It might not be a household name when it comes to mass-market motoring, but DeltaWing has been building a reputation within racing where its very unusual looking car has been proving that optimised aerodynamics are just as important as horsepower when it come to going fast.

And now it's looking to move from the raceway to the driveway with a road-legal sportscar.

The DeltaWing racecar looks like an arrow tip or a triangle - incredibly narrow at the nose and very wide at the rear.

But as strange as it looks, it can keep up with all of the conventionally styled competition despite running a much, much smaller engine thanks to how it cuts through the air.

The company is planning to take this aerodynamic trickery to the highway and is developing a DeltaWing road car.



The concept is yet to be officially unveiled but the company claims the results of an independent engineering analysis of the four-passenger car design show that it would be capable of getting almost 3.2l/100km from its 1.4-litre engine, theoretically making it the most efficient American-built petrol-powered road car in history.

There are a host of small diesel and gasoline engine European cars already on the market that can match or better  3.2l/100km without resorting to aerodynamic trickery.

However, DeltaWing's plan is to prove the design works and then enable the platform on which it's built to support different types of powertrain - traditional petrol, diesel, fuel cell or full electric.

The engine used for the engineering analysis is an off-the-shelf powertrain rather than something built specifically for the car or for efficiency.



"I'm very pleased to see how this objective testing validates and even exceeds our initial estimates," said Don Panoz, DeltaWing Technology Group chairman and CEO.

"This key milestone allows us to immediately move forward with our plans to build prototype two- and four-seat DeltaWing vehicles and begin real-world testing."

DeltaWing is by no means the only company studying the benefits of a narrow, lightweight front end for cutting drag and air resistance.

In 2013 at the Tokyo motor show, Nissan unveiled something called the BladeGlider, an unconventional three-seat electric sportscar which bears a striking likeness to the DeltaWing.

When it was first announced as a concept, the indication was that it would be a road-going production model within four years.

A year and a half after the Tokyo show, Nissan says that it is still discussing whether or not to go ahead and make the BladeGlider a reality.

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