Every February, the winner of the Daytona 500 hoists a trophy over his head in victory lane, and sitting on top of it is a silver model of a car that never once raced.

A Concept Car Built Like a Fighter Jet

The car on the trophy is Firebird I, a 1953 experimental vehicle built by General Motors. It looked like a fighter jet with wheels, and the engine under its skin was closer to an aircraft's than a car's.

Under its fiberglass body sat a 370-horsepower gas turbine called the Whirlfire Turbo-Power. GM had never put an engine like it in a car before.

Firebird I was never meant for the road or the track. It was a rolling engineering experiment, built to see whether a gas turbine could ever work in a passenger car.

GM showed it off at the 1954 Motorama, its traveling car show. The original sits today at the GM Heritage Center in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

The real 1953 GM Firebird I XP-21 concept car, jet-fighter-styled silver body with a tail fin and bubble canopy, on display or at a GM show, side or three-quarter view — The real Firebird I, the 1953 GM concept car the Daytona 500 trophy's model represents. Photo: Karrmann, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Man Behind the Tailfins

Firebird I came out of the studio of Harley Earl, General Motors' first design chief. Earl approved the design that gave the 1948 Cadillac the first true tailfins on an American car, borrowing the idea from a WWII fighter plane.

He also ran a secret project inside GM known as Project Opel. He pitched it to Chevrolet's general manager, and it went on sale in 1953 as the Chevrolet Corvette.

A Trophy Named for a Friend

Bill France Sr., the man who founded NASCAR, was a friend of Earl's. When France created a permanent trophy for his new Daytona 500 race, he named it after him.

The Harley J. Earl Trophy was first awarded in 1959, the year of the very first Daytona 500. The perpetual trophy stands about four feet tall in a triangular shape that echoes the speedway's own layout, and it is housed at Daytona International Speedway.

Two Trophies, One Tradition

Since 1998, every Daytona 500 winner has also taken home a personal copy of the trophy to keep. Each replica weighs 54 pounds and stands 18 inches tall.

Sculptor John Lajba builds them by hand in Omaha, Nebraska. Each one takes about six weeks of work to finish.

The original trophy, the one from 1959, lives at the speedway. Only the replica goes home with the driver.

Every February, the Daytona 500 winner still lifts a model of the jet car Harley Earl dreamed up. The next one goes up on February 21, 2027, the 69th running of the race.

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