A handful of VERY early '81 cars had the flat hood w/no lines, and no fuel flap. The way that you can tell these cars apart from the '82's is that they will have absolutely NO badging on the front of the car from the factory (no "DMC" grill emblem, and no "De Lorean" hood badge). As it has been said before, the gas flap was dropped either because of legal reasons (no DOT regulation stating that you couldn't put access to the fuel cell in the trunk.), or because it was faster and cheaper not to cut the flaps out on every bonnet. The lines were dropped because too many hoods were cracking durring the stamping process. From the looks of everything, the flap & the lines appear to be last minute changes at the start of production, rather than the other way around. Since DMCL already had the tooling for the flat hoods, that kind of change in body production probably cost very little, if anything at all to invoke. Or, one theory might be that while gearing the factory up for production is when they made the flat bonnets that are so common on some '82's, and all '83's. A last minute change to switch over to the grooved hoods may have been yet another delay in starting production. Later on as a cost cutting measure, perhaps it was decided to use up existing stock rather than manufacture new. But this last part is only a theory... Some of the spoilers do look nice on the D, but it would probably be best not to install one. A spoilers job is to place more down force on the rear end of the car. On a car with a front mounted engine, AND rear wheel drive is the only time that they will properly do their job: prevent "fish-tailing" (sliding of the rear wheels). On a front wheel drive car, they will do nothing, but on a DeLorean (rear to mid-engine cars), I would imagine that by placing more force on the back, it could possibly give the effect of even worse weight distibution, thus making the car more unstable in wet weather. If I'm wrong about this, please let me know. -Robert >I think all 1982 DeLoreans had a flat hood. The pleated hood with the >flap was early 81, without the flap for late 81. They went totally flat (no lines) in 82. I have seen some cars with the DeLorean badge on the >older style hood. Looks OK to me. >I have a rear wing on my car. It looks good. If it was not on the car >when I purchased it, I dont know if I would have added it. See >http://remus.rutgers.edu/~mxl/dmc/Ser6-10.JPG for a shot of it.