“I am still trying hard to convince my friends that I really don’t like cars, but admittedly with sketches like this I’m not that convincing..” says Christian Leyk.

The little styling exercise is called ‘plusminus’ and took roughly half a day from note pad doodle to illustration. You might call it a distraction, but you’ll never know where spontaneous ideas like this will lead to. Apart from that, particularly when you are very busy with other tasks or find yourself stuck fixing problems elsewhere, turning your back to those tasks for a few hours and do something totally different and unrelated really freshens up your mind and let you restart with new inspiration.

We have roughly based the study on the platform of a Ferrari 458 Italia (or 488 GTB) and played with a few other shapes inspired by recent models of the famous brand with the prancing pony. However, there are some new and fairly different details and we could just as well seeing ‘plusminus’ wearing the equally evocative badge of Alfa Romeo. At the moment we haven’t yet made up our mind as to whether we prefer ‘plusminus’ following our recent developments towards a modern electric drive or if it should rather come with the soundtrack of a typical Italian thoroughbred. Tough call…