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EC Anthony above's right. Packard won the annual Gallup Poll of Most Beautiful American Car three years running, until Buick took it in 1938. Two years later, the '40 Packards tackily aped the '38 Buick's hood louvers.

The pictured car shows Packard attempting a narrow grille a la LaSalle and 1939-40 Nash even though the '38 Zephyr had started a shift toward horizontal motifs which quickly won out, witness the '41 Cadillac. The '42 Packards both traditional and Clipper hedged their bet with horizontal side grilles AND a vertical main grille. The '42 Lincoln's snout was even more confused. Concurrent Chryslers echoed the 1936-37 Cord's horizontal hood louvers, the '42 DeSoto the Cord's disappearing headlights.

Dutch Darrin, recalling being asked to tender a design for what became the 1941-47 Clipper, observed "Packard was so scared of GM they couldn't see straight."

The above picture shows Packard's styling schizophrenia. A stylized, narrowed grille at top, with the bottom aping the '39 Buick's grille; itself mimicking concurrent GP racers, resulting in '39 Buicks running hot, '40 Flintmobiles using a bolder, enlarged version.

The Packard Clipper that finally arrived after four and a half years of peddling the basic '38 bodies was aimed squarely at Buick Roadmaster, even to the side opening or entirely removable hood and gas pedal starting switch. Buick was finally reined in after not just outperforming Cadillac but offering for 1941 a line of Brunn catalogue customs, only a few of which ever built. Before the war, Rolls-Royce annually disassembled a new Buick Limited hoping to glean the latest Detroit production tips.

GM production men recruited to teach Packard how to cost their new '35 One Twenty were increasingly running the show. Sadly, their production acumen was not matched by their marketing ability. Contrast most of Packard's heavy-handed ads 1939-on with the breezier, more self-confident Buick and Cadillac appeals.

Still later, Packard's engineers brought in a new '49 Oldsmobile 88 and told John Reinhart to use the same roof and cowl heights for the '51 product.

Off this style thread, but about this time Chrysler engineers pulled the ohv V-8 from a used '49 Cadillac hearse and copied it faithfully, other than substituting a valve train allowing hemispherical combustion heads for more hp at the identical compression, bore and stroke.

According to historian Maurice Hendry, who knew what he was writing about, in the '30s, a Buick alumnus, Howard Reed, tried to interest East Grand management in not just an overhead valve, but overhead cam engine. Reed was told such an engine's noise would be unseemly in a Packard. It would also have reduced profit margins. The few of us interested in Packards as road cars often overlook that the Company's focus was smoothness, witness their sluggish Ultramatic vs. the four-speed HydraMatic which could take jack rabbit starts and hard acceleration.

We car buffs really are as ridiculous as fans rooting for this or that ball team, the players themselves all free agents and despite the press releases, could care less.

Re: the above styling mish-mosh, remember that most of these designers were young men, searching various avenues, and of course never expected their explorations to survive 75, 80 years. Designs for the immediate postwar Cadillac exist showing a bloated, "flow-through," slab-sided, wheeled pillbug every bit as odious as what Packard felt compelled to do to the Clipper in 1948, instead of the crisp offering Clark Street fielded that year, which permanently placed Cadillac at the top of the luxury field.

Writing in the New Yorker of the then new 1940 automobiles, E. B. White likened them to "badly formed eggs."

Hi

Definitely a styling exploration for 1940-41, given the low 'moustache' likely done after the '39 Buick appeared.

Integrating the headlights into the fenders was next trend which looks fairly well handled here, though smacks of '37-'38 Ford.

The one detail they should have utilized is that nice grille insert mesh, would have looked great on the Clipper.

Steve