The Le Mans organizing body was likely very curious to see what Ben Bowlby's DeltaWing could do, as the design is a car of "halves": It has half of the drag, half of the weight and half of the power of a conventional design—which Bowlby projected would consume half the fuel, half the brakes and half the amount of tires. This was good enough to get Nissan interested, and they committed to providing the engine.
"As motor racing rulebooks have become tighter over time, racing cars look more and more similar and the technology used has had less and less relevance to road car development," said Andy Palmer, Nissan Motor Co.'s Executive Vice President, after sealing the partnership. "Nissan DeltaWing aims to change that and we were an obvious choice to become part of the project."
They subsequently released a sexy video discussing the collaboration. I dig Bowlby's line about "Guilt-free high-performance motoring:"
On race day, the DeltaWing ran well for the first six hours—before tragedy struck, literally. On lap 75, Toyota driver Kazuki Nakajima knocked the DeltaWing into a wall:
To the untrained eye the knock-out appeared pretty blatant, but as you heard in the video, the announcers attribute it to an unintended consequence of Bowlby's wing-less design: The DeltaWing, the announcers claim, is difficult for other drivers to see. Other media outlets, however, called the contact "reckless" and Nakajima later apologized.
As light as the contact appeared, it was disastrous for the DeltaWing team. As reported by Automobile,
Damage was so extensive that DeltaWing driver Satoshi Motoyama was unable to make it back to pit road (crew members can't work on the car outside the pits). Before the incident, the car was running strongly enough to have finished well against the most technically sophisticated prototypes of this era.
The DeltaWing team was out of the race. Bowlby looked on the bright side: "The car did what we had all hoped it would do," he said, post-race. "It ran at the pace the [Le Mans organizing body] had asked us to run. And believe me, there's a little bit of headroom: we can go quite a bit faster."
Undeterred, they returned to the U.S. and rebuilt the car. They subsequently gained approval to run it again, this time in the 1,000-mile Petit Le Mans race at Road Atlanta, where the DeltaWing made its American debut last weekend.
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