The Weirdest Race Car You've Ever Seen
The revolutionary DeltaWing racer gets a second chance, at Le Mans. But what does it mean?
By Sam Smith Aug 3, 2011 8:28AM
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.
[Source: Automobile Magazine]
70Comments
Aug 5, 2011 10:27AM
gpom3...go back to the article and click "Tyrrell P34", you'll see that it had a very respectable first season, finishing 1st and 2nd at the 1976 Swedish GP, as well as a number of other top 5 finishes through out the 1976 Formula 1 season. The team finished the season with 3rd in the World Championship Constructor points. The lack of, or should I say, limited amount of front tire development was, in large part the downfall of the design. As I recall (yes, I was a hard core F1 junkie in the mid 70's) the Tyrell six-wheeler performed very well in the rain. It's interesting that so much of the technological advancement found in today's road cars - ABS, Traction Control, Fuel Injection, Electronic Engine Management, Radial Tire development, to name but a few - were originally developed in Formula One...more so than in other racing series, due to the huge budgets the top F1 teams enjoy. Ferrari reportedly spends nearly a billion US$ per season. NASCAR & Indy Car do not have teams with anything even close to that kind of budget...they are still using carburetors to feed their pushrod V-8's. Make no mistake, Formula One is, was, and always will be, the Top Dog in the world of motorsports.
Aug 5, 2011 8:52AM
Aug 5, 2011 8:01AM
Aug 5, 2011 8:00AM
I'm an OLD race-fan; one thing that I always liked about racing, any type of racing, was the out of the box thinking that went into building a better vehicle than the next guy. Given a set of parameters to work within, mechanics and engineers were constantly coming up with ways to improve on and outdo the competition. Over the last few years the various sanctioning bodies have taken most of that creative thinking away and force the competion to all the same, no wiggle room to work in. The result has been to produce some very boring, un-inventive racing.
I don't know if this new car would ever amount to anything on the track, but it is damn nice to see somebody willing to try and break out of the box everybody else is in. Good luck with it!
Aug 5, 2011 7:51AM
Call it the Broadhead, or maybe the Razorhead. Then anyone who wins a race driving it can be called the Bowhunter.
About 20 or 30 years ago, an F1 team tried to run six-wheelers. (Two sets of steerable wheels, set up in tandem, with a much lower tire diameter in front, to cut through the air better, but maintain the same total tread patch area.) I think they were allowed to compete, but I don't think they won anything.
If the Deltawing has all the steering problems forecast in these comments, it could get black-flagged during the time trials at LeMans. I have a notion that Mr. Bowlby, or some engineers on his behalf, must have run some computer models to predict, among other things, how the sonofagun will steer.
But will it really work? That's why they still run the races!
About 20 or 30 years ago, an F1 team tried to run six-wheelers. (Two sets of steerable wheels, set up in tandem, with a much lower tire diameter in front, to cut through the air better, but maintain the same total tread patch area.) I think they were allowed to compete, but I don't think they won anything.
If the Deltawing has all the steering problems forecast in these comments, it could get black-flagged during the time trials at LeMans. I have a notion that Mr. Bowlby, or some engineers on his behalf, must have run some computer models to predict, among other things, how the sonofagun will steer.
But will it really work? That's why they still run the races!
Aug 5, 2011 7:26AM
Aug 5, 2011 7:15AM
I think this looks awesome. I'm with all of you about the understeer but with the track so narrow up front, the driver could easily miscalculate the rear width and hit a wall, other car, or a pit crew member with it. This could easily become a disaster on the track for drivers and/or crew.
Aug 5, 2011 6:25AM
Aug 5, 2011 4:50AM
Aug 5, 2011 3:59AM
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