- Dodge’s original Charger helped kickstart our decades-long obsession with rear spoilers.
- Superbirds, Cosworths and Batmobiles turned giant wings into iconic design signatures.
- Modern wings have active flaps, can function as airbrakes or even hide inside bodywork.
Rear wings on road cars driven at road speeds are ridiculous. They block your view, attract unwanted attention from the cops and, on plenty of cars, are more useful serving as car-meet drinks shelves than creating actual downforce. We absolutely love them, of course. But after six decades of increasingly outrageous appendages, which production car deserves the crown for the greatest wing ever?
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We can trace America’s obsession back to the first-generation Dodge Charger. Its slippery fastback body created unwanted lift in NASCAR, so Dodge added a small lip spoiler and made it available to customers to satisfy racing rules. By 1967, the Charger had become the first American production car offered with a rear spoiler. Tiny wing, enormous legacy.
Related: This Porsche 911 Has Spoilers Growing Out Of Its Taillights And No One Stopped It
Things escalated quickly. The 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona and its 1970 Plymouth Superbird brother went skyscraper-high, while BMW’s 3.0 CSL Batmobile went for quantity as well as size. It featured a spoiler above the rear window plus that colossal trunk-mounted wing, though the latter wasn’t road legal in Germany and was delivered inside the trunk for owners to install themselves.
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Then came the poster legends. The Lamborghini Countach’s wing cost it 10 mph (16 km/h), but looked like it added the same amount. The 1973 Carrera RS 2.7’s ducktail changed the Porsche 911’s classic silhouette, and the Turbo did it all over again the year after, but soon 911s looked naked without them.
By the 1990s big wings were essential streetwear and a core part of the visual and aerodynamic packages on cars like the Toyota Supra Mk4 and Subaru Impreza WRX STI. And Ford’s Escort RS Cosworth doubled down with its unforgettable two-tier whale-tail arrangement that would have been three tiers if designer Frank Stephenson’s original sketch hadn’t been toned down.
Wings With Brains
Modern aero is much smarter than those OG wings. The Porsche 911 GT3 RS has a roof-high, two-element swan-neck monster with an F1-style DRS function. And Zenvo’s TSR-S came with a Centripetal Wing that didn’t merely change angle forwards and backwards but dramatically tilts from side to side. Some wings aren’t even visible, lying flush with the body until they’re summoned to dish out some downforce, or to act as an air brake.
There are dozens more that deserve mention, from the huge fixed wing on the Viper ACR to the one bisected by a Le Mans-style dorsal fin on the Lamborghini Veneno. So forget wind tunnels and downforce numbers for a second and just focus on the wow factor. Which road car has the greatest rear wing or spoiler ever?
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