The Weirdest Race Car You've Ever Seen

In his book "The Unfair Advantage," the late racing legend Mark Donohue noted that race cars are like women: If they look right, chances are they are right. With the car you see here -- and frankly, we can't tell if it looks right or not -- traditional maxims may not apply. And that's fine by us.

This is the DeltaWing. It weighs 475 kilograms, stands just over 1 meter tall, and has a rear track approximately three times the width of its front. It does not exist outside of a handful of mockups and computer-assisted design drawings, but according to its designer, Ben Bowlby, it's currently built around a 300-horsepower engine. It looks, in case you are not up on such things, like no other car on the planet.

Last year, Bowlby tried, and failed, to get the DeltaWing authorized as the 2012 Indy Racing League spec chassis -- the model of racing car that the entire series would run on. As Automobile notes, he was suitably crushed, but he didn't give up on his creation. He took his design, funded partially by Indy and NASCAR mogul Chip Ganassi, and started shopping it around.

And now it's coming back. Next year. On a track you've probably heard of, with a real, live human behind the wheel. And Dan Gurney is involved. (Reminder: Gurney is the only American to ever win an F1 race in a car he designed and built himself.)

How weird is this?


The DeltaWing is heading to the 24 Hours of Le Mans next year. It's been approved for competition by the Automobile Club de l'Ouest (ACO), the sanctioning body behind the daylong endurance race. Its approval is part of the ACO's Garage 56 program, meant to allow environmentally interesting vehicles into the 24 Hours. This means that the DeltaWing won't have to meet current Le Mans regulations; it will also not be in contention for the overall win. It's just there, running. Its low carbon footprint and cool tech package are essentially what got it into the mix.



Still, this is an interesting turn of events. When the IRL bailed on the D'wing for 2012, most pundits wrote the car off, expecting to never see it again. It is, after all, a race car that looks like nothing else. Motorsports is big business, and we no longer live in a world where the new, interesting and fast can trump convention. NASCAR, F1, Grand-Am, ALMS -- every top-level form of professional racing has embraced or is rapidly moving toward parity through identical cars.

But this isn't for the better. The DeltaWing is a reminder that racing appeals for a variety of reasons. On one hand, a bunch of individuals in ostensibly equal cars is compelling, and in the case of Grand-Am or the occasional NASCAR road race, it provides for stirring competition. But the secondary aspect, that of technology and the advancement of speed science, shouldn't be overlooked.

Motorsports should be a proving ground, an arena to try different ideas in search of the fastest or most efficient answer. Half of the fun of following this stuff used to be seeing what different engineers came up with in response to a given set of rules -- watching brilliant minds from different backgrounds solve engineering problems in vastly different ways. (See: Tyrrell P34, anything else strange and glorious on wheels.) Take away the technology gap between cars and you ensure closer competition, but you also lose a bit of the spirit that made this stuff appealing in the first place.

To put it another way, the bleeding edge is important. The DeltaWing may not be the future of wheeled competition -- to be honest, we're not even convinced it'll see the starting grid at Le Mans next year -- but it's overwhelmingly different and charming because of it. So bully for Bowlby, to coin a phrase. And we'll just hope this is the start of something truly different.



You can read more on the DeltaWing at Automobile's site, or in the current issue of the magazine, where motorsports deity Peter Brock weighs in on the topic.