Short-Throw

NY Times

Last in Beauty Contests May Be First on Tracks
By PRESTON LERNER
BRASELTON, Ga.

BELTED tightly within the slender carbon-fiber sheath of a black missile known as the DeltaWing, I hurtled over a brow on the Road Atlanta racecourse and knifed down to a 90-degree left-hander at nearly 170 miles an hour.

Despite plenty of racetrack experience, I had my doubts about what would happen next. Critics say that this radical racecar — a bizarre-looking creation that resembles the Batmobile — is more likely to fly than to turn. Five days earlier, in fact, it had done just that, flipping into a guardrail after being hit by another car during a prerace test session.

I hammered the brake pedal and clicked the left shift paddle three times to select second gear as my body strained against already taut shoulder harnesses. The carbon-carbon brakes bled off speed at an astonishing rate, and by the time I had to turn left, I was able to glide through the corner with no more drama than easing into a shopping-mall parking space.

This is not to suggest that I’m a hero racecar driver; quite the contrary, to be honest. Instead, my point is that while the DeltaWing looks more like a futuristic mobility pod than a contemporary racecar, it drives like, well, a regular automobile.

“If I were blindfolded, I wouldn’t know the difference between the DeltaWing and a normal car,” said Gunnar Jeannette, who had driven the hastily repaired machine to a respectable finish here a few days earlier in the 1,000-mile Petit Le Mans sports car race.

Curiously, the inside of the cockpit is just about the only vantage point from which the DeltaWing doesn’t seem freakishly different. But its strange appearance from the outside, unlike any other car built for road racing, is an honest indicator of the unique technology it embodies.

The DeltaWing is arguably the most innovative — and probably the most polarizing — racecar to appear at least since rear-engine cars replaced traditional roadsters for Indianapolis 500 type events. By virtue of a design that minimizes aerodynamic drag and cuts weight to less than 1,300 pounds, it is able to go roughly as fast as cars that have twice as much horsepower and use twice as much fuel.

“The DeltaWing is all about making history,” said Dan Gurney, the legendary Southern California driver who has won in many forms of motor sport. “It’s going to have an enormous impact from the standpoint of efficiency, fuel economy, brake wear, tire wear, aerodynamics and power-to-weight ratio.”

The avant-garde shape of the car — widely panned by both racing fans and participants as being hideous — and the threat it represents to existing designs has created a legion of detractors. But it has also generated an avid core of supporters who say they believe it holds the key to making motor sports relevant in a world increasingly aware of environmental matters, though that was not the main inspiration for the project.

“I’m not a tree-hugger,” said Ben Bowlby, the iconoclastic designer of the DeltaWing. “I’m a racer.

“This is a disruptive technology,” he continued. “It may force us to change the way we perceive racecars — and road cars.”

Bowlby, 45, moved from England to Indianapolis in 2003 to work as the technical director of Chip Ganassi’s IndyCar, Nascar and sports car empire.

In 2008, he had an epiphany: the two big front tires on Indy and Formula One cars produced loads of aerodynamic drag that slowed them down. What if he replaced them with two small front tires placed very close together? This would allow him to fashion needle-nose bodywork that minimized drag. Low drag meant that less power would be needed to reach the same speeds.

In 2010, Bowlby’s concept was entered in a competition to select a new chassis for the IndyCar series for 2012. The DeltaWing design was rejected because of concerns that the small front tires wouldn’t allow the car to turn properly, while the wingless body might be prone to flying uncontrollably.

But officials of the Le Mans endurance race were seduced by Bowlby’s mantra: half the power, half the weight, half the fuel and all the speed. So they invited the car to enter a demonstration class showcasing green technology.

With the imprimatur of Le Mans, Bowlby was able to secure backing to build the car. Because the design was so radical, virtually every component had to be custom built. Michelin agreed to create the special tires. (The front tires, a mere four inches wide, look as if they belong on a vintage VW Beetle). Nissan signed on as the lead sponsor and provided a 1.6-liter 4-cylinder engine, which produces a paltry (by racing standards) 300 horsepower.

In seven months, the DeltaWing went from the drawing board to completion in the shop of Dan Gurney’s All American Racers. Three months later, it was racing at Le Mans, where it ran creditably before being knocked into a concrete barrier by another car. It then appeared last month at the Petit Le Mans race, finishing a remarkable 5th over all (running in an exhibition class), silencing cynics who said the car wouldn’t perform as advertised.

The DeltaWing is eligible to compete next year in American Le Mans Series sports car races. The A.L.M.S. founder, Don Panoz, who is now the owner of the DeltaWing project, told me at Road Atlanta that he was developing closed-cockpit and road versions of the car.

In some ways, a road car would bring motor sports full circle. Racing began at the turn of the 20th century as a way to demonstrate the capabilities of early automobiles. But it didn’t take long for cars to be developed specifically for competition.

In Europe, open-wheel thoroughbreds raced on road courses — a model that matured into the modern Formula One format — while in the United States they tended to compete on purpose-built tracks like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Sports cars based on road-going automobiles raced in their own events, most notably the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France.

For much of the 20th century, racing was the crucible in which new automobile technology was perfected before trickling down into the world of everyday road cars. Disc brakes, turbocharging, all-wheel drive and twin-cam engine architecture are just a few of the innovations pioneered by racecars that we now take for granted in our minivans and family sedans.

But by the 1980s and ’90s, advances in aerodynamics and electronics had made racecars so fast — and so potentially dangerous — that the rules became ever more constraining in an effort to slow the cars. As a result, although hundreds of millions of dollars are spent annually developing cars in Formula One, the technical apogee of the sport, racing no longer generates technology that translates into more sophisticated road cars.

“Formula One is wretched excess,” said Ricardo Divila, a former designer of Formula One cars and Le Mans prototypes who serves as an engineering consultant to Nissan. “Formula One has been gelded. You can’t do anything interesting anymore but make minute, incremental improvements.”

My brief stint behind the wheel convinced me that the DeltaWing was a textbook example of a better mousetrap. Still, its future remains unclear. Change is an unnerving proposition, and the conservative voices that dominate motor sports haven’t embraced a vision that would require a fundamental rethinking of racecar design.

“There’s no question that the DeltaWing is stretching the boundaries,” said Darren ***, Nissan’s director of global motor sports. “But why should racecars look the way they do today? We’re not saying that the DeltaWing is the only answer. We’re saying that it raises questions.”

SLandstra_Z06

I think it's cool looking, but the incident at Road Atlanta shows that the car is much more prone to flipping than a traditional car with a wide front track.

Remember the three wheelers that Honda, Kawasaki, Yamaha et al used to sell? All replaced by four wheelers, now...

It would be interesting to see several of these cars competing in the Grand Am/ALMS series.

Steve

63Corvette

Good story Mike. Thanks for posting

el es tu

Personally I dont like the cars but I know they have a place to exist. If they keep changing cars so radically and adding things like hybrid setups kers etc they should class it differently - maybe alternative technologies?

50 years from now I still want to see new racecars that run on liquid fuel and look like this:


and this

Zoxxo

Here's a really good up-close look at the car with Ben Bowlby himself explaining how it all works. A fifteen minute video.

The front springs are from a mountain bike!

http://youtu.be/c_INdbXMqsw

Z//

Everett Ogilvie

At Petit LeMans this year it ran times similar to P2 times - that impressed me for the car that everyone said can't turn (and with only 300HP).

geerookie

I want to build one for ST2

drivinhard

1:12 at Road Atlanta is pretty dang fast.

VetteDrmr

I like the delta wing: radical configuration that results in some serious performance potential. I've heard that Grand Am is going to make a place for DW to compete, that'd be great!

As far as the instability of the tripod, I think it has somewhat more propensity to get over on its back, BUT not as much as many believe. IIRC the collision with the P car was wheel-to-wheel, and that'll cause problems every time.

I DO think it's much more akin to a traditional open wheel car, and we don't mix sports cars and OW cars, for whatever that's worth.

Mike, thanks for sharing, that was a good article!

Have a good one,
Mike (B)

NVR2L8

Mike -

Sooooo...... If you get one of these, will you have to convert your "man cave" into a "bat cave"?

davidfarmer

I personally think it's a total waste of resources. I'm all for the "half" idealogy (half the weight, half the power, half the tire) but no reason to go so far away from established design and rule sets.

btw, speaking of being "green" etc, with all the talk during the ALMS races of the GreenX Challenge, it's darn difficult to actually find results of who won the thing. I gave up after tripping over countless PR posts, and little hard data.

Jason

If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

VetteDrmr

David,

Gotta say this is one of the exceptionally rare times I disagree with you. I can't stand "green" racing, how much more politicking do we need in racing? BUT, I'm all about having someone come in with what they think is a better idea and living or dying on the track. Sometimes the cars are so good they get banned, but at least they succeeded before that happened.

Personally I think DW belongs on the track with other open wheel cars, mainly due to size. Give them the same engine/fuel limits as the other cars, then see what happens. THIS version of DW was designed for endurance racing (small engine, long range, etc.) but what would a sprint (i.e. 500 mile) racer look like?

Have a good one,
Mike

z06801

That was the best explanation of it I have heard, made some sense, but still that little bump from that Porsche which would have been just a good bump between to cars made that thing turn over pretty easy.

Everett Ogilvie

I think it's cool BECAUSE it's different. Better mouse trap and all that. Even if it does not stand the test of time over the long run, it sure gets folks thinking outside the box.