Axon's automotive anorak: Fins ain't what they used to be!

As part of the mix of pre- and post-war cars gracing the Cartier Lawn, four of the eight concours classes will celebrate significant automotive 70^th anniversaries. These will include the 1948 launch of the Jaguar XK sports car series, the introduction of the iconic Citroën 2CV and the founding of Porsche. The fourth 70^th anniversary won’t be make or model specific, but rather a celebration of the tail fin. Yes, you did read that right… the tail fin!

Largely forgotten now and long overlooked by most modern-day car stylists, 70 years ago an automotive design revolution began when Harley J. Earl – the influential head of General Motors’ Michigan-based vehicle styling studio and the revered ‘father’ of car design and the concept car –introduced the new 1948 Model Year Cadillac Series 62 range.

The large ’48 Cadillacs were the world’s first production cars to feature pronounced tail fins, these subtle protrusions drawing inspiration from the early 1940s Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft and helping to start at the American ‘space age’ fascination when rocket ships captured the popular imagination in sci-fi movies.

As well as being a styling flourish, the Cadillac’s tail fins were claimed to aid aerodynamic stability to the cars at speed. The fins quickly caught on throughout Detroit, and soon led to fierce competition between Harley Earl and his flamboyant Chrysler design counterpart Virgil Exner over the size and complexity of tailfins, culminating with those on the famous 1959 Cadillac models, an example of which will be displayed on the Cartier Lawn next week along with some earlier finned Cadillacs.

Following its styling excesses for the 1959 Model Year, for 1960 Cadillac had adopted a smoother, more restrained design with lower, more profiled tailfins, and by 1961, the Cadillac models had been restyled again with a far calmer appearance, the tail fins reducing in size and incorporating a revised backlight treatment to enhance the models’ crisp angular lines. GM’s other in-house brands (Chevrolet, Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, etc.), as well as its Detroit rivals over at Chrysler (and to a lesser extent Ford) also began to reign-in their tail fin extravagances, the fins getting smaller with each passing Model Year, until they had virtually disappeared on most North American cars by the late 1960s.

Before this, however, the tail fin trend had already made the long leap across the Atlantic to Europe where fins began sprouting on everything from humble family Fiats, Austins and Triumphs, to more exotic Ferraris and Facel-Vegas by the late 1950s. Given that the life cycle of a European-built car tended to be considerably longer than the short-lived built-in obsolescence ‘in one year, out the next’ of the Big Three US car giants, rear fins actually remained in vogue for longer in Europe (and Japan) than they did in the Country that first created them.

Take the Pininfarina-styled BMC Austin-Morris Cambridge/Oxford ‘Farina’ models (1959-71) for example, or the popular Triumph Herald (1959-71), Skoda Octavia (1959-71), Fiat/SEAT 1800 (1959-73) or the long-lived Peugeot 404 (1960-78), all proudly boasting their very upright and restrained (by US standards) rear fins.

Throughout the 1960s, many other British and Continental cars were produced with pronounced tail fins to give a more transatlantic style. Notable among these was the Rootes Group’s Sunbeam Rapier, Alpine and Hillman Super Minx/Humber Sceptre/Singer Vogue, Ford’s Cortina MK 1, Zephyr/Zodiac, Anglia 105 and frightful Consul Classic/Capri, the Vauxhall Cresta PA, the Mercedes-Benz W111 saloon range, the luxurious Facel-Vega Excellence, and even the communist-era East German Trabant 601 (1963-90) and Russian Moskvich 408/412/2140 family, which continued being produced into the 1990s! 

By this time automotive tail fins had all but fizzled-out. The niche, low-volume Lancia Kappa Coupe of 1997 half-heartedly attempted to revive fins had a small, subtle ‘suggestion’ of rear fins, as a styling nod to its earlier coupe-bodied Lancia Flavia 2000 and predecessors. Almost 20 years later, the sadly stillborn Bristol Bullet prototype that debuted in camouflaged concept form, shooting up the Hill at the 2016 Goodwood Festival of Speed, also briefly promised to revive the rear fin to recall that model’s 1950s Bristol 404/405 inspiration.

More recently, a few months ago at the 2018 Geneva Motor Show, the Lexus UX concept SUV hinted at another possible fin revival with discrete tail light fins set into the rear lamps, but I for one wouldn’t hold my breath to see sizeable tail fins making a comeback anytime soon.

So, if you want to admire these automotive design relics from the past, be sure to stop by the Cartier ‘Style et Luxe’ next week at the 25^th Anniversary Goodwood Festival of Speed, and gaze in wonder and awe at the enormous scale of the tail fins at the back of the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz Convertible on the Lawn. Be warned though, you might get neck ache if you look for too long!