The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
These five cars were first to bring spoilers to the market
The use of aerodynamic principles in production vehicles is commonplace now, but it hasn’t been for very long. While today it’s not rare to see a Honda with a giant rear wing, it would have been unheard of in the 1960s.
The first instance of a spoiler on a race car was the 1961 Ferrari 196 Dino SP. The body was designed by Fantuzzi, a renowned coachbuilder responsible for some of the most beautiful race cars of the 1950s and early 1960s.
But, as road cars got faster and faster, aerodynamic technology would migrate from the race track to street. Here are five examples of what we mean.
STABILIZING FINS
In the early days of racing, it was hard to get a car to stay straight, and tires as wide as a 1950s necktie didn’t help the cause. Race cars like the Jaguar D-type attempted to cut through the wind with slippery bodies, but kept things stabilized at high speed with a large rear stabilizer fin.
When employed on luxury vehicles such as Cadillacs, rear fins do as little for aerodynamics as chrome does for gas mileage. However, when the rear stabilizer fin is honed to the point it becomes an actual aerodynamic device, you get flying buttresses.
The first production car with a pass-through flying buttress was the Ferrari 599, and it actually worked to eliminate a rear wing by channeling air around the rear section, increasing down force.
REAR SPOILER
Spoilers — so called because they spoil the flow of air that destabilizes the vehicle — mark one of the earliest forms of aerodynamic improvement.
The first time a rear spoiler appeared on a production vehicle was the 1967 Dodge Charger, although it technically came in the trunk, not on it, and was dealer-installed to meet NASCAR homologation requirements.
While the spoiler didn’t do a lot when attached to that Charger, the technology would return in the 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona with its massive rear wing.
CHIN SPOILER
Chin spoilers — under the car’s front bumper — were developed to keep the front end of the vehicle planted on the ground at high speed, in order to maintain grip. The first production car with a chin spoiler was the 1968 Camaro Z/28.
The 1967 Lamborghini Miura was notorious for front end lift due to the gas tanks sitting where most engines of the era were mounted. Unlike the Camaro, the Miura would not see a fix for this problem until the SV was introduced.
Bill France of NASCAR fame had long banned cars with chin spoilers from his tracks, but reversed his ruling after someone pointed out that he had a chin spoiler on his own personal car, a brandnew Camaro Z/28.
REAR WING
An evolution of the rear spoiler, a rear wing could do more than just spoil the air flowing over it. For the first time, manufacturers were starting to think about how they can move and shape the air around their vehicles to influence certain handling characteristics, rather than just trying to slip through it.
In this case, the technology came straight from the race track to the road. The track was an oval, and the car was the 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona. The massive rear wing was placed high up in the air where nothing else could touch it, and was able to keep the car planted on the ground tight enough to reach 200 miles per hour (320 km/h), an unheard-of number in the 1970s.
ACTIVE AERO
As cars became more dependent on technology, aerodynamics kept up. The idea that a rear spoiler could move depending on the car’s speeds was one way it did that.
The 1988 VW Corrado was a handsome replacement for VW’S venerable Scirocco coupe, a sleek version of its classic Golf hatchback. At 120 km/h, a switch told the rear spoiler to reduce rear-end lift by up to 64 per cent.
The 1984 Lancia Thema also featured a kind of active aero, but it wasn’t automatic, and required the driver to twist a knob on the dashboard to expose it.
From inside VW’S ranks we also saw the Porsche 959, which had a system that could lower the vehicle by 50 mm once speeds reached 150 km/h.