Motorsports has always been exciting, what with the addictive mix of stimulating sights, sounds, speed and all around pagentry. Lately, though, two interconnected and formerly prominent aspects of the sport have been put on the back burner by many series: creativity and innovation. The reasons given for the push toward homogenization range from keeping competition close to reigning in spending and everything in between.

But it wasn’t always like this. It used to be that rules and regulations were kept open enough to allow the exploration of new ideas in design and propulsion. As a result, every now and then there were new cars that were so far removed from the norm and so “out there” that they (and often the men who drove them) became legends, even if they turned out to be failures. While there are so many machines that fit that description, we’ve tried to narrow the field down to a list of ten. Here they are, in no particular order.