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An artist's conception of the two-seat Le Mans version of the DeltaWing. (Courtesy Project 56)
The most controversial racing vehicle proposed in the 21st Century, the tricycle-like DeltaWing IndyCar, has a new lease on life, and on a much bigger stage.
The DeltaWing, initially proposed as a replacement for the current Dallara IndyCar for the 2012 season, will instead get a chance to compete in the 2012 Le Mans 24 Hours.
A two-seat sports car variant will be constructed by a consortium of U.S. racing powerhouses called the Project 56 Group. Project 56 Group includes Dan Gurney’s All American Racers, DeltaWing Racing Cars LLC, which includes designer Ben Bowlby, and two-time American Le Mans Series winner Highcroft Racing.
Dan Gurney’s All American Racers have designed, built, and raced sports cars, Indy cars, and Formula One cars. Ben Bowlby has designed successful sports- and open-wheel cars for a number of series, including IndyCar. Duncan Dayton, principle at Highcroft Racing, has a history of successful sports car campaigns.
The three will partner with Dr. Don Panoz, founder of the American Le Mans Series, to begin producing the new DeltaWing sports car at Gurney’s California factory in July.
The consortium took its name from the Automobile Club de l’Oueste’s provision for a 56th car on the Le Mans grid, granted to cars which do fit in any established class but display noteworthy new technology. Porsche’s Hybrid 911 GT3R raced in this class in 2010.
Project 56 has accepted an ACO invitation to run its revolutionary sports car in the 56th spot in the 2012 Le Mans 24 Hours race, the most prestigious road race in the world. There simply is not bigger stage upon which to debut the new machine.
“To take a car like this with a totally innovative design, to Le Mans and run before a worldwide television audience of more than 600 million people is an incredible story,” Highcroft Racing’s Duncan Dayton said in the Project 56 press release.
“In 2010 the ACO Sporting Committee decided to create the garage #56 to promote new technologies. When the ACO Management met the representative of the DeltaWing project, everybody thought immediately that it would be a high quality project for the Le Mans experimental entry in 2012, said ACO Sports Director Vincent Beaumesnil.
“The interest in this project is based on the optimization of all factors that have an impact on global energy consumption and efficiency of the car.”
Radical Design
(Courtesy Highcroft Racing)
The DeltaWing is a revolutionary concept, unlike anything which has preceded it. The vehicle’s tiny front wheels are extremely close together, giving the car a distinctly triangular shape, an almost a tricycle-like appearance.
Designer Ben Bowlby believes that the long, narrow front end will dramatically reduce drag while still providing good high-speed handling. The car is also designed to be much lighter than current cars, which, combined with the lowered drag, would allow the car to perform at the same speeds as the current cars, with only half the power and thus half the fuel.
“The secret to the DeltaWing car is simplicity and efficiency,” Bowlby said in a Project 56 press release. “To achieve the dramatically reduced carbon footprint we have looked at ways to reduce weight and drag, as well as the total number of components required to build the car.
The impetus for the original IndyCar design was to create a fast, safe, green race car; a car using the latest technology and breakthrough design concepts, which would be just as fast but use mush less fuel, and which would be much more recyclable.
The DeltaWing design, with a wide rear end and an almost tubular nose, needs less tortional stiffness to achieve high performance, Bowlby claims, so that the chassis can be mad e from light tough, energy-absorbing materials, providing equal driver safety with less weight, less cost, and less environmental impact.
Continued: Rejected by IndyCar
