Moby Dick: The Porsche That Looked Like Nothing Else

When a rulebook loophole accidentally created a masterpiece

Some cars are designed to be beautiful. The Porsche 935/78, nicknamed “Moby Dick” for its elongated white body and whale-like proportions, was not one of them. It was designed to be legal — stretched, flattened, and reshaped around the letter of Group 5 regulations rather than any aesthetic instinct. And yet, somehow, the result is one of the strangest, most compelling silhouettes ever to leave a Porsche workshop — and one of the strangest stories behind any poster in this collection.

A Shape Born From Loopholes, Not Instinct

There’s something almost rebellious about building an image of a car that wasn’t trying to look good. Every proportion on Moby Dick exists because an engineer found a gap in a rulebook and exploited it without a second thought for elegance. The tail stretches absurdly far behind the rear wheels. The body flattens and widens in ways no design brief would ever request. It shouldn’t hang together. And yet the sheer confidence of the shape — the way it commits fully to its own strangeness — ends up reading as a kind of beauty that “correct” design rarely achieves.

Framing the Indefensible

Working from a model on the desk and a camera rather than a blank sheet of paper changes the question you’re asking yourself. It’s not “how do I draw this” — it’s “what angle, what light, tells the truth about this shape.” Most of what I photograph earns its beauty honestly: considered curves, historic liveries, proportions shaped by decades of automotive design language. Moby Dick breaks all of that, and that’s precisely why I wanted to capture it. There’s a pleasure in rendering a shape that refuses to apologise for itself — in letting the elongated tail dominate the composition instead of softening it, in leaning into the sheer, uncompromising length of the thing rather than trying to make it more conventionally handsome than it ever intended to be.

White, and Almost Nothing Else

Where many of the liveries I work with lean on bold colour contrasts, Moby Dick’s near-monochrome white finish forces a different kind of attention. Without colour to lead the eye, everything comes down to form — the way light catches the curve of that stretched bodywork, the shadows pooling beneath the flared arches. It’s a reminder that beauty doesn’t always need colour to make its case. Sometimes restraint says more.

Why It Still Feels Radical

Decades on, Moby Dick still looks like it arrived from a different decade to the one it actually raced in — futuristic in a way that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with sheer nerve. Regulations have long since closed the loophole that made it possible, which only adds to its strangeness: this shape could never legally exist again. It’s a one-off in the truest sense, a silhouette frozen at the exact moment a rulebook briefly allowed for madness.

The Porsche 935 Moby Dick Poster

For this piece, I gave the composition room to stretch — quite literally — letting that elongated tail run almost to the edge of the frame rather than compressing the car into a conventional format. It felt dishonest to do otherwise. A car this committed to its own excess deserves a poster willing to commit right alongside it.

Moby Dick isn’t a car you fall in love with immediately. It’s a car that unsettles you first, and then, slowly, you realise that’s exactly why you can’t stop looking at it.

Renault 5 Turbo Poster | A Small Car with a Giant’s Swagger

Proof that charisma was never about size

Not every legend needs to be large. Some of the most magnetic cars in motorsport history are small enough to park in half a garage bay — and the Renault 5 Turbo might be the finest proof of that. Flared arches bolted onto a humble city hatchback, an engine relocated behind the driver’s seat like a secret nobody bothered to keep — this car shouldn’t have worked as well as it did, visually or competitively. It worked anyway, and that’s the whole story behind this Renault 5 Turbo poster.

A Silhouette Built on Contradiction

Look at it side-on and the 5 Turbo reads almost like a cartoon of itself: the boxy, friendly proportions of an everyday supermini, suddenly interrupted by wheel arches so wide they seem borrowed from another, angrier car entirely. That contradiction is exactly what makes it a joy to compose. Most race cars are beautiful because their proportions are considered and whole. This one is beautiful because its proportions argue with each other, and somehow the argument resolves into something charming rather than awkward.

Jean Ragnotti’s Car

No story about the 5 Turbo is complete without Jean Ragnotti, the driver whose flamboyant, cheerfully reckless style matched the car’s personality so precisely that the two became inseparable in the public imagination. Watching footage of Ragnotti throwing the 5 Turbo sideways through a hairpin, you get the sense he wasn’t just driving the car — he was performing it, the way a stunt driver performs for a camera rather than merely competing for a stopwatch.

Monte-Carlo, in Red

For this piece, I returned to the Rallye Monte-Carlo, a stage that has hosted so many defining rally moments it practically functions as motorsport’s most theatrical backdrop — stone bridges, autumn leaves scattered across tarmac, headlights cutting through early winter dusk. Against that setting, the Renault’s red bodywork doesn’t just stand out; it seems to insist on being noticed, the way a bright coat insists on being noticed in a grey crowd.

Composing the Renault 5 Turbo Poster

For this piece, I wanted to hold onto that theatrical quality rather than sanitising it into a clean studio composition. The car sits slightly off-balance in the frame, as though caught mid-slide, because a car this playful photographed straight-on loses half its personality. The environment matters just as much as the machine here — the road, the light, the season — because Monte-Carlo in winter has a colour palette all its own, and the 5 Turbo was practically designed to be dropped into the middle of it.

Why Small Cars Make the Best Stories

There’s something democratic about a car like the 5 Turbo. It began life as an ordinary hatchback, the kind of car anyone’s neighbour might have owned, before someone decided to turn it into a rally weapon. That origin story gives it a warmth that purpose-built exotics rarely carry. People don’t just admire the 5 Turbo — they grin at it, the way you grin at someone who’s clearly having more fun than they’re supposed to. That grin is what I try to put into every Renault 5 Turbo poster in this collection: not just a fast car, but a genuinely joyful one.

Jaguar D-Type: The Underdog Shape That Beat Them All – Jaguar D-Type poster

A small Scottish garage, a colour called Flag Blue, and a body shaped more like an aircraft than a car

Some racing stories are about factories with unlimited budgets. This one isn’t. Ecurie Ecosse was a private team run out of Edinburgh, founded by an accountant and a mechanic who wanted to put Scotland on the motorsport map — and somehow, against works teams with far deeper pockets, they did it in a car whose beauty came from the same place as its speed: a shape drawn not by a stylist, but by an aircraft engineer. That’s the story this Jaguar D-Type poster is really about.

A Body Built Like an Aeroplane

The Jaguar D-Type was shaped by Malcolm Sayer, a man who’d spent the war years working on aircraft design before Jaguar ever gave him a car to draw. It shows. The D-Type’s monocoque tub, its long sculpted nose, the small stabilising fin behind the driver’s headrest — none of it reads as decoration. Every curve exists because moving air told it to be there. Sayer would go on to shape the E-Type a few years later, but there’s an argument that the D-Type is the purer object: rougher, more urgent, closer to the wind-tunnel logic that built it in the first place.

Reims, 1956

I set this piece at the 12 Hours of Reims in 1956, one of the fast, flowing road circuits of that era, cut through open French farmland rather than fenced into a permanent track. It suits the D-Type’s shape — a car built for sustained high speed, not tight corners, photographed somewhere that actually let it stretch its legs. Ecurie Ecosse ran their cars in a colour they called Flag Metallic Blue, a shade with just enough depth to catch the light differently every time the car changes angle, which made it a genuine pleasure to compose against the flat gold of a French summer field.

The Team Nobody Expected

What pulls me back to Ecurie Ecosse, beyond the shape of the car, is the size of the story against the size of the operation. This was a handful of Scottish mechanics and a couple of race-bred drivers, running against the full might of the works teams — and coming away not just competitive, but victorious, at Le Mans in both 1956 and 1957. There’s something worth holding onto in that: proof that a small team with a well-shaped idea can still out-run an organisation ten times its size. It’s not a bad thing to think about while running a small studio yourself.

One of the First Pieces I Ever Made

This one has a different story behind it than most of what I make now. It was one of my earliest pieces, put together with the help of an intern at the time, and we did it entirely in 3D — a genuine experiment, back before I’d settled on the way I work today. I’ve since moved away from 3D completely. Everything I make now starts with a real, physical scale model photographed under real light, because that’s where the honesty of the final image comes from. But this piece stays in the collection as it was, a small record of where the process started.

A Tribute Built Into the Whole Frame

What I wanted this piece to do, beyond capturing the car, was pay tribute to Ecurie Ecosse itself — a small team representing a small nation, taking on giants and winning. So rather than tuck a flag into a corner, I let the Saltire take over the entire composition: Scotland’s white diagonal cross on blue, filling the frame edge to edge, with the D-Type posed as though it’s driving straight out of the flag itself rather than simply standing in front of it. The car’s own paintwork picks up the same idea — a central white stripe running the length of the blue bodywork, echoing the cross behind it, so the livery and the backdrop read as one continuous piece of graphic design rather than a car placed on a flag.

The rest of the composition leans into that graphic instinct too: a gold laurel wreath marking out 1956, the drivers’ names — Ivor Bueb and Duncan Hamilton, the pairing that actually won at Reims that year — set in bold type above the car, and “Écurie Écosse” and “Jaguar D-Type” carrying the same confident, poster-like weight as the flag underneath them. It’s a different way of working to how I approach most pieces now, closer to a piece of team branding than a photographic study, and looking back, that’s exactly what made it the right way to honour this particular story.

Composing the Jaguar D-Type Poster

What struck me even in that early 3D piece was how little the D-Type needs from a composition to look fast standing still. I kept the frame low and wide, let the long bonnet run almost the full width of the piece, and left the fin at the rear to close the silhouette rather than cluttering the scene with spectators or pit equipment. A shape this considered doesn’t need company. For the full Jaguar D-Type poster, the aim was to let Sayer’s aerodynamic logic do exactly what it always did on track: quietly outperform everything louder around it.

Why the Shape Still Holds Up

Put a D-Type next to almost anything else from the mid-1950s and it looks like it arrived from a different decade — not through exaggeration, but through sheer economy of form. Nothing about it needed to be added later to make it look modern. It already was. That’s the real legacy of a car shaped by someone thinking about air rather than fashion: it doesn’t age the way fashion does. Seventy years on, the Jaguar D-Type still reads as correct, and that’s a far rarer achievement than any single race result.

Ferrari 250 GTO: The Silhouette Every Car Artist Chases

On Sicilian mountain roads, a shape was born that designers still can’t improve on

Ask anyone who spends their time turning cars into art which silhouette gives them the least trouble, and more often than not, they’ll name the same machine: the Ferrari 250 GTO. Not because it’s simple — nothing about a body this sculpted is simple — but because every line already knows where it’s going. There’s nothing to fix. You just have to get out of its way, which is exactly the brief I gave myself for this Ferrari 250 GTO poster.

A Line That Needs No Explanation

Long bonnet, cabin pushed back towards the rear axle, a roofline that drops and rises again like a held breath — the proportions of the 250 GTO read as inevitable, as though no other shape could ever have made sense for what the car was built to do. That’s rare. Most beautiful cars are beautiful because of one detail, one flourish. The GTO is beautiful because of the whole sentence, not a single word in it.

Targa Florio, 1964

I chose to set this piece against the Targa Florio — the road race that wound through the mountains of Sicily, past stone villages and hairpins carved into rock older than the sport itself. It felt right. A car this considered deserved a backdrop with equal weight: not a sanitised circuit, but real roads, real dust, real risk. The blue and yellow of Ulf Norinder’s Swedish racing livery against that ochre landscape is a colour story I could have painted for weeks and not grown tired of.

A Different Angle on the Same Village

The photograph that started this piece is a period shot of car #112 threading its way out of a Sicilian village — stone houses, a mountain standing guard in the distance, spectators watching from a rooftop terrace. It’s a beautiful photograph, but it’s shot almost head-on, the car coming straight at the camera, and something about that angle always left me wanting more. A car this sculpted deserves to be seen in profile, where every line of the bodywork can actually be read from nose to tail.

So that’s what I set out to do: keep the same village, the same mountain standing in the background, the same stone walls catching the afternoon light — but turn the car to show its full side-on silhouette instead. Front-on, a car reads as a fact: it’s coming towards you, that’s all you know. In profile, it reads as motion — you can trace exactly where it’s been and where it’s about to go, and that alone does more to suggest speed than any blur or motion line ever could. Reworking a real moment from a different vantage point, rather than simply copying the original photograph, is exactly the kind of decision that turns a reference image into a piece of its own.

Why Artists Keep Returning to It

There’s a reason the GTO appears, in one form or another, in nearly every serious collection of automotive art — mine included. It isn’t nostalgia. It’s that the shape rewards attention the way a good painting does: the longer you look, the more you notice how each curve sets up the next one. Shoot it minimalist, shoot it detailed, render it in monochrome or full colour — the bones underneath never let you down.

The Weight of Rarity

Part of what makes the GTO impossible to separate from its own myth is scarcity. Only a handful were ever built, and today it’s regularly cited as the most valuable car in the world at auction. But I’ll admit — the price tag interests me far less than the way light falls across that rear haunch, or how the nose seems to lean forward even when the car is standing still. Rarity explains the value. It doesn’t explain the beauty. The beauty was always going to be there, price tag or not.

Composing the Ferrari 250 GTO Poster

For this Ferrari 250 GTO poster, I leaned into negative space — letting the Sicilian road stretch out ahead of the car rather than crowding the frame with detail. The goal was to give the eye somewhere to travel, the same way a driver’s eye would have travelled across those mountain switchbacks. A poster of a car this iconic doesn’t need decoration. It needs room.

A Shape That Doesn’t Age

Sixty years on, nothing about the GTO reads as dated. Put it beside a modern supercar and it holds its own, not through nostalgia but through sheer clarity of form. That’s the mark of real design — automotive or otherwise. It doesn’t need its era to make sense. It simply is what it always was: correct.