Time Traveler

The Sports-Car Driver’s Off-Roader

1. This much weight pushed by this much power is a recipe for brake fade. Start with high-temp brake fluid and more aggressive brake pads. If you’re going for, say, a Laguna Seca lap record, step up to superlightweight carbon-ceramic brake discs (more than half an inch larger than stock but saving 25 pounds of unsprung weight) plus huge six-piston calipers. 2. If you want cornering grip, you need lots of front camber. Unplugged ran almost 4 degrees of negative camber on

Dark Helmet for the

Laguna lap record.

Adjustable front upper control arms, plus adjustable rear camber arms and toe links, open up suspension settings that were never possible with the factory setup. Unplugged even offers a quick-

change front control arm, so you can run aggressive settings at the track without destroying your tires on the drive home. 3. “For tracking a Tesla, the biggest front tire you can fit on the car with a matching rear is always the best strategy,” Schaffer says. On Dark

Helmet, that meant 310-section-width racing slicks. And that’s not even the ceiling—Unplugged puts 315-width tires on Model 3s for track duty. “You want as much front grip as you can throw at the car,” Schaffer says,

“and we haven’t found that limit yet.”

Lightweight billet machined wheels in a funky 19-by-10.9-inch size match those foot-wide tires and help shed rotating mass. Unplugged can even etch the customer’s name into these custom-made

wheels or finish them in just about any color. 4. If all of the above still doesn’t have you going fast enough, it’s time for some race-car tricks.

On Dark Helmet,

Unplugged fabbed up a high-downforce rear wing and a matching front spoiler, and reshaped the factory front fenders with new air-extraction ducts and flared openings to cover those super-sticky tires. The Model S is a large, heavy sedan, so the aerodynamic devices need to be properly burly: Schaffer says you can stand on the front splitter without damaging it. 4

“Now, what in tarnation?!” you can almost hear the man atop car No. 26 exclaim from the tufted-leather club chair of his race car. The source of his confusion? The competitor to his immediate left, who has clearly arrived from the future to pose for this 1903 photo. Lined up against the era’s clattering contraptions, No. 999 resembles a belly-tank saltflats racer, even though belly tanks, and the planes that carried them, wouldn’t arrive for decades. But that’s no time traveler; it’s just Walt from down the street.

Walter Baker—seen here peeping from the Torpedo Kid, his electric-powered speed-record car—was proprietor of Baker Motor Vehicle Company, maker of then-popular electric cars. They looked nothing like the Torpedo Kid or Baker’s earlier electric streamliner, named the Torpedo. At the dawn of the automotive age, electrics held every top-speed record. In 1902, Baker, at the wheel of his firs t Torpedo, almost certainly traveled faster than any human had before, likely over 80 mph and possibly 100.

But his run didn’t count, because partway down the course in Staten Island, New York, he lost control and killed two bystanders. Baker and his co-driver were not seriously injured thanks to seat harnesses, a real novelty then. Undeterred, the luxuriously mustached Baker built two new electric racers, the Torpedo Kids. These single-seaters were smaller, lighter, and motivated by less powerful production-car motors. But after a Torpedo Kid went into another crowd in 1903 (with no serious injuries), Baker called it quits. He never held a speed record, but he did live to

age 86. –daniel pund P H O T O G R A P H S C O U R T E S Y O F C L E V E L A N D P U B L I C L I B R A R Y