Great Wings of Car History
Wingin’ It
From purely functional to patently ridiculous, airfoils are the ultimate automotive ornamentation.
Plymouth Superbird
When engineer John Pointer was reassigned from Chrysler’s Missile Division (yes, really), his first act was to sketch a nose cone and a two-foot-high rear wing over the body of the 1969 Dodge Charger 500. The Plymouth version, the 1970 Superbird, applied the same aero formula to the Road Runner coupe and added the Looney Tunes character to the tail.
Winged Porsche 550 Spyder
Built as an experiment by a 22-year-old Swiss engineering student, the chunky wing on this Porsche 550 Spyder marked a mid-Fifties attempt at generating downforce. In his first outing, Michel May outqualified Juan Manuel Fangio at the Nürburgring. Porsche’s factory racing team threw a fit and got the car banned.
Chaparral 2E
Jim Hall’s mid-Sixties Can-Am racer was the quintessential and most conspicuous winged car. Its massive rear wing was mounted high to clear turbulent air stirred up by the body and could be feathered to reduce drag by a driver-actuated pedal.
—Brendan McAleer
Honda Spirit 201
The small Spirit team was Honda’s way of returning to top-level racing in the early Eighties. Two wings nearly enclosed the rear wheels, making the car look like a kid wearing a cardboard-box race-car costume. It wasn’t successful, but it did set Honda back on the path to F1 greatness.
Lamborghini Countach
The car world has oil speculator and F1 team owner Walter Wolf to thank for one of the most distinctive wings. Wolf commissioned his own Countach prototypes in the Seventies. The cars had massive 335-mm rear Pirellis, widened fender arches, and a V-shaped rear wing that characterized many later Countaches.
Dodge Viper ACR
The 2016 Viper ACR’s Extreme Aero package consists of a front splitter, four dive planes, six diffuser strakes, and an adjustable rear wing the size of a park bench. The wing is so aggressive that it affects fuel economy when the car’s towed on an open trailer, but the added downforce contributed to a fan-supported lap record at Germany’s Nürburgring: 7:01.3.
Ford Escort RS Cosworth
The poster car of antisocial British youth, the Escort “Cossie” was a rally homologation special with a massive rear wing inspired by the Fokker triplane flown by Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. It was originally intended to have three layers, but Ford pared it down to a still-outrageous two-tier configuration.
You Might Also Like
