Is being banned the most sincere form of flattery in racing? Sure it sucks for the cars, teams, engineers, and backers that created something highly innovative and likely effective but it immediately launches these cars into a kind of heroic strata for all of time. This video shows eight different cars that were shown the door in different racing series, in different eras, and for different reasons. Some were squashed for cost concerns. Some for supposed performance advantages. Some for the “wrong” engine driving the car, and others for just being too far afield of what a particular racing series wanted the competition to look like.
The one thing that basically all of these cars have in common is that they were developed very quietly and then unleashed on unsuspecting competition. There was the shock and awe factor of their reveal and then the shock and awe factor of their effectiveness in the case of stuff like the Gordon T-Rex car, the winged Chryslers, and the Lotus F1 machine. The turbine powered IndyCar was nearly a race winner with Parnelli Jones before a cheap bearing failed, and we all know how bad ass Jim Hall and Chaparral were.
We hope you dig this look at eight of the coolest mechanical bad boys in racing history.
