![]() On the racetracks and the roads, the thin edge of the wedge split the end of one era from the beginning of a new one. The exemplar must be the Lotus 56, the turbine Indy race car from 1968. A 1967 Can-Am car still had some bulges, but the wedge profile was what the smart designers were after. Fortunately, the wheel only hit a car parked in small lot with golf carts between the Turn 2 suites and IMS' Southeast Vista, hitting a white Chevrolet Cruze. ![]() Wedges had their moment in the racing world just before the wings took over. INDIANAPOLIS Ind圜ar officials are reviewing the crash in the Indy 500 where a wheel was knocked off a race car and launched over the fence, just missing the stands outside Turn 2. It reflected contemporary thinking in aerodynamics: Get the nose low to keep excess air from going under the car and slant the top surface to pile up some air pressure and push the chassis into the road for grip. First, note that Gandini’s Carabo wasn’t just a design trick. Here, we’ll celebrate the examples that appeared as concepts at auto shows between the late 1960s and well into the 1980s. Designed by young Marcello Gandini at Bertone, the Carabo made a sharp-edged break with the notion that sports cars had to look voluptuous, with bulging curves like a Shelby Cobra, Jaguar E-type, or Ferrari 250GTO. Johnson made a case here recently-an extended, forceful, and informed argument-that it all began in 1968 at the Paris auto show with the Alfa Romeo Carabo concept. We’ll touch on a few more as we move along here, but consider the concept cars, the one-off dream machines whose job it was to forecast the future. But, man, for a while there the world’s car designers wore out the straight-edges and triangles faster than they did the French curves.Ĭar folk still have the production cars of that era on our radar screens and in some of our garages: the DeLorean DMC-12, the Lotus Esprit, the Triumph TR-7, the BMW M1, the Fiat X1/9, and, of course, the Lamborghini Countach. ![]() Now it looks as ’70s as a double-knit polyester leisure suit or feathered Farrah hair. Yesterday’s gone, and with it the notion that a low-profile, wedge-shaped car looks futuristic.
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