It’s no coincidence that some of the most successful racing cars are also some of the most beautiful. Think Ford GT40, Jaguar D-Type, and your pick of dozens of Ferraris, and you’ll soon start to get the picture.
But in some cases, there’s no substitute for function over form — or at least that’s what the designers of some of the cars featured in Goodwood’s compilation would have you believe.
Of note is that many of these cars, such as the phallic-sporting F1 cars of 2014, or the high-domed revision of the Deltawing race car, resulted from regulatory compliance.
Read: Either Ahead Of Their Time, Or Just Plain Bonkers, Take A Look At These ’80s Concept Cars
With the Caterham CT-05 (and, to be honest, any F1 car from 2014), regulations mandated that a small minimum width of the nose should be kept low so as to avoid the high-nosed designs seen previously. Of course, virtually every team exploited this loophole in the regulations with a rather embarrassing, ahem, “sex toy” phase of Formula One.
But cars like the Panoz Abruzzi, well, those are an oddity. Powered by a 600hp, 800Nm, 6.2 liter supercharged V8, it had all the on-paper credentials you’d want. But, as our narrator so eloquently puts it, “it looks like the Batmobile had a hideous accident.”
Perhaps the most controversial car on the list, purely because anyone would dare include it, is the now-legendary pink pig liveried Porsche 917/20. Although certainly not the worst offender in the line-up, rumor has it that Martini, responsible for some of the best liveries on motorsport, outright refused to be associated with it — hence the rather odd but historic paint job.
What other disasters of design can you think of from the racing arena?