For reasons perhaps beyond anyone’s understanding, F1 . They were universally loathed, and quickly banned, and now you can own one.

I am somewhat fascinated with the 2014 F1 cars, a real beacon of how the people in charge of F1's rules try to regulate a certain kind of racing, and teams end up producing something else. F1 has wanted cheaper racing. Costs stay astronomical. F1 wants more overtaking. Short of DRS-assisted passes, races still look like processions. Every time that the rules dictate one thing, the teams figure out a way around it.

And so we had the 2014 cars, which were meant to, I don’t know, do something. Something that didn’t entail cars having Groucho Marx noses on them.

The ugliest of them all was probably the Caterham team, but I myself was a fan of the Lotus cars, which ran one short prong and one long one, to meet the letter of the rules if not the spirit.

spotted this “twin tusk” nose cone for sale, with bidding at £900.00. The explains why exactly these Lotus noses looked as they did:

In order to meet the single lower nose tip regulation, the two tusks are of unequal length, so the longer one forms the mandatory nose tip, while the other is short enough to avoid being considered part of the nose tip by the regulations.

This leaves each tusk to act as a crash structure, the front wing mounting pylon and then, as they narrow towards the rear of the car, also become turning vanes.

Of course a person does not need a 2014 Lotus F1 nose cone, but F1 didn’t really need it either.