High speed design dreams
by Michèle Nardelli
UniSA industrial design graduate Ben Soderberg, 26, has spent the past 12 months living a designer’s dream – developing his very own sports car, the RUF CTR3.
It started out well when, after graduating, Soderberg moved back to his birthplace of Germany and began an internship at RUF Automobile, one of the most respected sports car manufacturers and suppliers of specialised components in the world.
"My first job at RUF was to give a Porsche Cayman a facelift," Soderberg said.
"Together with a model maker, I was designing, developing and building the models and because the company is relatively small (about 70 employees), I was quickly involved in all areas of the work – not just a deskbound designer."
Before long, Soderberg was engaged in the production of graphics, translations, dealing with customers and, as expected of an intern, lots of coffeemaking as well.
Soderberg said one of the best aspects of the work was the short timeframes between design product developments.
"In most instances, the pieces we made were on the cars being sold only weeks later," he said. "It is really satisfying to see your own creation become ‘public’ so quickly."
And not very much later, RUF offered him a full-time position in the company to start a design and development department.
After
working on several more facelifts and body kits for the Porsche
Boxter and 997 he was appointed chief designer for the RUF sports
car.
Using a Porsche 997 platform, Soderberg and his design team teamed up with a Canadian engineering company, which designed a completely new rear end, birdcage and suspension setup.
"While the Canadians were working on the engineering I was
working like mad on a CAD model, which we would then later mill out
of clay," he said.
"I also had to coordinate the work between the engineers and our
company – it was a tremendous learning curve."
The car was launched in Bahrain in April and, with a few tiny modifications, RUF hopes to go into production later this year. The supercar will sell for around €380,000.