Die Cast - Summer 2012

FOOSE LETS LOOSE

Chip Foose is literally a chip off the old block—the block being Chip’s dad, Sam Foose, whose custom cars were frequently scaled down to model size in the heyday of plastic kits and rattle can paint. Chip first got his hands dirty at a tender age, working alongside Sam at Project Designs in Santa Barbara, CA, learning the ins and outs—and the occasional pratfalls—of working in a high-end rod and custom shop.

It was a fateful meeting with a legend—Alex Tremulis, who penned the coffin-nosed Cord 810/812, as well as the Tucker automobile—that cemented Chip’s resolve to become a car designer. Tremulis recognized the raw talent in the not-yet-teenaged kid’s sketches, and suggested that the younger Foose someday attend the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. It would take years, but once the rest of the world got to see what Alex saw that day in Sam’s shop, there would be no turning back.

Porsche…all of which I will deny! Seriously, it was through these incidents/accidents that I learned some of my best lessons.

by andy goodman & joe kelly jR.

DCX: When did you know you were going to be a car guy? What got you started?

My dad, Sam Foose, was, and has always been, a huge inspiration to me. I used to sit and copy his drawings for hours, and I learned my skills working in his shop. I’d like to say I was helping, but I destroyed more than I fixed for the first few years. There are stories of me accidentally leaving rags soaked with lacquer thinner on fresh paint, or driving the shop truck through a fence into a freshly painted Rolls Royce and

DCX: If we did our homework properly, it was a sketch that you completed while attending the Art Center College of Design that led to the actual Plymouth Prowler. Can you share that experience with us? When I was a senior at Art Center, Tom Gale, then VP of Design for Chrysler, came to us with a project to design and build a model of a vehicle that would respond to a niche market. Tom was an avid hot rodder, and I suggested that I wanted to design a vehicle that would create a new niche market: factory-built hot rods. I developed the original concept, and built a scale model of what later developed into the Plymouth Prowler. To say I designed the Prowler is not fair to the many talented designers at Chrysler, but the project was based on my initial design concepts. Seventeen years later, through my friend and licensing agent Carson Lev, we were able to strike a deal with RC2/JL Full Throttle Die Cast to build a full-sized, functioning car, the “Hemisfear,” based on my design work for the car at Art Center.