Infiniti

If the automotive world has an equivalent to the Met Gala, it would be the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. It takes place later this week in Monterey, California, and each year it features an assortment of classic and historic cars that are more akin to four-wheeled works of art than the more mundane stuff you or I drive on a daily basis. (Unless you’re Ralph Lauren, in which case, carry on.) It’s not just car collectors that bring along their machines to show off; the OEMs get in on the act too. In Infiniti’s case, that’s a “what if” called Prototype 9, a 1940s-inspired electric race car.

“We discussed the idea of ‘chancing’ upon an unrecognized race car, hidden away for decades in a barn, deep in the Japanese countryside,” explained Alfonso Albaisa, SVP of Global Design at Nissan (Infiniti’s parent company). “We wanted to explore what this looked like, what it would have been made of. Open-wheeled racers of the age were beautiful machines, elegant and powerful and with a wonderful purity of purpose. It’s an automotive fantasy, but the notion captured our imaginations enough to put pencil to paper.”