I would think the race car analogy would be more an example of the detrimental effects of wake turbulence. It takes power to push the car through the air and that power, IIRC, is linear. In the case of race cars the following cars require less power for the same speed as the lead car does a disproportionate amount of the work of moving the air around the vehicle, setting up the wake in which others can follow. In the windmill example the blades use the wind energy to generate the lift to make them turn. Less total wind energy would be available to turn the second and third sets of blades due to losses to turbulence, rather like a competition yacht spoiling the wind of a competitor by turning in front of it.

What my brilliant possibility requires is either the ability to dither the wind direction back and forth by a few degrees or to rotate the array at a similar rate and I cannot imagine a feasible way to do that. I wrote before I thought.  

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."