What Happens When You Mix a Formula 1 Car, a Spaceship and a Periscope?

The name of this piece has probably never been thought of before. You will see the result further down.

In Formula 1, anything that gives you an additional advantage will be used in the desperation to be No. 1. We have had geniuses such as Colin Chapman, Gordon Murray, Rory Bryne and Adrian Newey all have produced cars that, due to their design, are some of the greatest driving machines ever.

Cars such as the Lotus 79, Ferrari F2002, Mclaren MP4/4 and Williams FW14B were some of the most dominant machines ever.

We have also seen some ideas that haven't been very successful.

The Williams FW26, with its Walrus front nose, put Williams from being on the verge of being able to challenge Ferrari to behind, not only Ferrari, but BAR and Renault. The 4-wheel drive, gas turbine powered, Lotus 56 had some success in America but in Europe (when it wasn't raining), it was unable to match any of the other cars.

But the most insane and bizarre looking Formula 1 car I have ever seen has to go to the Eifelland Type 21. Over the 1972 season, the Eifelland car went through many cosmetic changes designed to boost performance. In the end, it was nearly normal.

The car was underneath a March 721 but what designer Luigi Colani did to it made it one of the most mad looking cars ever.

Colani's seemed to have a hatred of straight lines. He had never designed a Formula 1 car before, but all of the other things Colani had designed, including cameras and computer mice as well as road cars barely had a straight line on them.

Luigi decided to use this concept in his Formula 1 car design. He turned his concept that everything should be circular or curved and began designing new body work for the March car. What he designed as you can see was one of the oddest looking cars I have seen. 

The Eifelland team was owned by a German called Guenther Henericci in an attempt to advertise his caravan business. 

The Eifelland Type 21 had body work that was designed to answer the question posed in the article title. The rear wing was a one-piece design and so was the cockpit and that weird periscope, which was actually a mirror. The air box which was normally just behind and above the drivers head was now in the front wing.

It was a unique concept.

To Colani's credit, though, it wasn't slow during testing. The car had some problems one of them being, rather unsurprisingly, not producing enough downforce. The problems didn't stop there, with all that mad body work design preventing the car from cooling efficiently, the car kept overheating every few laps.

By the time the team entered the world championship at the second round in Kylami, a lot of Colani's design was changed, including the front wing. Rather than the Colani-designed wing and they know had what seemed to be a tea tray on the front.

The periscope remained though and the design around the cockpit was still the same so at least some of Colani's unique design remained. Also there was still a lot of encasing bodywork and there was no real side pods, so the car was still unique looking.

The car was drive by Rolf Stommelen who got it to 25th on the grid and finished a reasonable 13th, two laps down.

Rather sadly after this race there was more design changes and nearly all of Colani's ideas were gone but still around the cockpit the periscope remained as well as a lot of the original cockpit design.

When it came to the third round Jarama the new, blue Eifelland produced a slightly improved performance in qualifying, securing 17th before being caught up in someone else's accident near the end of the race resulting in a DNF.

The car wasn't the best handling so qualifying last in Monaco wasn't unexpected but kept out of trouble on race day, despite the torrential rain, to finish a very strong 10th. Rolf had another strong showing in Belgium on race day after qualifying in 20th he fought his way up to 11th by the end.

In France, Rolf did excellently qualifying 15th and was going well in the race before a puncture ruined his race and he ended up 16th and one lap down. At Brands Hatch, Rolf really struggled, qualifying 25th out of 26 before finishing 10th but a full five laps behind the leaders.

At the daunting Nurburgring Rolf qualified an unbelievable 14th and was running well before the Eifelland had its first mechanical failure, putting Stommelen out of the race.

The team by now was really struggling for money. The boss sold his caravan business and the team to someone else who didn't care about racing. The team went to the Austrian race under the "Team Stommelen" name. He qualified 17th and ended up classified 15th after an engine failure five laps from home.

With no more money, the team didn't enter the final three races and Eifelland didn't appear again.

One of Formula 1's true eccentric teams were gone.