The story of John Z. DeLorean has been told time and time again, and that’s just here on BangShift. There is no doubt that the man was gifted when it came to his vision of what a car should be…his work at General Motors alone solidified his reputation as a master, but DeLorean always wanted more, so when the corporate culture of GM finally got on his nerves, he struck out on his own and created a car that, for better or worse, became the symbol of the man who would spend decades known not as the man who climbed GM’s corporate ladder quickly upon the success of the Pontiac GTO, but the disgraced head of DeLorean Motor Company; a man so desperate for capital to keep production going in the Dunmurray, Northern Ireland plant that he wound up tangled up with cocaine and the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
Something I learned on my vacation in Ireland a couple of years ago is that the locals have a different take on DeLorean than most Americans do. We tend to see him as a corporate playboy, a man who pushed his boundaries just a bit too far, bit off more than he could chew, and wound up in court for years as a result and his car, the DMC-12, as the most successful of the low-production semi-sports cars that appeared and disappeared during the 1970s. We see a heritage based upon a movie reference. But if you talk to the people that actually live near where the cars were made, it was much, much more than that. This was Northern Ireland at the height of The Troubles: Bobby Sands’ hunger strike and IRA bombings. This was a dark time, when unemployment was rampant and violence was common. The reason why the British Government fronted DeLorean $120 million in start-up money was because they believed that having 2,500 or so jobs appearing near Belfast could possibly temper down the violence.
Carfection put together a collection of interviews from people closely related to DeLorean. From Stephen Wynne, the man who bought out the remaining stock from Consolidated International and is now running the new DeLorean Motor Company in Texas, to workers from the Dunmurray plant, people who were involved with the DeLorean project at Lotus, and more, this 45-minute piece paints John Z. as the man who tried to bring hope to an area that wasn’t seeing it at the time, and brings attention to the workers who fully supported his dream.
