I came across a picture in Motor Sport magazine (August 1959) of a Porsche Spyder with an aerofoil mounted to rear, was this one of the first ever seen in racing ?

The Porsche was entered for the 1959 Supercortemaggiore at Monza by the Swiss, May brothers , the aerofoil was rejected by the scrutineers so says the caption to the photo.

Did it ever appear again ? any more info would be of great interest

Many thanks

It's all in here
http://forums.autosport.com/index.php?showtopic=1008&hl

Thanks David , I did do a search but didn't find this thread

Just read through the post that David highlighted , a brief mention of the May brothers , but is there any more information about them being as their wing innovation was unique at the time ?

There's plenty in Ludvigsen's "Excellence Was Expected", incl. the following. Michael and Pierre May were in fact cousins. The contour of the wing was taken from NACA airfoils and the wing was sized to give a downward pressure at 150 kph as great as the weight of the car. It was, however, adjustable from the cockpit. The car was first entered in the 1956 Nürburgring 1000 kms, where they had to remove the wing after scrutineering. Etc....

In practice the full blown works Porsches were completely blown away by May's production Spyder 550! He was an incredible 4th fastest in practice, even beating Fangio's Ferrari 860 Monza and Behra's Maserati 300S! Under immense pressure from Porsche's teammanager Huschke von Hanstein the officials finally demanded that the May's car had to be de-winged.

What's German for Luddites?

'Maschinenstürmer' or 'Technikfeind'.

With such a great increase in performance , why didn't any other team copy the wing innovation, was it banned at all races , did the May cousins give up on the idea?

Whatever the reason, it took 9 years before a wing popped up on Jim Hall's revolutionary and succesful Chaparral 2E.

Actually Bruce McLaren experimented with an aerofoil on the M2A Firestone test car. During a test on the Zandvoort track in November 1965 the device gave a massive 3 seconds improvement per lap. It's very hard to comprehend that it was immediately forgotten for more than two years!

Hard to say.

The "petrolhead" teams possibly shied away from something that felt so unnatural.

Most of the sports racing cars of 1956 were road-capable and prototypes for future road cars. This was certainly true of Porsche. (I may be wrong, but I think that James Dean was killed in a 550). So sports car makers may have felt that as something that outlandish wouldn't sell on a production car there was no point in developing it.

As to open-wheeled cars, there was little understanding of aerodynamics and a deep suspicion. The Mercedes streamliner enjoyed mixed success; although their problems at Silverstone in 1954 were probably tyre-related the all enveloping bodywork was blamed. At indianapolis a streamlined car, the Sumar Special, was tried but they experienced problems and removed the streamlinung for the race. The various Reims and Monza bolt-on streamlined bodywork attempts were conspicuously unsuccessful so you can understand the scepticism.

Michael May was evidently a very capable engineer. He went on to do important fuel injection work for Ferrari.