Nichols N1A
The Nichols N1A pays homage to the 1960’s McLaren M1A, due to Co-Founder Steve Nichols’ rich history with McLaren. Nichols was the Chief Designer of the McLaren MP4/4, the most successful F1 car of all time, which won 15 out of 16 races during the 1988 season in the hands of the legendary Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost.
The N1A is a visually stunning, visceral sports car, combining beautiful classic lines similar to the M1A, with modern engineering for an exciting driving experience.
Peterson Instrument Co. were extremely proud to collaborate with the Nichols Cars team to push the boundaries of instrument design. Together we have created a bespoke, cylindrical style instrument cluster, that has a seamless 360 view sat proud in this convertible sports car, due to its low windshield.
When we met the Nichols Cars team, it was clear that they liked certain aspects of their original instrument cluster design for the prototype car, but on being seated in the car we could see improvements could be made in the visibility of the most essential gauges by changing instrument sizes and overall layout.
CAD design is a powerful tool, and we used CAD visualisation to give the Nichols Team an idea of depth, perspective and material finishes before any parts were finalised for manufacture.
From render to reality, this bespoke billet aluminium instrument cluster has come to life and is bursting with modern features. To aid in the symmetry of the cylindrical cluster, a reverse analogue speedometer was designed to give good visibility, while adding an exciting twist. A complicated light-guide design provides flood lighting to the pointers, while retaining more modern backlit chaplets. Peterson Instrument Co. also chose Hidden-Until-Lit ‘HUL’ warning lights instead of the prototype’s individual physical lamps, which we felt took up a lot of space on the cluster. HUL lights also have a minimalist design to the gauge faces and means the whole binnacle now runs on just 5 wires.
We are really proud to have designed and delivered bespoke and imaginative solutions for this exciting niche vehicle project.
