In a perfect race car design world, all shapes would be clean, and you’d need just one wing out back, one wing up front, and a smooth envelope of a car in between. But race car design is never perfect.
There are always regulations that force designers into conceptual corners, there are always budget constraints that require revisions of current designs when clean sheet new ones would be more efficient, and there are always blind, in the dark, aerodynamic fumbles that give the world weird wings where we don’t expect them.
Above is a Red Bull-branded 1998 Sauber C17 with Jean Alesi driving. It is wearing two little wings like earmuffs.
They’re weird. But I know that they are far from being the weirdest wings ever put on a race car. Surely you know some aerodynamic appendage that’s stranger.
Post your favorite, with as much backstory and information as you know, below.
Photo Credit: Getty Images
Contact the author at raphael@jalopnik.com.