mother of all strut braces, shown here with a fisheye lens.
The Zonda Cinque’s rear continues in a towering, 1975-style hood scoop.
I’ve always suspected that the Bugatti Veyron was groundhogs. After finally seeing a fisheye photograph of its grille, complete with buckteeth, all I can say is quod erat demonstrandum.
Even though the Agera is the first new Koenigsegg since the CC, it is in fact nothing but a special edition CC. It takes a distorted perspective to hide its Koenigseggian lines and introduce an element of, well, modern Honda prototypes.
The star of the post-financioapocalyptic 2009 Geneva Motor Show, Lamborghini’s farewell to the Murciélago is still a wonderful, surreal car, six HP short of 666.
Underexpose the big Lambo with a fisheye lens and you get a menacing interstellar cruiser from the Alien series, roaring through constellations, serving the needs of a shady transplanetary conglomerate.
If the Murciélago SV is a Weyland-Yutani spaceship, the Pagani Zonda Tricolore is the xenomorph it’s sent to collect exterminate.
To part on a note that’s not all doom and gloom and high-grain Kodak, here’s how you turn a Zonda into ‘70s disco power. Party like it’s 1974 and speed bumps are yet to be discovered!