Book Review — Cosmic Motors by Daniel Simon

Book Review — The Timeless Racer by Daniel Simon

After the success of Cosmic Motors, German designer Daniel Simon moved from Germany to California, where he brought his visionary design talent into Hollywood. He became the man behind some of the most iconic movie vehicles of the past decade — designing machines for Tron: Legacy, Captain America: The First Avenger, and Prometheus. His work stood out for the same reason his books do: it blends believable engineering with pure imagination.

After several years in the film industry, Simon returned to his own fictional universe and created The Timeless Racer — a book that feels like a documentary from an alternate future. It tells the story of Masucci Motors, a fictional racing team that competes across decades and centuries. The idea: what if racing never stopped evolving? What if technology, design, and human ambition kept pushing forward endlessly?

The result is a world where retro design and futuristic vision meet perfectly. The cars look like descendants of classic endurance racers from Le Mans — long, sculpted, aerodynamic — yet with details that could only exist in a far future. Simon calls them “machines from a parallel timeline,” and that’s exactly what they feel like.

Inside the book, Simon presents this world as if it were real. Each spread looks like a page from an authentic motorsport archive: team photos, technical drawings, pit crew scenes, sponsorship ads, driver profiles, and vintage-style posters. There’s even a mock interview with the “founder” of Masucci Motors, creating a full narrative around the designs. This combination of industrial design, storytelling, and visual world-building makes the book unlike anything else in the design world.

Simon’s background in automotive design (he worked for Bugatti before his film career) is visible in every line. The proportions, the stance, the detailing — they all make sense mechanically, even when the concept is fantastical. That’s what makes his work so powerful: the fantasy feels engineered.

Visually, the book is stunning. The mix of CAD-based 3D models, polished renders, and expressive sketches keeps the energy alive throughout. Every image could be a movie still — with cinematic lighting, perfect composition, and that signature Simon atmosphere: part motorsport nostalgia, part sci-fi realism.

Even though the book has been out for over a decade, it still feels incredibly fresh. It bridges the gap between art and engineering, fiction and history. Like Cosmic Motors, it invites designers and dreamers to ask: what if the future had a past?

For anyone passionate about design, storytelling, and the beauty of machines, The Timeless Racer is more than an art book — it’s a journey through an alternate timeline of creativity and speed.

https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/f/the-timeless-racer/9200000009847325/