Warrack is a creative designer with GM Holden. He most recently led the design of the GMC Denali XT concept shown at the 2008 Chicago motor show and is responsible for the holden VE ute exterior. Warrack grew up in rural Victoria and now enjoys an international career in automotive design.

I was born in Ouyen and raised in St. Arnaud in regional Victoria. Both my parents taught Art/Design at secondary school and from a young age I realised my passion for art and cars, and when I worked out how to put the two together I wanted to be an automotive designer.

I attended a design careers seminar at age 15 where Holden design director Mike Simcoe presented a bleak picture of the employment opportunities within automotive design and I decided to broaden the scope of my Industrial Design folio.

In 1998 while studying Industrial Design at RMIT I took the 3rd year automotive elective and entered the first ‘Wheels young designer’ competition. The brief was to design a Ford Falcon for 2010 and I entered a naive concept with exposed structure with some dubious proportions and I didn’t win. However my work was published.

At graduation I decided to delay looking for a job by enrolling for honors and midway through that year Mike Simcoe rang and interviewed me for a co-op student position at GM Holden Design. My job started out as a production vehicle designer for Holden with projects sometimes lasting 2 years.

These days I have a new project every few months and most don’t proceed past the sketch phase but all are GM global programs. The Holden Design studio in Melbourne is indeed part of a global operation. I have worked in Yokohama, Turin, Shanghai and have been based in Detroit for the past 6 months.

Some of my personal career highlights have been iconic projects like the Holden VE Ute. Some have been experiences like driving one of a handful of pre-production builds. The design I am most proud of the Holden VE steering wheel. It was an engineering challenge because of several sets of strict design rules. It’s the part of the vehicle that people interact with the most and I still enjoy using it.