The brief is simple: they should exist mostly for styling, and the addition of both chrome trim and styled rear lenses is a bonus (as with the Safari) but not a strict requirement. I adore the Safari’s modest and sleek fins, but there are examples of outlandish ones that fit the bill. My favorite fins are on a European sports car, feature brash chrome alone the top, afterburner-style taillight lenses, and were drawn by one of the most famous Italiancarrozzeria .
Better still: they’re on one of the most affordable European sports cars available: the Volvo P1800.
“The P1800 has tailfins?!” you may be thinking, but look: there they are. So well-integrated into the overall shape, the fins aren’t pointed at the top of their trailing edge as on many American classics that also wear the styling cue. Volvo even included a ton of chrome to brighten things up, but again, the trim is on a surface that naturally receives a lot of sunlight, so it’s not really noticed until you see a P1800 without it and wonder why it looks so strange.
For a dash of provenance, Volvo asked a design house to help assist during the car’s development. Even the original Frua-penned prototype wears the fins and trim that entered production, which is (in my estimation, at least) one of the few times acarrozzeria design was reproduced without much alteration in such large numbers.
Anyway, which classic car do you think had the nicest-looking set of tailfins?
Images by: Jeremy Heslup, RM Sotheby's, oldconceptcars.com, coachbuild.com, cars-mercedes.com
