I’ve had a couple of guest posts on
this blog and here is another. The background here begins with a years
long discussion of the Deltawing Racing Program on a motorsports related
message board that I frequent. The members of this board are a pretty
tech-savvy lot and have highly tuned BS detection faculties. Over the years we’ve
watched this program and marveled, not at it’s achievements but that it
continues to exist despite an utter lack of them. Matt Miller explains further
herein……
The Farce and
Failure of the DeltaWing
A Guest Post By Matt Miller
The 2015 24
Hours of Le Mans included some amazing technology and competition among very
different LMP1 prototypes. It also
included the first racing of the Nissan GTR-LM, a car designed by Ben Bowlby
that is waaaay outside the box. Against
this backdrop, it’s a good time to re-examine another Bowlby design that also diverged
severely from general practice: the DeltaWing.
To eliminate all suspense, I will say at the outset that this car is
both a miserable failure and a farce.
Now, let’s see why.
IndyCar Roots
To
understand the DeltaWing (DW), you have to understand the original intention of
the car in 2010: it was supposed to be the next IndyCar. It was intended to attract attention to that
form of racing, which had been losing its fan base and which become a
spec-racing series with an old-tech, open-wheel Dallara that was pretty
boring. Bowlby proposed a dramatic new
car with only 300hp and which weighed far less than the Dallaras. It was dramatic because of the shape: with a
front track of only 24 inches, the car resembled a slimmed-down Space Shuttle
in planform.
