The ten biggest debuts from the Geneva Motor Show

If you were to think of the country least enamoured with the concept of fast cars, racing and general motorised hooliganism, it’d have to be Switzerland. In fact, after the 1955 Le Mans disaster, where an exceptionally horrific crash claimed the lives of 84 people on the pit straight of the Circuit de la Sarthe, Switzerland banned racing within its borders altogether. 

It seems like an odd place, then, to hold the world’s premier motor show. Nevertheless, it’s the place where literal supercar history has been made. So, before the 2017's deluge of incredibly cool metal descends from the snow-capped climes of Switzerland, let’s have a look at what's gone before… 

What you’re looking at is perhaps the original road-going supercar. 

Of course, special one-offs like the Blitzen Benz and Fiat Mephistopheles came first, with aeroplane-spec engines and fuselages, but the Mercedes SSK was a very different animal – it was meant for customers.  

Its 7.1-litre straight six was supercharged to produce up to 300bhp and 500lb ft – a staggering amount for a road-going car invented before the great depression. It was also mounted behind the front axle, which makes the SSK essentially mid-engined. 

The way the blower worked was also pretty much Mad Max-spec – it was only available under 100 per cent throttle, where a special clutch connected to the accelerator would engage and spool up the supercharger. Nifty, no?

Racers of the era certainly thought so – the SSK attracted drivers like Rudolf Caracciola, and won endurance races in Argentina, Tourist Trophy races in Northern Ireland, and a series of Grand Prix races across Europe. 

Oh, and did we mention it was designed by Ferdinand Porsche, right before he left to found his own company?

Photo: Randy Stern

Depending on what side of the fence you fall, you could credit the dawn of production car streamlining to either Tatra or Chrysler. The fact remains that, at the 1934 Geneva Motor Show, the Airflow defined the future of the family saloon car. 

And, like most things that were ahead of their time, the Airflow was a commercial flop. Chrysler even kept their old 1933 model – a much more traditional design – on sale next to the 1934 Airstream, just because they weren’t sure if customers would embrace the streamlined design. As it turns out, that was a very prudent decision.

The benefits of the radical body style were manifold – better weight distribution, handling and ride comfort thanks to mounting the engine further forward and seating the passengers within the wheelbase – but it wasn’t until much later that aerodynamics played such a prominent role in car design, such as the VW Beetle.

Equally revolutionary was the Citroen Traction Avant, which pioneered the monocoque chassis, fully independent suspension and front-wheel drive. 

If you can do a few mental gymnastics, that makes the Traction Avant the original French hot hatch. 

Come back to reality, however, and you’ll find that the Traction Avant was a landmark moment in car design – while Lancia had already built a monocoque chassis, Citroen was the first to put it into mass production, engendering a seismic shift in the way road cars were built from then on.

Let’s get all the arguments out of the way now – this is the prettiest and most delicate Mercedes-Benz ever created. Argue all you want (hey, what else is a comment section for?) but we’ve already called it. 

And it had all the perfect ingredients to back up the sublimely styled body – a fuel-injected, straight six engine, aluminium panels to reduce weight, a wide track, short wheelbase and double wishbone suspension for superior handling, and powerful dual-circuit brakes. 

Armed with this kind of arsenal, the 230 SL was capable of giving even the famed Ferrari 250 GT a hard time on a tight track, even though it had half the cylinders and two-thirds the displacement. Heady stuff.

This was less a car and more a corporeal incarnation of headline bait. 

Pininfarina design, an engine from the 1990 Ferrari Formula 1 car, swathes of carbon fibre. Wherever you looked, there was another attention-grabbing facet of the F50. 

But it was the 4.7-litre V12 engine that pumped out more than 510bhp, thanks to literal F1 tech, that had everyone’s attention. Surely, the looks didn’t match the F40’s, but the prospect of using a bigger version of the engine that powered Alain Prost around Spa in 1990 was a heady prospect.

Every Jag fan knows the story of the E-Type. But we’re sure you’d love to hear it again – we do.

When the E-Type was unveiled in Geneva, it caused such an uproar that a second E-Type was driven through the night, from Coventry, to satisfy demand for test drives. 

And, of course, none other than Enzo Ferrari, not given to spontaneous declarations of support for other car makers, said that the E-Type was the most beautiful car he’d ever seen. 

We’d probably run out of internet before we ran out of platitudes and praise for the E-Type; suffice to say that it’s probably Britain’s best-ever invention. 

What happens when you drop a V8 engine designed for a large luxury car into a small, lightweight Italian body? If you answered ‘sheer brilliance’, you’re not far off. And if you answered ‘perhaps the best Fiat ever’, you might not be far off on that count, either. 

With a two-litre V8 producing up to 125bhp, fully independent suspension and a top speed approaching 124mph, the 8V was the original Fiat GT car. And, thanks to Ferrari and Maserati’s insistence on retaining a live rear axle, the 8V actually had the measure of the 212 Inter and A6G out on the open road. 

But the technological tour didn’t stop there – race-derived parts such as an aluminium sump, forged crankshaft, polished heads and four-into-one headers made from stainless steel meant that it was likely the most advanced car on the European roads of the early 1950s.  

And then there was the matter of the special versions by Zagato, Vignale and Ghia; the latter, a 1953 ‘Supersonic’ version, might just be the prettiest car of all time.

When it debuted, the car that’s world-known as the Countach was actually called the LP500. Which seems a touch dull, if you ask us, especially considering the car it was attached to.

Countach comes from the Emiliano-Romagnolo dialect of the Bologna area and, depending on whom you ask, translates as everything from ‘phwoar’ and ‘good grief’ to things the BBC won’t let us publish. In any case, the story goes that a local Bolognese (the people, not the delicious, meaty pasta) saw the LP500 prototype screaming past his farm and uttered the famous reaction.

LP stands for ‘Longitudionale Posteriore’, which translates as ‘lengthways, in the back’, which refers to the placement and orientation of the engine. The LP moniker seems like common fare now, but the Countach was actually the first time that Lamborghini had mounted its V12 engine longitudinally, unlike the transversally mounted V12 in the Miura. 

The road-going version took a step back from the five-litre V12 (hence LP500) to a four-litre, 375bhp version (hence LP400) but, by the end of its run – 25 years later – the Countach was up to the levels originally envisaged by the epochal design – 5.2 litres and 425bhp. 

By the end, the 25th Anniversary Countach had enough wings to technically qualify as a flock, but that’s another story. 

The McLaren P1, you’ll notice, got 10/10 in the Top Gear car review. You’ll also notice that a 10/10 is perhaps the rarest of all car ratings – it has to outshine the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, outrun a steroid-boosted asteroid and outdance Mikhail Baryshnikov to even think of getting a perfect score.

And then McLaren, somehow, managed it with the P1. This is the ne plus ultra of hypercars. It is frightening, and frighteningly good. 

And it made its debut in Geneva.

The undisputed star of last year’s show had to be the Centenario. Built to celebrate what would have been Ferruccio Lamborghini’s 100th birthday, it was much more than a milestone marker. 

The Centenario was also a testbed for Lambo’s most outlandish new ideas (and that’s saying something), including its own stab at active aerodynamics – which were deployed to great effect by the Huracan Performante on the Nurburgring, which of course ran a time of 6m 52.01s.