TECHNOLOGY SIXWHEELED CARS
The joy of six Adding extra wheels to a racecar might seem logical, but not always for the same reasons. Racecar charts the rise and fall of motorsport’s six-wheelers By LAWRENCE BUTCHER
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ast year, the lunatics at Hennessey, a US creator of Lotus-based machines that top 250mph, previewed a concept called ‘Deep Space’. The $3 million electric hypercar is designed to surpass 200mph and, in order to harness the presumably several thousand horsepower electric powertrain, it will feature six wheels. Radical as this concept may seem to some of the younger generation, company CEO, John Hennessey, is not the first to decide four wheels just won’t cut it, and in racing many have added extra wheels in search of performance over the years. Rule makers – ever the spoilsports – clamped down on such antics in the 1980s, but fortunately a plethora of six-wheelers, some well-known, others less so, made it out into the wild before they did so.
The pioneers The motivation behind bolting on an extra axle has evolved over the years, and in the early days it revolved solely around the general unsuitability of then current tyre technology for racing. The late 1920s and early ’30s saw the idea of an extra pair of wheels, though not an extra axle, starting to come into vogue. Possibly the earliest example is Raymond Mays’ (who was later heavily involved in first ERA, and then BRM racing operations) Vauxhall Villiers TT. Hitting the track in 1929, it was based on a 1922 Vauxhall TT racer, sported a twin rear wheel set up and won that year’s Shelsley Walsh hillclimb. Through the 1930s, several manufacturers, including ERA, would follow his lead. However, the most well-known application of twin rear wheels is probably the Auto Union Type C of 1936. This not only ran in grands prix, but also competed successfully in European hillclimb events, for the latter fitted with twin rear tyres to help tame its Porschedesigned V16 engine. Not to be outdone, Mercedes used a similar set up to great effect later in the 1930s. At the brutal Grossglockner hillclimb in 1939,
The six-wheeled, Porsche V16-engined Auto Union Type C of 1936, seen here at Goodwood, competed successfully in various grands prix and hillclimb events 64 www.racecar-engineering.com SEPTEMBER 2022
In the early days [motivation] revolved solely around the general unsuitability of then current tyre technology for racing
