Donal Byrne looks over the life and extraordinary times of John DeLorean who died in New Jersey at the weekend
To borrow from Dickens, it was the worst of times. Belfast in the early 1980s was a city riven by sectarian strife, riots, murder and, like other parts of the North, on the brink of civil war. And things were about to get even worse.
The hunger strikes would soon dominate the life of every person in Northern Ireland. It was not a case of factory gates being locked for want of economic demand, but rather a case of no factories at all.
No wonder then that the coming of John Zachary DeLorean was almost Messianic. The rangy and handsome former golden boy at General Motors (he had become its youngest ever vice-president) arrived in Belfast offering a jobs package that would employ 2,500 people in West Belfast.
His record was that of an innovator, a brilliant engineer, and a man whose vision of design and car production was greater than anything that could be catered for by a multi-national company hidebound by conservatism. DeLorean wanted his own company and his own fortune and, as we now know, he was a conman of the highest order who knew how to make it.
Millions of pounds of British government aid were in his pocket and it seems nobody really asked the right questions.
Although one British judge would later describe his venture as "barefaced, outrageous and massive fraud", there was no doubting his credentials at the time.
His first stroke of genius with Pontiac was the Tempest in 1961. The US car industry was obsessed with what it called the "Volkwagen problem". The Beetle had shown that small cars could sell and all the Americans had to offer were gas guzzlers with massive engines, terrible handling and huge production costs - products of the "dark satanic mills" of Detroit.
DeLorean produced a front-engined, rear transaxle, compact with a good and relatively sleek design. By European standards it was still a lumbering whale but in the US it was a "compact". In two years the Pontiac sold almost 400,000 and DeLorean's star was well and truly in the ascent.
Then came the real stuff of legend, the Pontiac GTO, the car that became the original "muscle car" of the 1960s. DeLorean gave America exactly what it wanted at the time - a car with a big engine (8-litres), a relatively small body and a budget price. The car was a runaway success.
DeLorean was 40 at the time. The son of a Romanian immigrant and Ford worker, his mother was Austrian and his parents worked hard to educate him as an engineer. It was the stuff of the American dream.
DeLorean was soon known as much for his glamorous lifestyle as his car design. He lived the good life but yearned for more financial action. He had ambitions to build a light-weight sports car and the economic desolation of Northern Ireland and his smooth-talking acquisition of British grants created the opportunity.
Workers in Belfast remember him arriving for factory visits with the media in tow but not as being a hands-on manager. Others say he genuinely regretted the collapse of the dream and what it meant for the former workers.
The DeLorean DMC-12 gull-wing car was his Belfast project. A stainless steel body that didn't need to be painted, a 2.8 V6 engine he bought in from Renault and doors that opened like wings were the key elements. The car even ran on unleaded petrol, had a rear-mounted engine and a choice of a five-speed or three-speed automatic gearbox.
The car drove relatively well. I had a short drive in one in the US, where the DeLorean still has a big following, and found it good for its time but not a car that had anything of the European finesse that its Guigario body style might have suggested.
Certainly it needed a power boost for its role in Back to the Future when it turned into a time machine for Michael J Fox and the Professor. It was also cramped and somewhat clumsy but it was a great looking car.
DeLorean managed to manufacture some 12,000 cars. Most ended up in storage because dealers refused to honour their commitments when the company went spectacularly bust within two years. DeLorean said he needed more money but this time the British government started to ask some pertinent questions. The dream ended almost as quickly as it was realised.
Allegations of money laundering and drug dealing followed and he was tried for both, unsuccessfully. Ivan Fallon, who wrote a book on the rise and fall of DeLorean, described him thus: "He was an extraordinary engineer who rose from modest beginnings in Detroit whose problems started when he went Hollywood. He shed his wife, went on a crash diet, dyed his hair black and had a major face-lift - that manly chin was created by a foam-like material in his chin. He stopped doing what he was good at, which was making cars, to become this jet-set guy."
DeLorean was nothing if not resilient. After his acquital on the drugs charges he quoted Psalm 27: "The Lord is the stronghold of my life - of whom shall I be afraid? When evil men advance against me to devour my flesh, when my enemies and my foes attack me, they will stumble and fall."
DeLorean almost lost everything, but not quite. He still managed to hold on to some money and property, after numerous court seizures. But no one could take away his engineering brilliance and his legacy.