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The scene out the rear-view mirror of Porsche's latest special edition is both ruined and made by the big yellow banana arching across the rear deck. This huge wing censors the view, redacting any useful information the mirror might provide. It also makes me happy.

A rear wing is plumage on a peacock, a (mostly) useless flourish which attracts admiring looks from other automotive enthusiasts and a weary oy gevalt from everyone else. A wing sticks up for all to see, to show that here is something special, something fancy, something ridiculous. Here is a driver who cares deeply.

One oft-quoted and hateful theory has it that the length of women's skirts are inversely related to the health of the economy. Shorter skirts equal more confident bankers or some nonsense. There is, however, a better, equally inaccurate, less chauvinist index: The Wingdex. The wing index tracks height and girth of rear wings.

Peak Wing came in 1970 with the Plymouth Superbird. It had a wing so high it reached above the roofline. The wing stood on two precipitous struts which were wider at the base, like a pair of bell-bottoms. The aerodynamic magic used to determine the wing's precise height is still a source of great MOPAR mystery. Soon after came the oil crisis and wings disappeared virtually overnight. Coincidence? Probably not!

The 1980s brought Reagan's tax cuts, economic boom, and arguably the golden age of the supercar with the Ferrari F40 and Porsche 959.

The F40 has one of the world's great wings: a sharp geometric wonder in perfect proportion to its angular bodywork. The tifosi will hunt me down for this heresy, but the F40's fin is the spiritual successor to the Superbird's. Both mark high points in the Wingdex.

What the Porsche 959 and 911 Turbo lacked in wing height, they made up for in girth. The Turbo's tail was the size of a picnic table.

The Lamborghini Countach, which debuted sad and wingless in the 1970s had, by the following decade, grown a fantastic arrow-shaped appendage. By 1990, the compact Mercedes 190E Cosworth sedan had grown a foil nearly as big as the F40's.

But the Black Monday recession was in 1987, I hear you say. Well, I never said the Wingdex was perfect. It lags behind the market slightly. But it could explain why, after the 2008 recession, the Bugatti Veyron debuted with a wing that could be hidden completely. Some say Bugatti did this to reduce aerodynamic drag, but we know the real reason: A look-at-me wing on a million-dollar supercar would've been unthinkable at a time when people were losing their homes to foreclosure.

Throughout it all, there have been good wings and bad wings.

A skyward pointing piece of fibreglass wrapped in carbon-fibre-look stickers is a bad wing. Installed poorly, it's more likely to provide dangerous aerodynamic lift rather than steadying downforce. At the very least it's creating drag, which kills fuel economy. You'll see these bolted to the trunk lid of vehicles like the Chevy Cobalt, Acura Integra or Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder.

The first wings were just as crude. In 1928, engineers stuck upside-down airplane wings to the side of the rocket-powered Opel RAK 2 experimental car to "prevent unintended flight," according to Hemmings. Automotive wings didn't take off until the late 1960s, when they became a regular feature on winning F1 cars, starting with Graham Hill's Lotus Type 49B.

The wing of the Cayman GT4 is a good wing. It could double as a snowboard in a pinch, and – at the GT4's top speed – works with the rest of the bodywork to provide 100 kilograms of downforce, pressing the car into the pavement. It's like having a gorilla sitting on the roof. On the highway or in traffic, it's as useless as having a gorilla on the roof, but seeing that wing blocking the rearview mirror is a nice reminder you're driving something fancy.

The GT4's wing is a mid-size affair. Not too big, not too small. Does it represent a stagnant, slowly recovering economy? Maybe. The beauty of the Wingdex – just like most economic theory – is that it can be bent, by cherry-picking examples and selective blindness, to explain whatever the market might be doing.

Judging by the wing on the McLaren P1 LM, it's a good time to invest. On the other hand, the non-wing on Aston Martin's new DB11 would indicate that it's not. Good luck.

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