The man who revived the Defender is now shaping a TT-flavoured era for the brand he was always destined to define
When aspiring designer Massimo Frascella took a day off work in 1998 to go and fawn over the freshly launched TT in a Turin Audi dealership, he had no idea he would one day be afforded the opportunity to reimagine the seminal sports coupé for a new era as the brand’s head of design.
Once Peter Schreyer’s sports coupé was unwrapped, it was so alluringly rule-breaking that it simply had to be studied in the metal. And at length.
Indeed, this early encounter with one of the most important Audis of all time instilled within Frascella a deep-seated appreciation for the attributes that define the brand and set him on a 27-year journey that would see him eventually take charge of Ingolstadt’s design studio, as had been predicted by anyone familiar with his work.
He says: “What’s consistent throughout my career was people feeling this association with the brand in what I was doing, and often telling me: ‘Oh gosh, you should work for Audi. One day, I’m sure you will work for Audi.’ And that happened.”
A graduate of Turin’s Institute of Applied Art and Design, Frascella began his career at Bertone before heading to Ford to work on the US-market Lincoln and Mercury brands, then settling at Kia’s Californian studio for six years, during which time he led the exterior design for the Sorento, Sportage, Rio and Soul.
Frascella arrived at Jaguar Land Rover in 2011 and worked his way up to eventually becoming head of design for both brands, most famously leading the landmark revival of the Defender.
His subsequent appointment at Audi is painted as the fulfilment of a prophecy written upon his first encounter with the TT, and his manifesto – the internet-stopping Concept C – is unmistakably influenced by that era-defining car.
Indeed, Frascella points to its simplistic silhouette and straightforward styling as the factors that sucked him in but says it was but a halo for a line-up full of models that stood out for their convention-breaking cleanliness and purity.
“You have to put the cars in the context of automotive design in general at the time,” he says, highlighting the contemporary B4 A4 and C5-gen A6 (“a masterpiece” – see at the bottom of the page) as particular highlights.
“We tend to forget what the landscape was when those cars came out and what they represented. And they looked like nothing else on the road.”
They looked like nothing, suggests Frascella, because they were “almost made of nothing”.
The clean lines, smooth surfacing and sparing decoration that defined this purple patch in Audi’s design history gave its cars a quality of moderation and subtlety that helped them stand out all the more as other car firms tended towards more exuberant treatments.
“They were just really different – but not for the sake of it. They were different with the highest level of restraint,” he explains.
“How did these guys manage to come out with something so radically different, so radically emotional, with so much character, with almost nothing on it? Like with just one line, two lines at the most, no chamfers – in and out, convex and concave… Just pure simplicity.
“How do you deliver something like that? That is the thing that really, really resonated.”
It’s a theme that’s more relevant now than ever, as Frascella pushes to carve out anew a strong and distinctive identity for this brand in an era of intense competition and upheaval.
Audi, he suggests, can be a refreshing breath of sharp, cool air – a sanctuary of composure and subtlety – in an ever louder, more pressured environment.
One challenge for Frascella will be balancing revolution and recognition: how to completely reset a corporate visual identity without devaluing the attributes that have defined the brand since its formation in the middle of last century.
It’s a challenge quite unlike the one he faced while helping shape the era-defining Jaguar Type 00 in his final months at JLR, where he would have had almost completely free rein in reinventing a brand that was famously deemed to have had “no equity whatsoever”.
“Everything we do needs to be recognisable as an Audi, first and foremost. It’s the value of a brand like Audi that has to be protected,” mandates Frascella, by contrast.
“Audi has that value, that legacy, that heritage, and it would be a shame to waste it,” he argues, pointing to the Concept C as a mission statement for achieving the tricky harmonious balance between past and present.
The titanium paint is one example – “it continues the lineage of the silver Auto Unions” and is being put forward as a ‘trademark’ colour for Audi’s new-era line-up.
“Likewise the new vertically oriented grille – a feature inspired by the legendary Type C grand prix racer, which marks a radical departure from the ‘Singleframe’ that’s dominated the visage of every Audi from the past two decades.
The cabin, too, is a stark contrast from Audi’s current interiors, defined by clean, architectural surfacing that contributes to a far more minimalist and functional vibe.
Notable by its absence is a whopping great touchscreen. The Concept C’s infotainment is run through a relatively diminutive item that folds discreetly into the dashboard when not needed – another hint at how Frascella will pare back to push forward.
“Again, it’s about being relevant,” he explains, highlighting the reduced focus on digital functionality as a symbol of this more rational outlook: if it doesn’t need to be there, it isn’t.
Big screens are de rigueur these days, but Frascella questions whether a desire to showcase technology should so overtly dictate trends in interior design.
“Often, technology is used as a display of just technology for the sake of it, or just to portray an image of yourself as a brand or as a product, of being ‘technological’, not necessarily having a real value or benefit in terms of customer experience,” says Frascella.
So while buyers of Audi’s latest top-rung models can choose to effectively swap their dashboard for an expansive triple-screen set-up, the next generation of Audi cockpits will be the complete inverse at their most exclusive.
“Technology needs to be there in service, and needs to be not in your face, there all the time, or overwhelming in situations. It needs to be discreet, like a digital butler,” he says.
It’s a disruptive mindset that goes against the prevailing trend towards assertive, digital-flavoured futurism.
If Audi’s future lies at least to some extent in its past, will it also take the firm down the retro path behind Renault, Hyundai, Volkswagen and others?
Can Frascella’s approach be interpreted as another attempt to channel the spirit of past successes to cultivate a sense of character for new cars?
Well, no. Partly because the Concept C isn’t merely the ‘TT revival’ that social media would have you believe – “it’s a very strong statement from the company and it wants to be its own thing” – but also because Frascella firmly rejects the notion that overly nostalgic design has a place in the Audi showroom.
“Retro is a very nostalgic approach that can work for certain brands, and can work in certain instances, on certain products, but it’s not a long-term strategy,” he says.
“There are many examples in the world, in the past, of brands that have looked back in the rear-view mirror too much – and I think it might work for a little while, but it’s a dangerous game to play.”
So while elements of the Concept C do nod to legendary past Audis, it is categorically not a one-trick pony pastiche.
And that’s especially important because Audi makes far more different types of car than it used to, so this squat, monolithic coupé must serve as a design halo for a line-up that nowadays comprises hatchbacks, saloons, estates, crossovers, grand tourers and full-blown SUVs.
This means there needs to be an element of inherent universality – an adaptability – that allows Audi’s defining cues to be applied across the range to types of car that simply didn’t exist in the original TT’s time.
Frascella baulks at the idea of a ‘Russian doll’ line-up but acknowledges that “there needs to be a connection that makes you look at things and makes you feel: ‘Yeah, this is Audi.'”
“Of course, you can’t take the Concept C and morph it into an SUV. That would be not the right thing to do,” says Frascella. Instead, it’s a question of adapting the concept’s themes to suit different segments and target markets.
“I go back to the four pillars of our design strategy: the clarity, the technicality, the intelligence, the emotion. You apply those principles to an SUV or to a sedan, and then clearly there are certain logical surface treatments or maybe line executions that could connect them visually,” he adds.
Audi has been here before, Frascella reminds us, pointing to the original TT and the contemporary A2 – clearly related by its one-bow silhouette and Bauhaus-flavoured adornments – as shining examples: “They almost share the same design elements, but the cars are completely different in character.”
He stops short of outlining exactly how a huge seven-seater, for example, could take its lead from the two-seat Concept C but suggests the relationship will be obvious purely by dint of a common sense of restraint.
“This principle of reducing complexity in the form will be applied to all of them. That’s a way to connect the cars together,” he explains.
We still have some time before Frascella’s vision reaches the roads, because the production version of the Concept C isn’t planned to be launched before late next year.
But his wilful rejection of passing trends and ardent commitment to timelessness mean that even this lengthy lead time between vision and fruition shouldn’t stand in the way of his cars’ shock value and visual allure.
Clearly, he’s designing for a new audience and a new age but, above all, it’s hard to escape the notion that he’s partly designing for some young automotive design student who one day soon will walk into an Audi dealership and have their mind blown and their destiny rewritten – and then we can start all over again.
Frascella’s favourite Audis
A6 (1997): Second-generation (C5) A6 was an “absolute masterpiece” that heralded a ground-up rethink of Audi’s design language. It arrived when Frascella was “a kid designer, so very easy to form”.
TT (1998): One of the cars that Frascella “really, truly, genuinely, deeply loves”. He adds: “It just sparked something in me that was different to anything else. That’s why I always felt that connection.”
Steppenwolf (2000): Criminally overlooked ‘TT off-roader concept with the VW Golf R32’s V6 was really the genesis of the Q3 that came 11 years later. “I was so shocked when I first saw it and got a sense of scale: it’s so tiny!”
RS Q8 (2025): Frascella’s 631bhp daily driver is the utter antithesis of subtlety and minimalism – but, he says, “a car with that level of performance needs to communicate that it has that level of performance.”
Can you do the F1 livery too?
Conceiving a brand-shaping concept car while simultaneously forging a fresh stylistic language is a formidable undertaking.
But Audi’s new design boss Massimo Franscella also faced a second, perhaps more visible challenge: defining the aesthetic of the manufacturer’s inaugural Formula One entrant.
In a broad-ranging discussion with Autocar, Frascella admitted the assignment “added an extra dimension to an already pretty exciting opportunity”, and enabled him to ‘soft launch’ some of the characteristics that will define his design language at Audi.
His team’s first priority, he reveals, was making sure the design really popped in the top-down pit lane shots. The resulting design is a bold yet minimalist treatment that majors on a new signature colour called Lava Red – “a very vibrant expression of the Audi red, particularly for Formula 1, which takes it to a new level in terms of emotional charge” – and blends elements that emphasise the firm’s technical prowess.
Frascella highlights the Auto Union-inspired titanium paint as a reference to the firm’s motorsport heritage and says the black details that make up the rest of the livery were the result of a compromise between the designers and engineers.
He explains: “Initially, there was a bit of conversation on how much exposed carbonfibre we need to have on the car for weight considerations and, as you can imagine from the technical side, it was like: ‘The car is going to be black, right? “Well, that’s not going to happen. It needs to be recognisable as an Audi. But we kept that black, which, in a way, is in favour of the exposed carbonfibre, but also belongs as a primary colour of Audi.”
