Panoz plotting DeltaWing road car

During its racing career the DeltaWing has always been regarded as of as one of the most unconventional race cars of all time, so why not one of the strangest road cars?

Yes, there’s about to be a new sports car in the world and it will rank as one of the strangest and most economical fast cars the world has ever seen.

It was one of the few budding sports cars to miss this month’s Geneva motor show, but the DeltaWing GT is on its way to the road.

Announced on the eve of the 12 Hours of Sebring sports car race in the US, the DeltaWing is the brainchild of Don Panoz, a man whose stubborn but creative nature has led him to challenge the status quo time and time again.

This time, the 80-year-old Panoz is turning to fast cars, claiming the upcoming family of DeltaWing-based road cars will be the most economical in history.

He has confirmed that the first DeltaWing street car will be the two-seat GT, with a target price of $US60,000 and a 260kW turbocharged 1.4-litre in-line four-cylinder petrol engine.

Though Panoz is refusing to say which manufacturer will be supplying the engine and where the rest of the powertrain and electronics are coming from, he is making assurances that it will be strong, reliable and fuel-efficient.

The entry-level four-seat version of the DeltaWing, which the imagination pictures as something quite strange-looking indeed, has its own target price of around $US30,000. Panoz has made no mention of international sales, though.

He did explain, however, that the narrow-nose sedan will only have around 75kW of power, but that’s because that is all it would need to be fast and incredibly fuel-efficient.

Panoz claims a study into his initial designs came up with a real-world fuel consumption figure of 3.4L/100km and a CO2 emissions figure that meets 2025 CAFÉ standards in the US, and is right on the cusp of Europe’s 2020 CO2 limit of 90g/km.

There is also talk of pre-engineering the family of cars for hybrid and electric powertrains.

“I’m certainly no tree hugger, but if you can reduce emissions and consumption, that just seems like the right thing to do,” Panoz said.

This isn’t the first time Panoz has dabbled in production cars, with the most famous of his two production efforts being the mighty Esperante (the other was the AIV Roadster).

He and his son, Dan, also revitalized LMP racing with a stubborn, Quixotic insistence that they could win Le Mans with a front-engined car, which lead to the era of the glorious-sounding Panoz racers taking on the world.

While fiercely driven and painstakingly engineered, they were ultimately victims of the physics of their basic layouts in a world of mid-engined racers.

Panoz didn’t completely walk away from racing at the end of the sports car effort, though. Instead, he teamed up with Chip Ganassi to develop the DeltaWing as a proposal for future Indy racers.

The idea was that its narrow nose and small front tyres would give it low drag, low weight and high efficiency, delivering similar lap times to conventional open-wheeled racers with half the power.

It was passed over as an Indy racer, though Panoz refused to give up on the car and turned it into a sports racer, finishing fourth in the 2014 Petit Le Mans in the US.

The DeltaWing started in last year’s Le Mans 24 Hour race as an electric car with Nissan badging, before it fell into controversy.

Former supporter, Nissan, announced its own DeltaWing-style racer, dubbed the Zeod RC, which attracted a lawsuit from DeltaWing and several scathing newspaper advertisements.

Nissan has steadfastly refused to comment on the ongoing legal action, though has privately insisted that because Ben Bowlby designed the original car when he worked for DeltaWing and the Zeod RC for Nissan, it sees no wrongdoing.

DeltaWing, though, insists that because Bowlby worked for them at the time the DeltaWing race car was designed, it remains their intellectual property.

Nissan, meantime, appears to have gone cold on its plan for a production version of the 2013 BladeGlider concept.