In nearly every competitive field, success is dictated by knowing what you can radically reinvent and what simply needs to be executed to perfection, and nowhere is this more evident than in motorsport.
There are countless stories of winning cars that stuck to conventional but perfectly tuned motorsport gears and even more tales of machines that made it onto a grid with a batch of brilliant ideas executed in a way that can only be described as tragically badly.
Life L190
Generally considered to be the single worst Formula One car to drive at a race event, Life Racing Engines, named after founder Ernesto Vita, had a bold plan to build an unconventional W12 engine that in theory provided as much power as a V12 but with the size of a V8.
This engine would be fitted to whatever car body would fit it, and the entire exercise would be a showcase that hopefully would inspire another team to take on the engine.
After a disastrous season where at one point the car’s fastest lap was five minutes off the pace, Life folded, its disgrace hidden by the more ignominious fate of the similarly struggling Andrea Moda.
Nissan GT-R LM Nismo
The radically designed Le Mans car was meant to be a radical state-of-the-art beast when first unveiled, with a wide front-wheel drive design and a kinetic energy recovery system to give it 1250 horsepower.
However, it only raced once in a disastrous showing where it only had half its stated speed and the car was quickly dropped.
Ford RS200
A car at the extremes of both ambition and tragedy, the fate of the Group B rally special car was one that has gone down in infamy as ending one of the most famous eras of rally racing.
Unlike the previous two cars, the RS200 had potential, but its power-to-weight ratio was poor and it had such bad turbo lag that it became a nightmare to drive, something that would prove fatal to three spectators when the car jolted into the path of onlookers.
This, alongside a fatal accident in Germany, led not only to the car being obsolete after the season ended but the entire racing series being closed down.
