In the 1950s, the study and application of aerodynamic principles in race cars was a fairly novel concept. For the most part, aero was a slippery subject: Streamlined cars surely sliced through the air cleaner like airplanes and were theoretically faster. While this was in fact true of cars that ran in a straight line, a few early pioneers started to grasp the concept of downforce, where air pressing down on a slanted surface pushed extra weight on the tires to create extra grip. In 1955, Swiss racer Michel May added a wing to his Porsche 550. That may have been the first car to use a downforce-generating wing, but it wasn’t long until the oval-racing world figured it out.
Jim Cushman is crediting with slapping the first wing on a sprint car in 1958 at Columbus Motor Speedway. As so often happens with racing innovators, Cushman’s competitors soon caught up and by the time this film was shot in 1959, a good chunk of the sprint-car field had added wings of varying designs to compete with Cushman. The designs are rudimentary by comparison to modern winged sprint cars, of course, but some of them—like Cushman’s—have end-fences to help turn the car, too, a fairly advanced concept.
This is a great time capsule to a time when the floors of these cars needed two round cutouts for the drivers’ large undercarriages.
I believe these are early suermodifieds. Columbus, Sandusky,Lorain County and Oswego ran them back in the day. I can remember one famous super driver telling me that they used to run Columbus on Thursday night, Lorain County Friday, Oswego Saturday and Sandusky Sunday afternoon.