TRIVIA TIME!!!

WE ONCE AGAIN QUESTION YOUR ANSWERS! 

I was hoping to open a can of worms by asking who fronted up the first true wing on a road-racing car, and I belkieve I succeeded. A lot of folks went for the obvious (Chaparral 2E in 1966) and some sit-down-to-pee Europhiles insisted it was the F1 Ferrari 312 of 1968 (I guess if something happens first over on this side of the Atlantic, it doesn't count). And then you had the famous and VERY scary pre-WWII German record cars from Opel and Mercedes-Benz shown below. But those wings were mostly to keep them from taking off and not really "road-racing" applications....

But several of you (particularly 3rd-place raffle-winner Bob Allen from Walton-on-Thames, England) agreed with me (pending further information, of course) that the first-ever road-racing wing was mounted on a privateer Porsche 550 entered and driven by a clever young engineer named Michael May at The Nurburgring in 1956.

In fact, Bob's answer was so complete (and included so much stuff I'd never heard before) that I have regurgitated it verbatim below: 

I believe the claim to the first use of a wing for aerodynamic benefit goes to Michel May. In 1956 this 22 year old Swiss amateur racing driver was a student at the Zurich Technical University and experimented with an inverted wing mounted over the cockpit of his Porsche 550 Spyder (550-0031). He and his brother Pierre raced the car, bought by their cousin, on the European circuit and saw the immediate benefits of the downforce created to increase grip and cornering. Michel added a lever system to adjust the tilt of the wing which created outstanding results.

At its debut, the Nürburgring 1000 Kilometres on 27-May-56, they were met with the predictable ridicule, an obvious reaction from the philistines among their competitors but the car was passed by scrutineering and they went on to qualify fourth in practice - faster, even, than Fangio and Behra. Outpacing the works Porsches prompted Huschke von Hanstein to lodge a protest for the wing to be banned under the pretext that it was unsafe and obscured the vision of following drivers. He threatened to pull all four works cars from the race so the officials backed down and bowed to his request. May raced the car with the wing in one other race, the Supercortemaggiore in June but did not finish and the concept was then shelved.

May continued his engineering career working at Daimler-Benz on his own patent fuel injection system and was approached by Porsche to get more power out of their F1 engine. He went on the agreement that if he increased its power, he would get an F1 drive in the F1 car; May achieved the goal but von Hanstein convinced Porsche not to let him drive for fear of embarrassing the works drivers with his ability. He left Porsche to become a consultant to Ferrari on its Bosch direct injection and, in doing so, mentioned the wing to Mauro Forghieri. As a result, Ferrari successfully used a wing on the 1968 type 312, one of the first in F1.

So there! (my words, not Bob's).

Anyhow, I'm still working away relentlessly on the new book (every day, in fact) so you won't be getting many e-blasts for awhile. But here's a quick trivia photo puzzler: