Petrolhead Blog

Remember that fabulous Mercedes concept we saw a few posts ago?  Sleek, clean, aggressive lines used to create a machine that looks rapid even in stills.

It probably doesn’t need saying that not every racing car comes out looking that way.  Some of them, such as this fine example, have features that appear to have fallen from the ugly tree atop Minger’s Hill, smacking every branch on the way down, before rolling slowly down into the nearby settlement of Uglytown where the residents beat them vigourously with aesthetically displeasing sticks.  In spite of that, those cars are often moderately successful – the linked example, Williams FW26, would win a race at the end of 2004, though by then shorn of that remarkable front end.

This occasional feature isn’t that interested in cars that succeed in spite of their looks.  Design 101 seeks to celebrate cars that could surely never work, cars that even the untrained eye immediately comes to view as patently ridiculous.  Sometimes the design quirks are relatively subtle.  At other times, they’re what-the-hell-is-that obvious.  The first entry, a break from Formula One coverage to honour the car that inspired the whole idea, falls very firmly into the latter category.

The 1981 Indianapolis 500 was one of the most controversial races ever seen at the Speedway.  On May 24th, Bobby Unser took the chequered flag ahead of Mario Andretti, the only other man to complete the full 500 miles.  On May 25th, the official results had Andretti the winner, Unser having been penalised for overtaking under yellow flags when rejoining after a pit stop.  Unser’s Penske Racing team filed a protest, the issue eventually being resolved in Unser’s favour on October 9th.

Watching from the sidelines, having failed to qualify an aging Vollstedt car for the race, was Idaho short-track racer Ken Hamilton.  At Indy, just as anywhere else, you can’t do a thing if you don’t have a good car around you, and Hamilton didn’t.  What he had, thanks to an approach from a multi-millionaire Idaho native, was the promise of a well-funded ride for 1982.  Ken’s benefactor wanted to build an Indycar, and had his designer ready to start work.  All he needed was a driver.

The designer was another Idaho native, Dean Wilson.  In the late 1970s Wilson had founded the Eagle Aircraft Company, specialising in the design and manufacture of agricultural aircraft.  Whether knowledge of crop dusters could be applied to single-seater racing cars was something that had yet to be tested, and one wonders whether it might have been smarter of Hamilton to suggest that the car might be better suited to someone else.  Come the month of May, though, a ride is a ride, and Ken had one.

Wilson was a believer in function over form.  If his creations did the job they were designed for, they were automatically beautiful.  His first and so far only foray into car design certainly followed that philosophy, and the results were spectacular, though not necessarily for the right reasons.

To give you a feel for the cars of the era, here’s a picture of the Wildcat that carried Gordon Johncock to a hair’s-breadth victory over Rick Mears in 1982:

You might imagine that the skills needed to design a plane would transfer easily to the design of a racing car.  After all, a fundamental understanding of lift and downforce is essential.  The influence of the air around affects the performance of each method of transport.  You might begin to imagine something different once you compare and contrast that Wildcat with this shot of Hamilton and the Eagle Aircraft Flyer:

Even now, with the benefit of some 28 years distance, it’s difficult to know exactly what to say about the Flyer.  At first glance, it appears to have been designed by two different men, one at each end of the car, working in offices several thousand miles apart.  The cab-forward seating position is extreme even by the standards of the time, and the enormous amount of car behind the driver hasn’t been designed with ease of use through traffic in mind.  It looks heavy and ponderous.  The airbox, feeding a Chevy engine at a time when a Cosworth DFX was the engine to have, is in prime position to foul the airflow to the rear wing, while at the same time getting little air itself thanks to the headrest-cum-rollbar directly ahead.

In fact, every surface, from the bulky nose section to the curious wheel shrouds front and rear, gives the impression of having been designed with the express intention of ruining the airflow to the piece behind it.  Function over form is fair enough, but the Eagle Aircraft Flyer looks like a car that has neither, unless the function is to appear a discordant mess.

None of that would matter if the Flyer had turned lap records straight out of the box.  Had it done so, of course, you wouldn’t be reading this now.  Hamilton would later say, “The thing was out to lunch aerodynamically,”  a statement which somehow fails to surprise.

The car was Wilson’s baby, its creator maintaining to this day that all it needed was some more time and some more money.  Hamilton, better placed than anyone to know what it really needed, felt that letting someone else give their attention to the car would be more beneficial, particularly if that someone had any prior involvement in motorsport.  When his efforts to get the Flyer up to speed saw him indulge in a couple of spins, Ken weighed up his chances of qualifying (”At best, we were 12 or 14 mph off making the cut,” and more often substantially further away even than that) against the dangers of an accident in a car with nothing much between his feet and fresh air, parked it and walked away.

Hamilton was inducted into the Western Idaho Racing Association Hall Of Fame in 1987 and continued to race well into the 21st century.  Dean Wilson continued to design and sell planes, with varying degrees of success, into the late 90s, when his focus switched to modifying and maintaining his own Piper PA-16 Clipper.  The Flyer was passed to Ken’s son Davey in 1991 to be used as part-payment in a deal taking Davey into Indycars with Hemelgarn Racing.  It helped to launch Davey’s top line single-seater career, a decade after destroying his father’s.