Car news: Is this the future of American open-wheel racing?
April 11, 8:34 PMCar News, Views, and Reviews ExaminerMark Tapscott
It's not getting much coverage outside of the open-wheel racing community but the Izod Indy car series is moving toward adoption of a whole new concept for the design and relevance of its racers, beginning in the 2012 season.
There are actually three proposed designs being considered by Indy car officials, but two of them essentially are conventional refinements of the current technology. The radical design is called the Delta wing, and it does indeed look like nothing else currently competing on the race tracks of the world.
As you can see from the accompanying sketch, it's a delta configuration, with the front wheels set close in to the centerline, the rear wheels spread much further out, and with all four wheels almost completely enclosed with streamlining body work.
The final touch of the Delta is a high-standing fin at the rear over the area now occupied by the transaxle. If you are familiar with the appearance of the U.S. Air Force's F-102 and F-106 interceptors from the 1950s and early 1960s. you will have a good basic idea of the Indy Delta's basic shape and why it's called a delta design.
The Indy Delta also reminds me of a GM design exercise from the, I think, the 1950s, called, again I think, the Firebird, which had one fin. And if you look at it for a minute, you might even be reminded of one of Craig Breedlove's Bonneville Salt Flats world land speed record vehicles in the Indy Delta silhouette.
Frankly, this design is so "out-of-the-box" for what race cars are "supposed" to look like that I have a hard time imagining 33 of these darts going around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. But let's not forget that there was a time when the Indy establishment called those rear-engine racers from Europe "funny cars."
Among the advantages of the Indy Delta design, according to its proponents, are its aerodynamics, fuel efficiency, and super light weight, which allow it to reach currently competitive speeds using only a turbo-charged four-cylinder engine producing 300-350 horsepower.
This "more with less" approach is thought to be more relevant to future passenger car design than the traditional idea that more power is always the preferred approach, with secondary consideration for factors like fuel economy and environmental impact.
Pressdog.com blog, which focuses on the Indy Racing League, reports that the Indy Delta race car prototype passed a critical test in a moving ground plane wind tunnel, at speeds up to 140 mph. For more on the test from Pressdog.com, go here.
For more on the Indy Delta wing race car from its designers, go
here. Being an old Formula Ford racer and a lifetime proponent of the maxim that "real race cars don't have fenders, I am not sure what I think of the Indy Delta approach, but certainly opens up some new thinking about "the greatest spectacle in racing."
