Welcome to Stradale, our bi-monthly digest of everything new and upcoming at Discommon. Be sure to join our community of Insiders to catch all future issues: Join Here.
Hi again,
Apparently, you all enjoy my musings. The July Issue earned a 70% open rate. As for the other 30%... $*@% ^*$# ^#()@% !*#$.
$!@%.
Anyway, back to this month: a small red car, an enormous aircraft, and the frame of all picture frames.
The World's Most Complicated Picture Frame
If you follow along on Instagram, you’ll know that our brand strategy and product work for Grand Prix Motorcars has evolved into a much larger undertaking involving interior design, custom installations and art curation.
This is what I affectionately refer to as the world’s most complicated picture frame.
We commissioned the wildly talented New York artist Vanessa Wilkes to create a hand-drawn blueprint of a Porsche 911 2.7 RS. With a piece like that, a conventional frame was never going to suffice. Instead, we designed an enormous, slatted interpretation of the 2.7 RS itself, built around the artwork.
We are certainly not the first people to experiment with slat art, but it was extremely fun to give the idea our own spin. The plywood slats are sanded raw to evoke the old tooling bucks once used to shape car bodies, while the tires were finished in black with a tread pattern milled into their surfaces.
We’ll be evolving the Grand Prix Motorcars work down the road - next up, three huge suspended Porsches. Because apparently we have lost all interest in simple things.
The Lancia
We get a lot of questions about the red car parked inside Discommon HQ. The knowledgeable ones ask whether it’s a ’92 or ’93. Others ask if it’s a Volkswagen Golf. Let’s settle that debate: it’s a 1993 Lancia Delta Integrale Evo I, and it has been part of the furniture here for nearly six years. The car was a COVID-era adventure between a dear friend and me (the entirely sensible decision to co-own an old Italian rally car). Previously owned by an Apple engineer and imported from Japan, it eventually made its way to Lancia specialist Tanc Barratt in the UK. We gave Tanc a no-holds-barred brief: turn it into the ultimate road weapon for the back roads of southern England and Wales.
The result is wildly Discommon. It still looks remarkably stock, but very little beneath the surface was left alone. Even the turbo retains its original housing while concealing completely new inconel internals. Quietly excessive engineering, hidden inside something familiar. That philosophy feels appropriate for the Delta. The original Delta was a lethargic four-door family sedan that attracted the attention of some cigarette-smoking Lancia engineers, who in their spare time decided it needed a fat turbo, all wheel drive and a career in rallying. The Delta lineage subsequently won six consecutive World Rally Championships. Above mediocre.
As for this one, it is sort of for sale, and sort of never for sale. My friend currently has it, which means it may be sold, or it may be torn completely apart and restored. You never really know what will happen to a car once it disappears into his bunker.
The Quietly Complicated Case
Photo courtesy of Fortell
Fortell is building what it calls the most intelligent hearing aid in the world. Having heard it work, we’re inclined to agree. Its custom AI silicon separates speech from noise in real time, turning a crowded restaurant from a wall of sound back into a conversation. Most hearing aids make life louder. Fortell makes it clearer and the engineering required to do that is absurd in the best possible way.
We were trusted to design and develop Fortell’s charging case, then bring in the manufacturing partner to produce it. The challenge: mating hand-formed leather to a dense, highly technical charging assembly with virtually no tolerance for, well, tolerance. Convincing a natural material to behave with that level of precision took plenty of iteration.
There’s history here, too. Fortell’s founder was the person who first trusted Discommon to lead design for Butterfly Network. Being invited back to help create the first product from his own company is a vote of confidence we don’t take lightly.
Discommon Cups
We just can't avoid being somewhat of a cup company. Two new Discommon cups, a latte and cortado size, coming to our shelves just in time for the holidays. Oh, and our Portugal cups are coming back as well. Four styles for any pour.
This magnificent beast is a Handley Page Victor—and one of my defining examples of engineers doing seemingly impossible things with pencils, slide rules and wind tunnels.
It was designed in the early 1950s. The vinyl-record era, not the computational-modeling era. Its bizarre yet somehow elegant crescent wing was calculated largely by hand, shaped to manage airflow and delay the formation of shock waves as the aircraft approached the speed of sound.
The Victor was originally built as a nuclear bomber. It excelled in that role—until Soviet air defenses caught up, fast. Ironically, that isn’t what ultimately defined it.
Decades later, the Victor found its legacy as an aerial refueling tanker, supporting RAF aircraft on some of the longest combat missions ever flown. A machine designed for one extraordinary purpose, adapted to perform another long after it should have become obsolete.
Exactly the sort of engineering I can nerd out on.
More to come. For now, we'll be figuring out where to keep 1,200 bags being delivered at the end of this month.
N
