MotorTrend

2015 Man of the Year: Peter Mullin

Visionary collector pushes to advance automotive design.
WriterPhotographer
Man of the Year Peter Mullin

Click hereto read about all the 2015Automobile MagazineAll-Star awards.

Slightly late for a photo session, Peter Mullin pulls up in the unique MINI Cooper S he drives around Los Angeles. It's the medium green of an Aston Martin DB4 and carries that marque's winged emblem on the nose. License plates bear the coined name Vanquet. Mullin's wife, Merle, had encouraged him to buy an Aston, but instead of a Vanquish, he said, "I'll just do this and save a couple hundred thousand for a Bugatti."

The photo session is on the rooftop garden of one of Art Center College of Design's south campus buildings in Pasadena. The school's transportation programs disperse about 50 graduates each year throughout the industry. Notable alumni are Franz von Holzhausen of Tesla and Miguel Galluzzi of Piaggio's Advanced Design Center, nearby on Colorado Boulevard. With students moving beyond scale models to full-size prototypes, TransDesign has crowded out Illustration, Fine Art, and other programs from the main hillside campus. Mullin, the 73- year-old grandfather of 12, donated $15 million—the largest gift in Art Center's history—for the purchase of another south campus building. President Lorne Buchman describes the gift as "transformative" and says it not only helps to ease the space crunch but also "takes philanthropy to a new level."

In enthusiast circles, Mullin, who built his fortune in the insurance industry, is most renowned for his discriminating collection of French cars. Can't make it to the Mullin Automotive Museum, in coastal Oxnard, for "The Art of Bugatti" to see what he calls "the genius artistry of that whole family"? (The exhibit runs through March.) The museum's new website allows virtual visits; as it develops, additional features will let you design a car, paint it, and eventually print it through rapid proto­typing for display on your own desk. "The technology today allows you to virtually be there with a fly-through of the whole museum," he says after the photo shoot. "It's insane not to use it to enhance the visitor's experience, whether they're (there) in person or online."

What's developed in Oxnard will soon extend to the Petersen Automotive Museum, on L.A. 's Wilshire Boulevard. The Petersen closed in October for a remodeling and "reiteration" that Mullin, who pushed for change as board chairman, expects will place it among the top three car museums anywhere. Doing away with quaint dioramas, the new Petersen will feature cars as art and emphasize L.A. car culture. To acquaint patrons with the intricacies of automotive design, the museum will include a real-time studio staffed by Art Center students, strengthening the nexus between institutions. Meanwhile, some of his own cars will be displayed in a gallery at the school's new building.

Not a bad year for Mullin. Attending boat races at Long Beach Marine Stadium as a boy, he listened to his father, a chemical engineer for Mobil, discourse about oil viscosity and the coefficient of friction. "I was more interested in speed and design and results," he says.

Ronald Ahrens

When Automobile launched in 1986, my byline appeared on a sidebar to the cover story written by our founding editor David E. Davis, Jr. Yet it wasn’t inevitable that I’d write for the magazine, even though my childhood was heavily automobile-flavored: my father raced jalopies and late-model stock cars on the oval tracks around Omaha, Nebraska, where we lived, and my favorite uncle liked drag racing and hot rods.

After earning a B.A. in English from the University of Nebraska, I moved to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter. Instead, though, I ended up holding cue cards on TV shows, including the soap opera Days of Our Lives. My first magazine story, the inside scoop on how we prepared those cue cards, appeared with my own photos in Soap Opera Digest.

In my freelance career, I’ve written for Bon Appétit, the Wall Street Journal, and many others. I started corresponding for the Automobiles desk at the New York Times in 2010, which is proving to be a great relationship. As a change of pace, my historical column for DBusiness (“Detroit’s Premier Business Journal”) has run since 2006. But while a food-and-wine tour can get boring after a couple of days, nothing beats a call from Automobile. I’ve been behind the wheel of everything from a Ferrari 458 Italia (“Blood Red to Goodwood,” March 2011) to the Fiat 500 Abarth. On assignment for “Three Zero Heroes,” I co-drove the winning BMW X3 in the 2004 Alcan Winter Rally. Teaming again with the same navigator, we won the 2006 Carolina Trophy, bulldogging a 1951 Chrysler Saratoga to the finish for “Substance over Style.”

Other assignments have placed me not only in the driver’s seat of a Porsche 911 Targa for the 2002 Targa Newfoundland, a plummy nod that seemed to indicate my editors’ favor, but also in the co-driver’s seat of a Class 1 buggy for the 2003 Baja 1000, suggesting they wanted me dead.

As you might guess, there’s no regret about failing as a screenwriter. And now I’m beginning something new: teaching automotive journalism at Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena. My workshop, Creating Content for Automotive Media, launched in 2012 and will be offered twice a year. I look forward to helping students along on their way to incomparable automotive adventures and working with the best editors in the business.

Read More

Share

You May Also Like