Whose BladeGlider: A legal sword fight

Nissan says the idea for the BladeGlider, the wedge-shaped concept that drew crowds at the Tokyo Motor Show last week, came out of the clear blue sky.

The car's inspirations, Nissan says, are "the soaring, silent, panoramic freedom of a glider and the triangular shape of a high-performance 'swept wing' aircraft."

One of Nissan's former racing partners begs to differ.

Delta Wing Project 56, a company backed by racing tycoon and pharmaceuticals entrepreneur Don Panoz, is suing the Japanese automaker, arguing that the BladeGlider is a knockoff of its similarly wedge-shaped DeltaWing race car, which debuted at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race in 2012 with a Nissan engine under the hood.

The civil suit that Panoz's lawyers filed Nov. 22 in Superior Court in Jackson County, Ga., against Nissan and one of the BladeGlider's project team members, Ben Bowlby, seeks a cease-and-desist order that would prevent the company from displaying, racing or selling cars with such a design. Also named in the suit is Darren Cox, director of Nissan's global motorsports program.

Bowlby was behind Panoz's DeltaWing, which Nissan helped finance. He was hired by Nissan to become director of motorsport innovation and went on to design Nissan's ZEOD RC electric racer, which shares the DeltaWing's narrow, arrow-shaped footprint. Both racers feature a wider wheel track in the rear than in the front.

Nissan hopes to commercialize the radical design idea, assuring audiences that the similarly shaped BladeGlider will become a production car.

Panoz says he spent tens of millions of dollars to prove that the DeltaWing worked. On those grounds, the 78-year-old millionaire claims intellectual property rights to its unusual shape, which he wants to license to automakers.

Panoz said in an interview last month that he has built two concepts of production cars and is trying to license those exotic designs to automakers as a way to boost fuel economy. He said he worries that if Nissan is able to race and sell its wedge-shaped cars, the DeltaWing's shape essentially will enter the public domain of automotive design.

"Everybody else in the market would be open to that kind of design," he said. "And what do automobile companies do? They see something that's taking off and they want to mimic it, don't they?"

The lawsuit adds Panoz, best known in the auto industry for bankrolling the limited-run Panoz Esperante sports car, to a long line of automotive mavericks from Carroll Shelby to Elon Musk who have fought in court for the rights to their designs. A spokesman for Nissan North America in Nashville declined to comment on the lawsuit.

There is no denying the resemblance between the DeltaWing and the BladeGlider.

Both have four wheels like a standard car. Both have narrow front ends. The BladeGlider's two front tires are just 4 inches wide and 2 feet apart, giving the car a slim snout that flares to a normal width toward the rear of the car.

The unconventional design has proven worthy on the racetrack. Though the DeltaWing has yet to win a race, it finished fifth out of 42 cars last year at the Petit Le Mans outside Atlanta, held at a track Panoz used to own. It did so with a four-cylinder, 300-hp engine; the fourth-place finisher had a 450-hp V-8.

"In the very beginning with this car, because it was so new and such a departure from what race cars were, with their big front wheels and wide front ends, a lot of experts said, 'The car won't work. It will fly. It won't corner,'" Panoz said. "The car does work. It doesn't fly, and it does corner."

It so thoroughly challenged the conventional wisdom of car racing that Automobile magazine, which had canceled its Racing Car of the Year Award for seven years for what it called stifling race regulations and a lack of technological innovation, resurrected the award in January for the DeltaWing.

"Yes, the DeltaWing looks weird, and, yes, it may render an entire generation of racing cars obsolete," the magazine wrote at the time. "But the genie is out of the bottle, and we intend to embrace it."

The DeltaWing lawsuit, which accuses Bowlby of misappropriating confidential information, is the culmination of a months-long confrontation with Nissan, which pulled its sponsorship of the DeltaWing vehicle this year. Nissan later revealed plans to put its own wedge-shaped car on the starting line at 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2014.

Bowlby had drawn up plans for the DeltaWing in 2009 while employed by race car owner Chip Ganassi, according to the lawsuit. In 2011, Bowlby started working with Panoz, who licensed the design and paid to build it for the following year's Le Mans race.

They soon lined up Nissan as a key sponsor. As part of the agreement, Nissan offered money and expertise, and provided the engine used for the DeltaWing's first two races, the suit says.

Soon after the car's first race in October 2012, Bowlby parted ways with Panoz and signed on with Nissan. In June 2013, at 24 Hours of Le Mans, the automaker unveiled the wedge-shaped ZEOD RC and announced plans to field it at Le Mans in 2014.

At a Nov. 19 Nissan reception in Yokohama, Japan, Nissan officials showed the ZEOD and BladeGlider concept sitting side by side. Nissan presented the BladeGlider as a possible production car, inspired by the ZEOD.

"People have asked how a car of that shape can handle around corners," Bowlby told Automotive News, referring to the BladeGlider. He gestured at the ZEOD RC. "We have proof right here that it works fine."

Nissan describes the BladeGlider, with its lightweight, aerodynamic design, as an early prototype for a new breed of sports car that defies a century's worth of automotive design and engineering conventions. Andy Palmer, the automaker's global product planning chief, said last month that the car is more than a design exercise.

"This will be a production car," he said.

Panoz, who made his fortune in pharmaceuticals as a pioneer of the nicotine patch, is not new to building cars. In the 1990s, his company Panoz Auto Development started selling a boutique sports car called the Panoz Roadster at some U.S. Ford dealerships.

The company went on to market the Esperante, another two-seat convertible, from 1999 until 2007, with Panoz's son, Danny, taking the lead. Now the elder Panoz has started a new company called Delta Wing Technologies and hired as its president Al Speyer, the longtime executive director of motorsports at Bridgestone/Firestone Inc.

Panoz's company has spent $20 million on two concept cars falling on opposite ends of the cost spectrum. One is a two-seat roadster that would compete with exotic cars from brands such as Ferrari; the other is a four-seat family sedan.

Meanwhile, Panoz is trying to license the unorthodox wedge design to major automakers, saying its aerodynamic profile and reduced weight offer vastly improved fuel economy.

The wedge design may have one key advantage: Under new federal fuel economy standards, targets are determined largely by the vehicle's wheelbase, not on its curb weight or passenger capacity. Because of their long wheelbases, cars designed like the DeltaWing qualify for lower mpg targets, but they are much lighter and more aerodynamic than conventional cars with comparable wheelbases.