On the grille

The classic Bugatti, the Bentley... and the Ford Edsel. Jonathan Glancey comes face to face with radiators

On the grille


It was meant to represent a lucky horseshoe, but ended up looking like a lavatory basin or a vulva, depending on who was looking at it. Either way, the radiator grille of the Ford Edsel was one of the main reasons why the late-Fifties sedan turned out to be one of the biggest flops in motoring history.

The radiator grille is a car's face and can't help determining how we judge its character. Although the Edsel was a perfectly decent car, it had a decidedly unlucky face.

Until the Thirties, every car had an honest face. Some were aggressive, others meek, yet because the radiator was always on show - set between a pair of headlamps and wings - the early models had little that they were able to hide. To keep an engine cool, a car needed air to flow as freely as possible through the honeycomb of its water-filled radiator. These were framed like pictures, in brass and other metals, and were always on show. Old cars have honest faces. No wonder we have a soft spot for them.

Two things served to change the look of cars forever: streamlining and marketing. Both were linked because manufacturers knew that cars were identified first and foremost by their faces and learnt how to give them a family feel. Soon enough, almost every Bugatti had a lucky horseshoe mouth (what worked for Bugatti in the Twenties, failed for Ford in the Fifties - a case of proportions gone very, very wrong). The horseshoe grilles looked good and could also be used as 'mouths' for its formidably fast Le Mans racing cars on the track and for its dashing road cars.

Driving a Bugatti around Berkeley Square or Place des Vosges was little different, in the owner's imagination, to speeding a blue racing model around Brooklands or down the Mulsannes, sparring with great, green Bentleys along the way. Every Bugatti driver was a racing driver, the Michael Schumacher of their day. Even the writer Aldous Huxley owned a Bugatti, although he could barely see past his nose.

The Bentley did the same for its owners. The stately eight-litre saloons, which carried aristocrats in the grandest style through the streets of Mayfair and St James's, boasted the same aggressive Gothic shroud around their vast radiators as the four-and-a-half-litre models that battled, very successfully, with horseshoe Bugattis at Le Mans.

As for Rolls-Royce, they were never meant to be racing cars, despite the early high-speed career of the Hon CS Rolls. These were cars for travelling great distances in impeccable style. They were always meant to be civilised cars. And where does the word 'civilised' come from, boy? Er, civis, sir. As in? Latin for 'citizen', 'city', Rome. And what do we think of when we talk of Roman cities? Temples, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. Quite right. A Rolls-Royce radiator from early on was encased in a magnificent representation of the portico of a Roman temple, hand-tooled in stainless steel and topped with a dashing Graeco-Rome meets Art Nouveau statuette of a winged 'Spirit of Ecstasy'. Ah, the pleasure of owning the most civilised car of all. Rolls-Royce chose the face, or façade, of its cars wisely. Ever since, owners of these country houses on wheels have ridden behind those impeccable, temple fronts.

Pretentious, certainly, but eye-catching and symbolic of wealth, prestige and old-fashioned notions of what it means to be cultured. Or at least until the Seventies and Eighties, when all too many of us were more likely to associate the posh radiator grille of what used to be known as a 'Royce' but is now called a 'Roller' with the façades of neoclassical houses that line either side of Bishop's Avenue in Hampstead or streets in Marbella and Malibu, rather than the Athens or Rome of antiquity.

American cars went for huge, wide grins - a lot of expensive automotive dentistry - that said 'howdy' in slits and chutes of chromium plate and stainless steel. Cadillac was the greatest mouth artist of all, though the big, confident grin of a '59 Eldorado can't help but make you smile. And why not smile when you get behind the wheel of a massive, louche automobile with automatic just about everything, power-assisted everything else, gas at a few cents a gallon and more horsepower under the hood than the whole of the Seventh Cavalry.

Radiator grilles got ever more ambitious and vulgar in the Fifties, yet the greatest motoring marques of all re-learnt the lessons of Bugatti and Bentley. The confident, grinning grilles of the highly desirable Aston-Martin DB MkIII and its successor, the peerless DB4, was based on Aston's exquisite Fifties racers.

So, too, the monumentally powerful DB7 Vantage of today. The grille of the legendary E-type Jaguar, a shark's mouth, was adopted from the Le Man's 180mph D-type. The shark's mouths of racing cars can be seen on dozens of cars today - from the diminutive Toyota MR2, through to the lightweight Lotus Elise, every Ferrari, TVR and even the microscopic Smart Roadster concept car.

Many new cars with no pretensions of sportiness also boast fishy faces. Appropriately, these appear to be based on the piscine physiognomy of minnows and sticklebacks rather than sharks and rays (as in Chevrolet Corvette Stingrays). Just look at the puckering, bubbly grilles of every Daewoo, complete with feathery gills on either side of the main grille assembly, or the mackerel mouths of contemporary Citroëns and Renaults. The difference between the sharks and the minnows here is appropriate: for a new Ferrari F360 to dice with Porsche 911s driving flat out at three miles a minute along early-morning autobahns, the car needs to breathe in great gulps of air. And a Daewoo Leganza, cushions on the back shelf, National Trust sticker on the rear window, pottering along the backwaters of Worthing, needs only sip air with the economy of a domestic goldfish.

There was a brief moment, established in the late Seventies but dating from the early Sixties, when the height of style was to do without a grille altogether. Air for the radiators of cars such as Emma Peel's Lotus Elan was scooped up through tiny, puckered mouths concealed beneath front bumpers, or else hidden entirely from view, as with the prognathous Citroën SM (the sporting choice of Field Marshal Idi Amin) or those forgettably bland Hondas masquerading as Rovers (were they the 800 model?).

In recent years, however, the grille has made a showy comeback. The sad thing is that because it generally has no function at all today, it is often about as satisfying, in cosmetic terms, as a few quids' worth of Gerald Ratner's finest gold jewellery.

Look, for example, at the pathetic grille on the nose of the new retro-style S-type Jag, the hideous face-jobs on each and every Lexus or the funny little mustachioed faces of the latest generation of Rovers. Gratuitous and silly.

If cars must have decorative grilles, then manufacturers might as well flaunt them. No shrinking violets when it comes to the look of cars, the Americans have been getting this right recently, now that the US motor industry has at last learnt that it must give up trying to make its big, chunky cars look like daintier European models.

One of the best new grilles can be found on the latest Lincoln Town Car. It grins like the Joker, which is just the right allusion, for this sexy limo looks as if it has been culled from a Tim Burton Batman movie. It looks just right cruising down the cinematic streets of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. You can almost imagine it with a big, fat cigar (sadly, not Cuban) stuck between the chrome-plated bars of its grille.

If you dislike all this pretension and want an honest-to-goodness faceless car without a grille or gill of any kind whatsoever, your choice is decidedly limited. Face up to the fact that you can have a new generation, rear-engined VW Beetle or... an old generation VW Beetle (the two different models are still available in Mexico and Brazil); a car without a face, but far from faceless.

Yet, for most of us, a car does not seem quite right without a grille. As long as it doesn't look like a vulva or a lavatory seat.