In the days when racing’s regulations were somewhat less restrictive than perhaps they are now, designers occasionally looked beyond current conventions to try something new and different
Racers are renowned for their knack for circumventing daunting situations, finding solutions to problems considered insoluble and generally thinking outside the proverbial box. While many of the resulting insights prove to be breakthroughs, others do not, and there may be no better example of this than the creation of a handful of what have been called “Pontoon Cars.”
For a later version of his unique, motorcycle-influenced car, Taruffi swapped the driver’s cockpit from the left pod to the right, as seen here during a demonstration run at Silverstone.
Citing its derivation from the French word pont, for bridge, old Noah Webster defines “pontoon” as a “portable float used in building a floating temporary bridge.” Most of these cars, however, were bridges to little but frustration for their builders, yet variations of the idea regularly found a home in the realm of experimental automotive technology during the middle portion of the last century.
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