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A. When the astronauts of Apollo 11 set foot on the moon in one of humankind’s biggest technological breakthroughs, they couldn’t have predicted just how monumentally Moon Boots would upend the snow-footwear market of the Eighties.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF NASA

GOING LONG

TECHNOLOGY IS OFTEN BABY STEPS. LET’S CELEBRATE THE GIANT LEAPS.

ANYONE WHO FOLLOWS the curving arc of technology knows a little about Moore’s law. In its simplest form, this oft-cited doctrine (not a “law” by any standard), named after semiconductor maker and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, states that the power of the microchip will increase by about 40 percent every two years. This, in essence, is the driving force behind every investment made in Silicon Valley: Growth is good; growth is inevitable. Let’s all get rich. Even Moore knows this type of growth cannot be sustained forever. But we’re acclimatized to expect it—in iPhones, with their gradual march to complete domination; in internet-connected appliances in our kitchens. And of course, in our cars, which seem to get smarter, faster, and more sophisticated with each successive generation. The ﬁrst electric cigarette lighter a century ago has gradually led us to the dizzying interface of huge ﬁnger-grease-smeared 14-inch dash screens. But the really interesting aspects of technology are the automotive moonshots, the big leaps forward. These are what interest us in the Breakthrough issue, Vol. 14. Inspired by another of our nerd loves, President Kennedy’s call to spend what amounted to 2.5 percent of the GDP to bring man to the moon in the Apollo program, Road & Track went looking for the true breakthroughs pushing designers to cross a sort of technological rubicon— and the noble attempts that fell short. Drivers are being asked to go electric, but that’s not an incremental move. The closer you get to the transformation, the more critical the big break-

through becomes. We can build all the top-shelf EVs we want, but without a reliable charging infrastructure, what’s the point? Ask anyone who owned a Model S in Florida when Hurricane Ian bricked their EV what it feels like to live without juice. There are promises to add a half million chargers in the U.S., but these machines are prone to failure at troublingly high rates. That’s why, despite all the reasons to dislike Elon Musk and his cheap hucksterism, we really have to give him credit for the Supercharger network, Tesla’s signature innovation. It works, it’s ubiquitous, and it will be studied as a brilliant marriage of innovation and the power of a well-integrated vertical company. Lawrence Ulrich investigates in “Elon Musk’s Biggest Coup Ain’t Rockets” (page 062). We look at breakthroughs from many angles. Editor-at-large A.J. Baime talked to ﬁve racing drivers about deﬁning moments in their careers (page 072). One of our newest contributing editors, Mike Spinelli, watched the fan car in person this year at Goodwood—and, like everyone else in attendance, was stunned by the uncanny speeds it reached. So for this issue, he went deep on vacuum cars over the years and why this radical tech never caught on (page 050). Not every breakthrough lands a man on the moon, but car enthusiasts desire heroic acts and big thinking. Leave the slow march to the iPhone.

MIKE GUY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

E D I T O R ’ S N O T E R&T VOL. 14 005

050 There’s a Sucker Born Every Generation The vacuum car is the breakthrough that just keeps breaking. 016 Magnum Force How a prodigious mustache and a wedgelike V-8 supercar saved Ferrari. 020 Are E-Fuels for Real? Cutting-edge thinking posits a renewable fuel for the future. Is it too good to be true? 022 Third Dimension With 3-D printing, automakers can think, design, and manufacture with whimsy. 026 The Senna Effect This documentary on the sport’s singular hero paved the way for America’s F1 boom. 028 Djet Engine The first production mid-engine road car, a French beauty with a funky name. 034 The Right Direction What we’ve gained and lost when a small screen can lead us anywhere. 036 Il Gran Torino Extraordinary Italian design, seen through the obsessive eye of one photographer.

062 Shock Value Elon Musk’s most significant contribution? A network of EV chargers that work. 072 Victory at Last! Five drivers reflect on the moments that changed everything. 080 Breaking the Wind With the low-drag EQXX, Mercedes eyes a future that slips easily through the world. 090 A Beautiful Shambles One Lancia tells of a doomed driver, a defunct family business, and this magazine. 102 Already Broken With the major barriers breached, does anyone still care about speed records? 110 The Taming of the Snail How turbochargers went from unruly to indispensable. 122 It’s a Cinderella Story Remembering Formula 1’s fairy tale, from the perspective of its unlikely champion.

040 Automatic for the People GM’s Hydra-Matic brought the slushbox to the masses. We unravel its secrets. 042 Watch the Throne In the world of wrist timekeeping, we owe everything to one man. This is his legacy. 044 The Lotus Position Lotus’s most important Formula 1 innovations, all in one place.

COVER BY G R E G PA J O

VO L . 14 : B R E A K T H R O U G H

132 Dossier: 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning Hiding under familiar skin, a quiet revolution arrives to the pickup market. 146 Airborne Weapon The new 911 GT3 RS harnesses the air to create the ultimate track-bred Porsche. 152 Crazy Eights The Rimac Nevera, for those who need their road car to run eight-second quarter-miles. 160 Superior Carrera The Ruf SCR may look like a throwback, but it’s far better. Just don’t call it a 911. 168 The Valley of the Supercars Readers join Road & Track for an unforgettable trip to the heart of Italy’s Motor Valley.

The first-ever GR Corolla. 300 HP. GR-FOUR AWD. Manual only. Get behind the wheel of this wild child.

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Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation E d i to r i a l Sta f f EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Mike Guy EXECUTIVE EDITOR Daniel Pund CREATIVE DIRECTOR Nathan Schroeder DIGITAL DIRECTOR Aaron Brown EDITORS-AT-LARGE A.J. Baime, Matt Farah, Travis Okulski DEPUTY CREATIVE DIRECTOR Cassidy Zobl DEPUTY EDITOR Raphael Orlove SENIOR EDITORS John Pearley Huffman, Kyle Kinard SENIOR REPORTER Chris Perkins REVIEWS EDITOR Mack Hogan STAFF WRITER Brian Silvestro MOTORSPORTS EDITOR Fred Smith ASSOCIATE EDITOR Lucas Bell DESIGNER Ronald M. Askew Jr. CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Eddie Alterman, Holly Anderson, Brett Berk, Mike Duff, Peter Egan, Jason Fenske, Peter Gareffa, Alex Goy, J.R. Hildebrand, James Hinchcliffe, Alanis King, Jamie Kitman, Zack Klapman, Ryan Lewis, Drew Magary, Brendan McAleer, Marshall Pruett, Elana Scherr, Mike Spinelli, Bozi Tatarevic, Lawrence Ulrich CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS & PHOTOGRAPHERS

John Vincent Aranda, Atelier Olschinsky, Brown Bird Design, Jake Caminero, Cayce Clifford, Houston Cofield, Piotr Degler, Clint Ford, Darren Heath, Jason Holley, Maciek Jasik, Skander Khlif, Peter Larson, Lisa Linke, José Mandojana, Ross Mantle, Mike McQuade, Tim McDonagh, Greg Pajo, Benedict Redgrove, Dean Smith, Laura Weiler, Joan Wong

Jason Kavanagh At Overdrive Energy Solutions, a start-up focused on smarter ways to power events, Kavanagh directs all things engineering related. Previously, he created some of the best-known Garrett turbochargers you’ve never heard of, and he’s tested hundreds of vehicles for automotive publishers. He also races a cruddy Miata with his 24 Hours of Lemons team, Eyesore Racing. Here, he explains the history of turbochargers in “The Taming of the Snail” (page 110).

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Chip Ganassi (racing mogul), Bob Lutz (Viper creator, exec), Sam Posey (painter, racer), Bobby Rahal (Indy 500 winner, team owner) DIRECTOR OF EDITORIAL OPERATIONS Heather Albano COPY CHIEF Adrienne Girard PRODUCTION MANAGER Juli Burke ASSOCIATE PRODUCTION MANAGER Nancy M. Pollock SENIOR COPY EDITOR Chris Langrill RESEARCH EDITOR Matthew Skwarczek COPY EDITOR Meredith Conrow PUBLISHER & CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER Felix DiFilippo VICE PRESIDENT, SALES Cameron Albergo

New York

(page 062).

GROUP SALES DIRECTOR Kyle Taylor SENIOR SALES DIRECTOR Joe Pennacchio SALES DIRECTOR Shannon Rigby SALES MANAGER Richard Panciocco ASSISTANT Keierra Wiltshire

Chicago SALES DIRECTOR

Rick Bisbee

Detroit GROUP SALES DIRECTOR Samantha Shanahan SALES DIRECTORS Tom Allen, Deb Michael SALES MANAGER Chris Caldwell ASSISTANT Toni Starrs

Los Angeles GROUP SALES DIRECTOR Jason Hunt SENIOR SALES DIRECTORS Lisa LaCasse, Lori

Mertz,

Susie Miller, Anne Rethmeyer SALES DIRECTOR Molly Jolls Hearst Direct Media SALES MANAGER Celia Mollica

Greg Pajo

P ro d u ct i o n /O p e rat i o n s PRODUCTION MANAGER

A New Zealand native, Pajo spent 15 years doing photography in the U.K. before recently moving to the U.S. He has always had an interest in cars and automotive design and eagerly traveled to Germany to shoot the streamlined Mercedes-Benz EQXX for our cover. When Greg isn’t working or spending time with his wife and daughter, he is likely mountain biking or racing his E36 M3 track car, although neither particularly well.

Mario Cerrato

C i rc u lat i o n VP, STRATEGY AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT Rick Day EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CONSUMER MARKETING William

Carter

H ea rst 300 W. 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 PRESIDENT & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Steven R. Swartz CHAIRMAN William R. Hearst III EXECUTIVE VICE CHAIRMAN Frank A. Bennack, Jr. CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Mark E. Aldam

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Publication Title: Road & Track Publication Number: 0570-6700 Filing Date: October 1, 2022 Issue Frequency: BI-MONTHLY Number of Issues Published Annually: 6 Annual Subscription Price: $30.00 Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 8. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 9 Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor Publisher: Felix DiFilippo 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 Editor: Mike Guy 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 Managing Editor: Heather Albano 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 10. Owner: Hearst Autos, Inc. 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 Stockholders of Hearst Autos, Inc are: Veranda Publications, Inc., 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None 12. Tax Status: Not Applicable 13. Publication Title: Road & Track 14. Issue Date for Circulation Data Below: Aug/Sept 22 15. Extent and Nature of Circulation Average No. No. Copies Copies of Single Each Issue Issue During Published Preceding Nearest to 12 Months Filing Date

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a. Total Number of Copies (Net press run) 124,830 99,817 b. (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies) 64,588 50,878 (2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies) n/a n/a (3) Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS® 5,845 4,000 (4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS (e.g., FirstClass Mail) n/a n/a c. Total Paid Distribution (Sum of 15b (1), (2), (3), and (4)) 70,433 54,878 d. (1) Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies included on PS Form 3541 29,427 25,161 (2) Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies Included on PS Form 3541 n/a n/a (3) Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through the USPS (e.g., First-Class Mail) n/a n/a (4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means) 10,962 5,263 e. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (Sum of 15d (1), (2), (3) and (4)) 40,389 30,424 f. Total Distribution (Sum of 15c and 15e) 110,822 85,302 g. Copies not Distributed 14,008 14,515 h. Total (Sum of 15f and g) 124,830 99,817 i. Percent Paid (15c divided by 15f times 100) 63.56% 64.33% 16a. Requested and Paid Electronic Copies 27,017 26,900 b. Total Requested and Paid Print Copies and Requested/Paid Electronic Copies (Line 15c) 97,450 81,778 c. Total Requested Copy Distribution (Line 15f) and Requested/Paid Electronic Copies 137,839 112,202 d. Percent Paid and/or Requested Circulation (Both print & Electronic Copies 70.70% 72.88% 17. Publication of Statement of Ownership: If the publication is a general publication, publication of this statement is required. Will be printed in the Dec/Jan 23 issue of this publication. 18. Signature and Title of Editor, Publisher, Business Manager, or Owner: Felix DiFilippo I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanctions (including fines and imprisonment) and/or civil sanctions (including civil penalties).

AN EXCLUSIVE TRACK CLUB MEMBERS MOMENT MONTICELLO MOTOR CLUB

On September 27, 2022, Track Club Founders joined Road & Track editors at Monticello Motor Club in New York to experience the annual Performance Car of the Year (PCOTY) testing ﬁrsthand. With ten contenders on the track, Founders rode shotgun with editors as they each conducted hot laps to ultimately crown the 2023 Performance Car of the Year winner.

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ILLUSTRATION BY AT E L I E R O L S C H I N S K Y

R&T VOL. 14 015

BY M AT T FA R A H

HOW TOM SELLECK AND THE PHOTOGRAPHY BY L I S A L I N K E

DRIVE

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HUMBLE 308 RESCUED FERRARI FROM OBLIVION.

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I T ’S FA N TA S T I C — fantastic to look at and fantastic to drive—and in today’s world, it announces you as an absolute connoisseur of the Prancing Horse brand. It was the car that established the mid-engine, V-8-powered Ferrari as the mainstream model, the one that made Ferrari a viable and profitable enterprise. The Ferrari 308 isn’t just a winner now. It was a winner in its own time. In 1977, Road & Track called it “a blending of man and machine that make the two feel and act as one.” The late P.J. O’Rourke called the targa-roofed GTS “the best damn car I’ve ever driven” in 1980. Collectors assert that 308s aren’t for concours shows or stashing away in collections. They’re for driving. Common for a Ferrari, relatively affordable to maintain, and finely engineered by any standard, the 308 is the affordable-ish choice if you want to get out and put a lot of miles on a classic analog Ferrari. In 1979, the fourth year of 308 production and two years after the roofless GTS hit showrooms and bodies were switched from glass-reinforced plastic to steel, Ferrari first passed the 2000 carsper-year milestone. During the 308’s final model year, 1985, it passed 3000. The two-valve 308 GTS was the first Ferrari model to sell more than 3000 units. If you count Quattrovalvole examples, Ferrari sold 6261 308 GTS models—more than the total number of cars it built from 1947 to 1967. Though not technologically groundbreaking, the 308 set the company’s standard for the next 40 years. It had a high-revving V-8 behind the seats, a stunning curvaceous Pininfarina design with pronounced side intakes, lightweight construction with a double-wishbone suspension for a great ride and handling balance, and, in most cases, a removable targa roof. Featured in more films and TV shows than any other Ferrari, the 308 is pure Hollywood. Its CV towers over even some big-name actors. The Internet Movie Cars Database lists almost 300 on-screen appearances. It had a starring role in Magnum, P.I., it was the ride of choice for two Rat Pack phony priests in The Cannonball Run, and a rev-happy Christie Brinkley teased Chevy Chase from behind its wheel in Vacation. Next to the

BREAKTHROUGHS THAT DIDN’T ILLUSTRATIONS BY BROWN BIRD DESIGN

A. (Previous pages) The 308 is one of the most immediately recognizable shapes of the car world. B. The design appears simple by modern standards, making it elegant and timeless. C. It’s the classic Ferrari that’s meant to be driven. D. The simple cockpit is pure Eighties. E. Ferraris may not have a reputation for reliability, but the 308’s engine is a paragon of dependability if it’s well cared for. F. Have a big door that you need to keep open? Just wedge a 308 underneath; it’ll prop that for you.

always competent but ordinary G-body Porsche 911, the Ferrari was a supermodel with pipes to match. A 308 said you were somebody. The 911 said you were another dentist. By 2005, when you could still order a new manual-transmission Ferrari, the 308 seemed outdated and slow. In 2022, Ferraris are fast and fun, but with paddles and hybridization the norm, enthusiasts are turning to usable older cars, and the 308’s shape has aged gracefully. Market forces have made people appreciate its simplicity, light 3100-pound curb weight, and tidy size. Many claim the 308 isn’t as solid or dependable as G-body Porsches, but this reputation isn’t entirely deserved. Donnie Callaway, a Ferrari master technician who lent us “O’Belo,” his 308 GTB, doesn’t blame the cars. “Eighties Ferraris are incredibly well made and engineered,” he says. “A 308, like an air-cooled 911, may have mechanical issues from time to time, but it will almost never leave you stranded. It will tell you something needs attention. There may be a weird smell or a puff of smoke or an off sound, but you’re not calling a tow truck for a 308. You can always drive it to the shop.” But, Callaway says, these cars got very cheap for about a decade, and owners didn’t want to spend properly for mainte-

nance. A $6000 major service is a lot when the car is worth $30,000. So they skipped and skimped, and the cars fell apart. Having just returned from a 700-mile trip in my freshly (mechanically) restored 328 and spending a day driving Callaway’s GTB in 105-degree desert heat, I agree. Properly maintained and cared for to factory spec, and with the ﬂuids warmed up, these cars are mechanically stout and a joy to drive, brilliantly engaging through the inputs and composed at high speeds. I used to think David Diem and Doug Turner were totally out of their minds or lying about crossing the country in a 308 in 32 hours, 7 minutes during the 1983 U.S. Express, carrying an 89-mph average. Now I find their claim completely believable and entirely reasonable. Few vintage cars are so happy between 90 and 120 mph, with perfect gearing, taut and expressive composure, and clear communication among hands, feet, and tires. An old 911 may be preferable in traffic or on the Nürburgring. But on the open sweepers of the northern Angeles Forest or crossing the desert at the tail end of a Cannonball, I’ll take the Ferrari. It may be mid-engine, but the 308 is one of the best GT cars Ferrari ever built, odometers be damned.

B R E A KT H R O U G H S T H AT D I D N ’ T

Tucker 48

With its streamlined shape, rear-engine layout, and numerous safety features, the Tucker 48 could have been the post–World War II Tesla. Preston Tucker’s vision was far ahead of what the conservative established automakers could produce. The problem, of course, was he couldn’t produce it either—not in volume. Bankruptcy killed the car, and soon after, Tucker himself died. —BRENDAN McALEER

ILLUSTRATION BY J A S O N H O L L E Y

YOU’RE RIGHT TO BE SKEPTICAL. THE COMBUSTION ENGINE doesn’t have to die. At least, that’s what an industry contends as it scrambles to come up with the answer for a growing problem: how to reduce carbon emissions. E-fuels, or synthetic fuels, promise to be a drop-in solution that not only keeps current cars on the road but also ensures they produce virtually zero net emissions. You have every right to be skeptical. The idea is to make liquid fuel using renewable or zero-emission energy sources. E-fuels are carbon based, much like gasoline, but they’re not extracted from underground oil reservoirs. Instead, with sunshine, wind, carbon-capture technology, and a chemistry degree, one can create a substance suitable for storage in fuel tanks and burnable in internal-combustion engines. With e-fuels, there are two intertwined challenges: cost and efficiency. A study published in 2016 in Energy & Fuels, a journal of the American Chemical Society, estimated that the ﬁnal cost of a synthetic fuel would be $3.80 to $9.20 per gallon, but that was in 2010 dollars. Adjusted for inﬂation, that’s $5.16 to $12.50 per gallon. Porsche, itself looking into the e-fuels business, recently stated prices eventually could settle around $7.60 per gallon or less. But just two years ago Porsche claimed costs were closer to $37 per gallon. If break-room chitchat says $5 per gallon is pricey, imagine when that same gallon costs $30. The weather wouldn’t even make it into conversation. Price is a serious problem because of e-fuels’ lackluster energy efficiency. Say a utility plant produces a certain amount of energy for powering a car. What percentage of it will actually go to spinning wheels? That’s critical, because whether

BY J A S O N F E N S K E

a vehicle is electric or uses synthetic fuels, it all starts with electricity production. According to a 2020 SAE study, about 40 to 70 percent of the electricity produced will make it to the wheels of an EV. For an e-fuels car, that number is only six to 18 percent. It’s possible that an e-fueled car could require 10 times more energy than an electric car to travel the same distance. Efficiency correlates with cost. Driving becomes more expensive as more electricity is needed, regardless of where it comes from or how a vehicle uses it. Are people willing to spend more simply to continue driving combustion cars? For some, the answer is yes; V-8 engines are glorious and create a worthy sound. But generally, people hate high gas prices. And that alone should create skepticism about the broad-scale adoption of synthetic fuels in passenger cars. Yet e-fuels should have plenty of applications to prove their worth. A major advantage of synthetic fuels, much like gasoline, is incredibly high energy density. You can pack a lot of bang into a small space, and they weigh very little in comparison to hefty lithium-ion battery packs. For industries like aviation, synthetic fuel may be one of the easiest methods of curbing emissions. E-fuels could help racing series continue the spectacle of roaring motorsport with a reduced carbon footprint. For the public, $30 per gallon is an extraordinary price, but to a Formula 1 team, the expense is laughably minor. In fact, Formula 1 has stated it’ll be net zero carbon by 2030 with 100 percent sustainable fuel by 2026. The series even noted that most road cars around the world could use this fuel. I’ll start saving now.

B R E A KT H R O U G H S T H AT D I D N ’ T

AVE Mizar

Advanced Vehicle Engineers (AVE) tried to make the Pinto fly. AVE’s Mizar was half Cessna Skymaster, half Ford compact car, and all kinds of deadly. In 1973, one of the two prototype Mizars fell to earth after a wing-strut failure, killing both of AVE’s founders. Nearly 50 years later, flying cars are still just around the corner.

D E P T. O F E N E R G Y

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BY T I M S T E V E N S

THIRD DIMENSION

THE REAL VALUE OF 3D PRINTING. A. Czinger’s 21C uses 3D printing for more than just trim pieces. B. A bank of 3D printers at GM’s additive manufacturing facility. A

ON THE SURFACE, the 1250-hp Czinger 21C is unlike anything else on the road. Its giant glass cockpit and gaping side intakes are more aeronautic than automotive. Under the skin, though, is where things get properly weird. Consider what Czinger calls the BrakeNode: It merges brakecaliper and suspension components into a single, oddly organic shape. Sculpted and perforated, it looks lifted from an H.R. Giger sketchbook. But it’s not mere lunacy. There’s a method to this madness. “We are fully, functionally integrating the brake caliper and upright structures, which so far is on track to deliver over 40 percent mass and part-count reduction with 25 percent stiffness increase—no compromise and no tooling required,” explains Michael Kenworthy, CTO of AM Technologies at Divergent 3D, manufacturer of the Czinger 21C. The BrakeNode and many of the 21C’s other components are manufactured using a process colloquially called 3D printing. Its formal name is additive manufacturing. “We literally make part geometries that cannot be economically produced any other way,” Kenworthy says. Traditional manufacturing techniques like casting, milling, and stamping haven’t changed much since the First Industrial Revolution. Three-dimensional printing is wholly new, an umbrella term for a variety of techniques for creating physical objects from digital designs on a layer-by-layer approach. The concept dates to Forties science fiction and saw its first practical implementations in the Eighties. Really, though, it’s only in the past 20 years that the technology has matured to usefulness. A typical $300 home 3D printer uses one of two techniques. Fused deposition modeling is the more common one. These printers force spools of plastic filament through heated nozzles, like a hot glue gun. The filament then hardens as it cools, constructing parts layer by layer. The other technology is stereolithography, where UV light hardens resin a layer at a time. These simple, cheap techniques produce some great-looking parts. However, at the

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY P E T E R L A R S O N

production-automotive level, finer tolerances and greater durability are necessities. So most pros turn to powder bed fusion. These machines can cost upwards of $500,000 and form parts by bonding powdered materials. “We primarily employ laser powder bed fusion, which involves layer-by-layer, selective laser melting of atomized metal powders,” Kenworthy says. “We are generally printing with layer thicknesses on the order of human hairs, around 50 to 100 micron.” That’s fittingly exotic, but it has mainstream applications too. In 2021, General Motors had 30,000 Chevrolet Tahoes sitting idle due to a single missing component. Traditional production tooling for a new part would have taken months, even if it were possible amid the pandemic. But GM whipped up the parts on the fly using 3D printing, and the SUVs got to dealerships. GM’s first production 3D-printed parts were a little more specialized. “The Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing and CT5-V Blackwing were GM’s first production vehicles with printed parts, including the shift-knob emblem, an electrical harness bracket, and two HVAC ducts. Additive manufacturing also contributed to cost [savings] and efficiency in developing the manual transmission, so you could say manual Cadillacs are around because we have this capability,” explains Brennon White, technical lead for GM Additive Manufacturing. And there’s more to come. The Cadillac Celestiq won’t only be the brand’s first electric flagship sedan. “We expect it to showcase the broadest

use of additive manufacturing in a production vehicle, with more than 100 3D-printed parts that are a mix of structural and visual components,” White says. “This number of parts was made possible by expanding on the learnings from the Blackwing programs.” Then there’s racing. Brad Keselowski, the 2012 NASCAR Cup champion, has a side gig: Keselowski Advanced Manufacturing (KAM), an engineering company focusing on additive manufacturing and parts simulation. “Additive manufacturing is an engineer’s dream tool, because 3D-printing technology allows us to manufacture part geometries that were never possible before using traditional machining, brazing, and welding techniques,” says Keselowski. Keselowski saw his first 3D-printed component, a plastic intake manifold on a race car, at age 15. While KAM focuses on aerospace projects, like printing rocket-engine parts, the company has also printed parts for his No. 6 RFK Mustang GT. “Most recently we’ve manufactured a power-steering reservoir with enhanced design and found improved performance at a lighter weight,” he says. “Better yet, we reduced the lead-time development by leveraging rapid iteration for the reservoir design and testing. “These outcomes are truly stunning,” Keselowski says, “and it’s deeply inspiring to be a part of today’s American manufacturing in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” The best part is that the industry is still discovering what’s possible. In a few years, even the 21C could look bland.

B R E A KT H R O U G H S T H AT D I D N ’ T

A. From rapid prototyping to production parts, 3D printing is useful throughout the car-design process. B. Watching one of the machines work is less sci-fi than you might imagine, but the results are suitably impressive.

Bose Suspension

Amar Bose was a gifted engineer and brilliant inventor. Having revolutionized the audio industry, he turned his team’s attention to an electromagnet-based automotive suspension system dubbed Project Sound. The technology was almost unbelievable. A Lexus LS400 equipped with the system could absorb any bumps and even leap over obstacles. The prototype system proved too heavy and expensive to scale to production.

BY J . F . M U S I A L

THE ‘SENNA’ THIS SLEEPER DOCUMENTARY IS EFFECT THE POWDER KEG OF F1’S U.S. RENAISSANCE. IN 2023, THE U.S. will host three Formula 1 grands prix: Austin, Miami, and Las Vegas. That’s the most in a single year for America and the most ever in a season for any country. Some believe F1 ﬁnally entered the American mainstream thanks to Netflix’s Drive to Survive, but the increased visibility started years earlier. Everything was stacked against American F1 fans 30 years ago. From the mid-Eighties to late Nineties, races weren’t always broadcast in real time. Unless you had connections like David Letterman, who would drive to ESPN’s Connecticut headquarters to watch F1 races live off the satellite feed, enthusiasts often had to settle for 20-minute highlight reels. Speedvision did a great job building the U.S. audience in the Aughts. The cable network broadcast the entire season live, even if some races started at 2:30 a.m. in America. Enter NBC Sports in 2013, with funding for additional shoulder programming to support the series I was lucky to be a part of as a TV producer. Viewership increased, but broadcasters were still bound by old rules set by Bernie Ecclestone, F1’s longtime and controlling CEO. There were few places we were allowed to ﬁlm. Garages? Not a chance. Trackside? F1-owned cameras controlled that. Want an elevated position? Banned. It was also somewhat comedic for us to be holding large cameras to shoot segments for TV, and sending social-media content from our phones could get our credentials revoked. No wonder there was pent-up demand for something, anything, beyond race-weekend coverage. So there was a surge of interest when

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S TA N C E

fresh content became available in the form of Asif Kapadia’s 2010 documentary Senna, about a driver who died almost two decades earlier. Ayrton Senna’s funeral in 1994 drew one of the largest crowds in world history, with more than three million lining the streets of São Paulo for the cortege. Ecclestone got a lot wrong, but he understood mass appeal. The CEO loosened his control on F1 content and opened the archives for filmmakers to tell the story. Senna was an enlightening experience for casual viewers: It wasn’t just about racing; it was about those who gave their lives to F1. The earliest viewings of the film in the States were private. One of the first was at the New York Times building in Manhattan. The crowd included F1 and Senna fans, but also media decisionmakers and industry influencers. Senna highlighted potential F1 business opportunities in America. When Ecclestone’s grasp of the sport ultimately led to his exit, he left behind a product perfect for new leadership, a role filled by Colorado-based Liberty Media. F1’s new American owners understood the need to modernize their commercial product. One of their first changes was to open the field to new content opportunities. Social-media rules were loosened in 2018, and TV race viewership spiked. It also opened the door for Netflix. Drive to Survive may have hit a perfect storm, with its first season released during the COVID binge-watching gold rush, but Senna set the foundation. It was the realization that stories about the people, not just the racing, were the valued commodity.

A. For American viewers, this poetic retelling of Senna’s tragedy provided a glimpse at the soul of Formula 1.

ILLUSTRATION BY J O A N W O N G

B R E A KT H R O U G H S T H AT D I D N ’ T

Wood Gasification

With fuel rationing severely affecting civilian transport during World War II, some people, mostly in Europe, used firewood to run their cars. The gasification process uses heat as hot as 1832 degrees Fahrenheit to produce combustible gas from organic materials. It can be used to power a combustion engine with minimal modifications. After the war, almost everyone went back to gasoline.

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A. Sure, the engine looks like anything else from the era. It’s where the fourcylinder sits in the chassis that’s such a big deal.

CENTRIST

THE RENE BONNET DJET—the “D” is silent—is the creation of designer René Bonnet, co-founder of Deutsch-Bonnet. Unveiled in 1962, it was the world’s ﬁrst mid-engine production car. It’s also so obscure that people frequently forget it exists, instead dubbing the Porsche 550 Spyder of the Fifties the ﬁrst mid-engine production car. However, the German automaker made only 90 550s, and all were intended as race cars, not series production road cars. A dedicated road vehicle, the Djet was nonetheless spartan like a competition car. In 1966, Autosport described the Djet as basically a Formula 3 car for the road. There’s not much to it: steel backbone chassis, double wishbones, fiberglass body, 145/R-15 front and 155/R-15 rear Michelin XAS tires, a four-cylinder from the Renault 8, and a four-speed transaxle from a Renault van. Automobiles René Bonnet

THE MATRA DJET IS THE ORIGINAL MID-ENGINE MARVEL. BY C H R I S P E R K I N S

A. Faired-in headlights capture the essence of other cars of the time, like the E-type. B. Mid-engine proportions may be familiar now, but in the early Sixties, the Djet looked as exotic as can be.

built early Djets, with Matra, then mostly known for making missiles, supplying bodywork. Matra bought out Bonnet in 1964 and brought out the Djet V in 1965. That’s what appears here, on loan from Nashville’s Lane Motor Museum. It’s easy to mistake the Djet for the rear-engine Alpine A110, unless you’re sitting in it. The engine is right there behind you, isolated only by a carpeted bulkhead and minimal heat shielding. It’s similar in layout to a Porsche Cayman, where the engine resides within a box right in the middle of the car, underneath a large hatch, with no real separation between the cockpit and trunk. Unlike a Cayman, the whole car shakes when it’s running. Noise, vibration, and harshness? Check. We took the Djet out to the Natchez Trace Parkway south of Nashville—a smooth, gently curving road that doesn’t go anywhere. And it was a revelation. René Bonnet and Matra got the mid-engine thing right straightaway. You don’t so much steer the car through corners as ease it, so instinctive is its handling. And the whole time, there’s fabulous intake honk ﬁlling the cabin. Skinny tires

B R E A KT H R O U G H S T H AT D I D N ’ T

Onboard Coffee Maker

The Hertella Auto Kaffeemachine company thought Volkswagen owners might want to make some of the worst coffee possible. Available in both six- and 12-volt applications in 1959, this rare portable coffee maker was little more than a heating element plus a small mesh cylinder to fill with coffee grounds in the manner of brewing tea.

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CENTRIST

PHOTOGRAPHY BY H O U S T O N C O F I E L D

After another successful season, Acura brought home its third IMSA DPi manufacturers’ championship. Meyer Shank Racing’s #60 ARX-05 claimed the 2022 IMSA DPi teams’ championship title, and Tom Blomqvist and Oliver Jarvis took the 2022 IMSA DPi drivers’ championship. We toast our champagne to all the drivers and teams that helped us make this sustained success possible. Next year, watch Precision Crafted Performance take on a whole new form as our brand-new, electrified ARX-06 enters the track to write the next chapter.

Three-time IMSA champs: ’19, ’20 and ’22

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A. Like all French cars, it has striking, odd, and gorgeous details. B. The Djet is a small car, with a dash that is also dainty and elegant.

B R E A KT H R O U G H S T H AT D I D N ’ T

SUV/Pickup

What if an SUV were also a pickup? The first stab at this was the 1963 Studebaker Wagonaire, a station wagon with a retractable roof to fit tall objects. It leaked. Later, in 2004, GM released the Envoy XUV, an SUV with two rows of seating and a retractable roof. It also leaked. Both lasted only a couple of years.

CENTRIST

and little weight over the front mean the steering is very light, and while at first it seems vague, acclimation comes quickly. The car feels like a proto-Cayman in the way it inspires confidence in the driver. The chassis is phenomenal. This Djet was the base model, with 70 hp from its lightly modified Renault engine. An available Djet V S got Gordini upgrades for 94 hp. Seventy is plenty, given that the Djet only weighs around 1500 pounds. Redline is, uh, unmarked, so I took the Djet to just 5500 rpm, and it had no trouble maintaining a good pace, even passing slower traffic on the freeway. The gearbox is surprisingly precise for an ancient mid-engine car, though second is difficult to find and, when you get there, easy to grind. There’s enough torque to stick with third and fourth once you’re up and moving. Heel-andtoe is impossible, as the pedals are floor hinged, offset to the right, and mismatched in height. The unusually tall ride height provides for a lot of suspension travel, so the car is supple and unperturbed by midcorner bumps and undulations in the road. It rides with a sophistication that rivals many of today’s mid-engine sports cars. Period reviews of the Djet were glowing (this is the first time Road & Track has reviewed one). In total, fewer than 1700 were built, which, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t make them that rare. Mercedes built fewer Gullwings. So how come nobody knows about the Djet? Perhaps it just wasn’t much of a thing outside France. This was the era when the “global car”— one car for all, or at least lots of markets—was a new idea, and the Djet was never sold in the United States. Then there’s Matra itself. The company had huge success in formula and sports-car racing, but it abandoned motorsport in 1974. By the Eighties, it was designing and building cars for Renault, notably the Espace minivan. After the Djet, more mid-engine sports cars followed—greats like the Lamborghini Miura and the Ferrari 308, beloved near greats like the Lotus Europa and the De Tomaso Pantera, big sellers like the Porsche 914 and the Fiat X1/9, and even the Pontiac Fiero. The Matra Djet showed the better way forward.

A B

A a ro n J o h n s o n • A l a n C o o p e r • A l e x G r e e n wa l d • A l e x K n o l l e n b e rg • A l e x W e l l e n • A l e x a n d e r M a r m u r ea n u A l f r e d G l as s e l l I I I • A l i r e z a A b d o l l a h i - Fa r d • A lva ro A l e n ca r • A n d r e w B r i t ta i n • A n d r e w Wag n e r • A n g e l a W i l l i a m s • A n t h o n y J . W e av e r • A n t h o n y M ac k e • A n t h o n y St e p h e n s • A p r i l W h i t e • Au st i n M ot t i n g e r • Ba r ry K a p l a n • B e n ja m i n K a r l B u s s e y • B i j h a n N a d e r i • B i l l F e n e c h • B i l l M u r p h y • B i l ly E d wa r d s • B l a k e Tov i n • B l u e J e n k i n s • B o J u n g • B o b B r ay to n • B o b Sta n f o r d • B r i a n F e l l i o n • B r i a n L a m • B r i a n M . Sto l a r • B rya n C o s ta n t i n o • Ca r l F o r s h ag e • Ca r l o A G a r u z z o • C h a r l e s A r o l l a • C h a r l e s E d wa r d s • C h a r l e s H o o p e r • C h a r l e s St e fa n ko • C h a r l e s W. L ac e y • C h r i s H a n n e s • C o r e y R a d c l i f f • C o r e y V. To r r e n c e • C u rt i s J e n n i n g s S c h o f i e l d • D. N i c h o l s B r ow n • D. S c ot t Fa r m e r • Da k i n T r i m b l e • Da m i a n S h av e r • Da n e B l u e • Da n i e l D u r a n • Da n i e l J . Vo e l k e r • Da n i e l S h a f e r • Da ry l M c L i n d e n • Dav i d D o n a l d s o n • Dav i d D oz zo • Dav i d J . E l l i ot t • Dav i d J u l i a n W r i g h t • Dav i d K u t n e r • Dav i d L . W e st e r • Dav i d M a f f u c c i • Dav i d Ray • D ea n E . S c h r e i n e r • D ea n M i yas h i ro D e e p S r a n • D e n i s M u u s s e • D e n n i s G i b s o n • D e n n i s R o b e r t S m i t h • D e o m i d R a p o p o r t • D e r i c k R au s c h • D e v i n A n d e rs o n • D i v yaj ot Sa n d h u • D o n a l d R . Pa r r i s h • D o n n a L . M i c h a e l s • D o u g l as Ro s s • D r . Ro b e r t G i rg i s • D r . W M E . D e w i t t • E r i c A n d e r s o n • E r i c M ag n u s s e n • E r n e sto Ca r r i z o sa • E u g e n e A l l e n W e i l • F r a n k M a n z a r e • F r a n k l i n H . H a n c o c k J r . • F r e d B a r a s oa i n • F r e d e r i c k A . B a r t z e n • F u lto n H a i g h t • G a r ry C r o o k • G a ry R e t e l n y • G e n e P o n d e r • G e o r g e A n ag n as • G i l W e st • G i l b e r to P i n z o n • G i u s e p p e C o n d e m i • G r e g o ry S c h i l l • G u r d o n H o r n o r • H . A l a n Yo k e m • H ay e s H . H a r r i s • H e n ry M a l c o l m Y e e • H ow i e T. Z e ag e r • H u g h W h i p p l e • I n n e s T. M at h e r • I s h M c l au g h l i n • Jac k E asto n • Jac o b H u n t • Jac q u e s Fav r e t • Ja d Sa l i ba • Ja k e Sa lt z b e r g • Ja m e s A . Wo l f • Ja m e s A l a n B e n n e t t • Ja m e s B ly • Ja m e s Cat l ow • Ja m e s C ow e n • Ja m e s D o u g l a s L ac e y • Ja m e s I m a n i a n • Ja m e s Wa l k e r • Ja n - L u d w i g B e r i n g e r • Ja s o n R . M i l l e r • Jay S t e i n e r • J C L o m b a r d o • J e f f M a r s e l l e • J e f f M a r t i n • J e f f S c ot t E va n s o n • J e f f e ry Q u e s e n b e r ry • J e f f r e y Ca p p e l • J e f f r e y T r ow e r • J e va n C a p i ta l • J i m B ay • J i m M ac k e r r a s • J i t i n d e r S e t h i • J o h n & S h e l l e y Av i l a • J o h n B o c c h i e r i • J o h n B r av m a n • J o h n B r u ba k e r I I I • J o h n C l a r k • J o h n D e Pa l m a • J o h n F o st e r J r . • J o h n G au c h • J o h n G r e e n b u r g J o h n I ac o n o • J o h n J . Ca m p b e l l • J o h n Low e • J o h n P e g g • J o h n S . H a m i lto n • J o h n W. Yo u n g • J o h n W i l lc ox • J o n at h a n D. C u m pto n • J o n at h a n F i n st ro m • J o n at h a n W e i z m a n • J o n at h a n Ya r m i s • J o s e p h D e J i a n n e • J o s e p h M i l a z zo • J o s h S p e n c e • J o s h ua J e f f r i e s • K a n e A l l e n • K e i t h & J e r i ta W i l l i a m s • K e v i n B o g a n • K e v i n C h at h a m • K e v i n C z i n g e r • K e v i n H u n t e r • K e v i n J o h n s o n • K u r t F e h l i n g • K u r t W. B r a e u t i g a m • K y l e H ay e s • L a n c e M c r i tc h i e S m i t h • L e a h K . H u d s o n • L e e L e v e n s o n • L e s A n d e r s o n • L e s s L i n c o l n • L e st e r J o n e s • L e w i s C h e w L i sa B u n dy • Lo r a M e l m a n • Lo u i s Jac o b ow i t z • L u cas M a rg o l i s • L u cas T r a b e r • L u k as A m l e r • M a rc D. R i s m a n M a r c u s B o l i n d e r • M a r c u s S t r o m • M a r k A n t h e n i e n • M a r k Ca r n e y • M a r k Day • M a r k E . S c r o g g i n s • M a r k E g g e r • M a r k G o i n e s • M a r k M c A l i s t e r • M a r k O n e i l • M a r k S e h g a l • M at t G e n u a r d i • M at t N i a u r a • M at t St r at h m a n • M at t h e w B r i a n C h e s l e r • M at t h e w C o o p e r • M at t h e w F r a n k e l • M a x P ow e r M oto r s • M i c h a e l B at t i s ta • M i c h a e l C o n g e l o s i • M i c h a e l G r e e n • M i c h a e l G r ov e s • M i c h a e l L a m ac c h i a • M i c h a e l M u z z i n • M i c h a e l N i c h o l a s • M i c h a e l P e s ot s k i • M i c h a e l Va l e n t i n e • M i c h a e l W e i l • M i k e B au r • M i k e J e n n i n g s • M i tc h S h e i t e l m a n • M i tc h Wat e rs • N at e S h a d o i n • N at h a n S i e w e rt • N e i l E H a n n e m a n n • N i c h o las D o n a h u e • N i c h o las M o r r i s • N i c k A l e x a n d e r I m p o r t s • N i c k M ata r a z z o • N i c o l a s P u j e t • Pa r a m d e e p M a n d • Pat Da ly • Pat r i c k A h e a r n • Pau l B o n o m o • Pau l H ag e r • Pau l P o r t e o u s • Pau l R ag s da l e • Pau l S k a f t e • Pau l T. A b b ot t • P e n P e n d l e to n • P e t e r H e f f r i n g • P J C r o sw e l l • P r e sto n Yo r k • R a n dy C o p e l a n d • R e x M ca f e e • R i c h a r d C o r g e l R i c h a r d H ag e n lo c k • R i c h a r d H a r p h a m • R i c h a r d M o r r i s o n • R i c h a r d R e y n o l d s • R i c h a r d R u s c h h au pt • R i c k R h a b e g g e r • R o b e r t By r n e • R o b e r t G r ay • R o b e r t H e s s • R o b e r t N e w m a n • R o b e r t R u b i n • R o b e r t S c h o l l • R o b e r t Wa l k e r • R o g e r B r i a n Sto r r s • R o n E . P o h n d o r f • R o n S c h n e i d e r • R o n a l d Sav e n o r • R o n a l d W i l l i a m H o u s e r • R o ry R . Dav i s • R oy Pa n t l e • R u s s e l l N e u w i r t h • S a m u e l Yag gy • S a n j u m S e t h i • S a r a h S a r o u f i m • S c ot t A . W r i g h t • S c ot t B a e r • S c ot t B r i n k • S c ot t M ac k e r r a s • S c ot t M c C l u r e • S c ot t N e h s • S c ot t P. Wa r d l aw • S c ot t S p o r t e • S c ot t W. C ro u c h • S e a n B u rc h • S e a n O H o l l a r e n • S e a n R e d d i s h • St e fa n J o h n s o n St e p h e n B r u n o • St e p h e n L e w i s • St e p h e n Ta r r • St e v e n & K ay H i c k s • St e v e n M a r lo R e i m e r • St i g N i e l s e n • S u m i t N ag pa l • S u sa n M i l l e r • T h o m as B o e h l a n d • T h o m as R . N e i l s o n • To d d Ba l l e n g e r • To d d St e g m a n • To m B a i l e y • T o m D av i d s o n • T o m E l l i s o n • T o m H e l l a n d • T o m R o b e r t s • T o m S c h a e f e r • T o m S i e w e r t • T o m To m l i n s o n • To m m y Ta r lto n • To n y A b e n a • To n y D e l e l l i s • T rav i s H a l l • V i n c e n t C ro g n a l e • Wa lt e r S . G e r r i s h Wa lt e r S . L i g h t J r . • W i l l K a l u t yc z • W i l l i a m Ba k e r • W i l l i a m Ba r b e r • W i l l i a m B u t l e r • W i l l i a m J. S z a fa row i c z W i l l i a m P ow e l l • W i l l i a m R . H as s e l l • W i l l i a m R e i d • W i l l i a m St e wa r t • W i l l i a m Wo e b k e n b e r g • + M A N Y M O R E , yo u k n ow w h o yo u a r e . . . .

Welcome to the inner circle. SCAN HERE TO JOIN THEM.

THE RIGHT DIRECTION WHY THE GPS REVOLUTION IS TWO STEPS FORWARD AND ONE STEP BACK.

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D E P T. O F O V E R T H I N K I N G

RECENTLY, I WAS DRIVING down a road, following the directions from my Ford Escape’s GPS, when the navigation voice said, “In a quarter-mile, make a sharp right turn into oncoming traffic.” What?! “This is it,” I thought. “It’s ﬁnally happening. My car’s been hacked!” Then I noticed the bleep-eating grin on my son’s face. He was messing with me from the passenger’s seat, playing jokes through the speakers using his phone. That voice wasn’t the nav at all. Nevermind how he ﬁgured this out—it launched us into an important conversation. I asked, “Do you realize how incredible it is to have GPS in your car telling you how to get where you’re going?” “Wait,” he said. “Cars didn’t always have GPS?” Audible eye-rolling. “No, let me tell you how it used to be, back in the day.” It used to be that every time anyone tried to go anywhere they’d never been, they’d have to scribble directions on a dirty napkin. Then they’d try to read that napkin while driving, with an actual paper map open across the steering wheel. When

BY A . J . B A I M E

that failed and they were lost, people would go to a gas station, ask for directions, and maybe or maybe not get pointed in the right direction. As I explained this, my son dug up facts on the internet. “Did you know GPS is owned by the United States Space Force?” he said. “For real.” When I was a kid, I sat in the back seat of our car while my lost parents yelled at each other. I’d fill my diaper, and they wouldn’t notice because they would be so frustrated trying to figure out how to get to some restaurant in South Orange, New Jersey, two hours late. We really could have used GPS. “Did you know,” my son continued, “that there are 31 operational GPS satellites and that they communicate with our car independent of any internet or telephonic connection? The orbital elevation of the satellites is around 12,550 miles. It costs our government about $750 million every year to operate the system.” “Interesting,” I said. Once upon a time, when I first got my driver’s license, I got in my sister’s

ILLUSTRATION BY J O H N V I N C E N T A R A N D A

1985 Pontiac T1000 to drive 80 miles south to visit my Grandpa Bill. After an hour of driving, I saw a “Welcome to New York” sign. I’d been driving north rather than south. Back then, if you were lost and needed to talk to someone, you had to ﬁnd a “pay phone.” You’d put a quarter in a slot, and sometimes the phone worked. If you were lucky, the person on the other end had directions. “Did you know,” my son said, “that China has its own GPS? It’s called BeiDou. And Russia has its own system called GLONASS.” Just then we arrived at our destination. Our car had given us impeccable directions. It didn’t matter that we had no idea where we were or how we got there—the GPS handled all of that for us, so we could be blissfully ignorant and fully assured we would ﬁnd our way home. GPS is so awesome. I said to my boy, “Thank you for spending this quality time with me.” “Love you, Dad.” “Love you, son.”

B R E A KT H R O U G H S T H AT D I D N ’ T

Seatbelt Interlock

In 2020, more than half of occupants killed in passengervehicle crashes in the U.S. were not wearing a seatbelt. For the 1974 model year, the federal government mandated an interlock mechanism that prevented a car from starting if the driver’s seatbelt was unfastened. But the public rebelled, and Congress struck down the measure. Perhaps it’s time to revisit the idea.

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PICTURE BOOK

IL GRAN TORINO OVER THE COURSE OF MORE THAN A DECADE, PHOTOGRAPHER PIOTR DEGLER CAPTURED SOME OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL, WEIRDEST, AND MOST SIGNIFICANT CARS TO COME FROM HIS BELOVED ITALY. THE RESULTING COFFEE-TABLE BOOK, ‘MADE IN ITALY,’ IS A GORGEOUS MONUMENT TO ITALIAN AUTOMOTIVE PASSION AND THE MASTER DESIGNERS WHO SPURRED IT ON.

A. Paolo Martin’s 1969 Sigma Grand Prix was an F1 concept with revolutionary safety features. B. In the 1971 Alfa Romeo 33 Spider “Cuneo” concept, designer Paolo Martin melded traditional barchetta body style with the prevailing wedge design of the era. C. Bertone’s sci-fi 1976 Alfa Romeo Navajo concept could have come from the set of Star Wars, which was released a year later. D. Designed by Battista “Pinin” Farina, the elegant Cisitalia 202 was a high-water mark of midcentury Italian coachbuilding.

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PICTURE BOOK

Piotr Degler grew up in Spain and as a young man moved to Italy to study automotive design at its epicenter, Turin. He worked at Bertone in 2009 under design director Jason Castriota. More recently, Degler transitioned to photography. In addition to corporate and editorial work, Degler published his first book, Carros de Cuba, in 2016.

His new work, the beautifully printed, 264-page Made in Italy coffee-table book, documents his love of Italian automotive design. Degler brings a designer’s eye to each of the more than 100 vehicles he features. His expert lighting and framing offer a fresh perspective on familiar classics. He gives as much care to lesser-known and more modern subjects.

In addition to car pics, Degler devotes 23 pages to brief profiles of the maestros of Italian automotive design, including Marcello Gandini, Giorgetto Giugiaro, and Leonardo Fioravanti, among several others. Made in Italy is available at madeinitalybook.com. Degler also sells largescale prints of his work, some signed by the maestros themselves.

B R E A KT H R O U G H S T H AT D I D N ’ T

Gyroscopic Car

Developed by a Ford designer and an aerospace engineer, the 1967 Gyro-X was a two-wheeled singleseater that used a spinning gyroscope to remain upright through corners. Theoretically, it would be capable of 125 mph, with a thrifty 80-hp engine saving on fuel. Gyro Transport Systems went bankrupt, but the car was saved and still works—though is limited to 30 mph.

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B R E A KT H R O U G H S T H AT D I D N ’ T

Turbine-Powered Cars

If it’s the jet age, why doesn’t a car have a jet engine? After a decade or so of work, Chrysler released the Turbine Car in the Sixties, building five prototypes and 50 vehicles for the public to test. The technology worked and offered advantages in durability and maintenance, but the car was noisy, relatively slow, and poor on fuel economy. By the Eighties, Chrysler permanently grounded the idea of a jet-powered car.

C U TAWAY

THE FIRST MAINSTREAM automatic transmission, the General Motors Hydra-Matic, is easily one of GM’s greatest contributions to autodom. Using simple mechanics, complicated math, and incredible production standards, the company introduced a technology that would not be fully mastered until decades after its 1939 debut. These days automatic transmissions equip about 99 percent of new vehicles sold in the U.S., a dominance achieved thanks to undeniable advantages. Compared with any manual transmission, today’s automatics are easier to use, as reliable, and often faster and more fuel efficient. This ease changed the world. By making cars almost effortless to drive, GM spawned the large American cruisers that reshaped our highways and enabled rampant suburbanization. Some feared the Hydra-Matic was too complicated a machine to ever be reliable. It proved its durability, though. When World War II paused all consumer automotive production in the U.S., Cadillac put Hydra-Matic transmissions into M-5 light tanks—helpful for the war effort and later for the postwar marketing folks. Conﬁdence in the Hydra-Matic soared. The breakthrough autobox stayed in production for decades and cemented the automatic transmission as a must-have option for almost all consumer cars.

A. The input shaft connects to the engine, turning even when the brakes are holding the car. Manual transmissions solve this by requiring the driver to engage the clutch, but the technology to automate this process in a reliable, compact consumer product did not exist. Without something to mediate the relationship between input and output gears, a car would stall at every stop. B. The Hydra-Matic solved the stall issue with a simple fluid coupling. Rather than rotating a fixed gear shaft, the input rotates a container of fluid. This fluid transfers torque onto the output shaft but, importantly, can also simply spin around if the output shaft is locked in place. Later automatics added a stator that multiplies torque output. Those designs became known as torque converters.

AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE GM’S HYDRA-MATIC

IS REVOLUTIONARY, CONFOUNDINGLY COMPLICATED, AND RUGGED ENOUGH FOR WAR.

BY M A C K H O G A N

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF GENERAL MOTORS

C. A planetary gearset has one job: turn two input speeds into one output. The gearset has an outermost “ring” gear, an innermost “sun” gear, and “planet” gears that orbit between them. The sun gear is the first input and, in this case, receives power from the fluid coupling. To output power, it transfers energy to the orbiting gears or the ring itself.

D. A series of clutches, which connect input shafts to gearsets or hold ring gears in place, determines the route power takes through the transmission. Selectively engaging and disengaging them allows the car to choose from predetermined gear ratios. E. The ring gear is the second input—and a potential output—of a planetary gearset. A

ring gear can be locked in place, spun naturally by the connection to the planet gears, or spun in time with a separate input shaft. Planetary gears output force onto a rotating planet carrier. Their final output ratio depends on the speed of both input gears. If the ring gear is stopped and the sun gear is moving, the planet carrier will rotate more slowly than the input speed but with a torque advantage. If the outer ring gear is spinning, the output speed increases, but the torque advantage diminishes.

F. The path the power takes through all planetary gearsets determines the transmission’s final output. A reduced ratio in the first will affect the final output of the second, third, or fourth. Because of this and the multiple inputs that alter each gearset’s output, a Hydra-Matic gearbox with two planetary gearsets can offer four forward ratios. A small gearset at the back of the transmission reverses flow to create reverse. Simply choose Drive or Reverse on the gear selector and press the gas—the car handles the rest.

T I C K TO C K

BY K Y L E K I N A R D

BREGUET’S GRANDE COMPLICATION IS THE KING OF TIMEPIECES. IF YOU’VE EVER trusted a mechanical watch to help you catch a train on time, you owe a nod to Abraham-Louis Breguet. Born in 1747 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Breguet expressed his prodigious talent for mechanics via the complex gears, springs, and drivetrains of pocket watches. His work produced countless technological leaps, including an improved lever escapement, the overcoil hairspring, the tourbillon (considered horology’s crown jewel), and the wristwatch itself. Many have improved upon his breakthroughs over the centuries, but few have replaced a Breguet invention entirely. To celebrate its namesake, and to rub his achievements in the face of every other watchmaker, Breguet released the Tradition Tourbillon Fusée 7047. Because it’s a Breguet, this Grande Complication, wherein a watchmaker packs every

PHOTOGRAPH BY M A C I E K J A S I K

trick in its arsenal into a single timepiece, offers more horological ﬁrepower than most. Each of the watch’s 542 components is ﬁnished by hand and arranged to display Breguet’s genius. And rather than encase its greatest hits in the stale aesthetics of an old-world clock tower, Breguet’s platinum tribute looks more like the Terminator’s eyeball. Celebrating centuries-old history with cyborg aesthetics? That’s pretty rad.

A. Breguet 7047 in platinum, $189,700, breguet.com

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S H O P S W E L OV E

NO TEAM TRANSFORMED FORMULA 1

MORE THAN LOTUS.

S H O P S W E L OV E

BY T R AV I S O K U L S K I

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LOTUS HASN’T COMPETED in Formula 1 since 1994, yet Colin Chapman’s team sits fifth in alltime F1 constructors’ championships and sixth in all-time wins. But the company’s F1 cars didn’t merely win; they transformed the sport. The team’s innovative engineering and relentless push past convention cemented Lotus’s legacy. One glance down a row of Hethel’s best makes their contributions to the sport clear. Classic Team Lotus, owned and run by Colin’s son, Clive, serves as the brand’s unofficial museum and archive. It’s now housed in a thoroughly modern facility, having relocated from a bunker-like building, but the Lotus spirit is unchanged. The vehicles aren’t on display, per se. The storage area is more parking garage than museum, every car with a pan underneath, keeping oil off the concrete. And there’s a revolutionary F1 car in every corner. Lotus introduced the Type 25, built around the sport’s first aluminum monocoque structure, in 1962. The 25 was narrower and sat lower than anything before it. Teams that bought customer cars from Lotus (like the traditional space-frame Type 24) were rightfully pissed to find out these works cars were far more advanced. The 25 dominated, with chassis R4 winning seven grands prix and the 1963 F1 championship in the hands of Jim Clark. The 1967 Type 49 was the first to use the FordCosworth DFV V-8, which was integrated into the chassis as a stressed member. This was an astonishing innovation that not only saved weight but also shifted it lower down. The 49 won 12 races, two drivers’ titles, and two constructors’ titles. The DFV became nearly ubiquitous in F1, powering machines that took 12 drivers’ championships and 10 constructors’ titles between 1968 and 1982. Later in its life, the 49 added wings and was also one of the first to run sponsorship, an iconic livery from Gold Leaf. The Lotus 72, introduced for 1970 and arguably the most important F1 car ever, established the blueprint all F1 cars still follow. Low nose, broad sidepods, air intake above the roll bar—they’re all there. The 72 was so good that it ran for six

A. (Previous pages) The 72 was so good, it raced for six years. Imagine an F1 team trying that today. B. The 25 broke the mold, won everything, and even made Lotus’s customer teams furious. C. Chassis 49B-R10, Graham Hill’s 1969 Monaco GP winner. D. The twin-chassis 88 was banned before it ever raced. E. These tunnels on the 79 made ground effects possible and perhaps were Lotus’s most important innovation.

seasons, winning three constructors’ championships, two drivers’ championships, and 20 races. The team continued to use it as successive designs proved slower or harder to handle. The 79 was the car that won Lotus its final constructors’ and drivers’ titles. Introduced for 1978, it was the first to fully harness ground effects, a way of generating downforce from the underbody via tunnels that Lotus pioneered on the 1977 Type 78. It was a sensation, winning six races in 1978 while delivering Mario Andretti his title. Not all of Chapman’s designs were successful, but all showcased his rare genius. The pioneering 86 and 88 were visions of twin-chassis F1 cars meant to skirt regulations banning ground effects. Beyond its unique aero ideas, the 88 was technically the first F1 car built from carbon fiber. But before the 88 ever raced, the FIA banned it, perhaps showcasing the true measure of Chapman’s innovation: Even the Lotuses that never raced changed the game.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY D E A N S M I T H

B R E A KT H R O U G H S T H AT D I D N ’ T

Fifth Wheel

Californian inventor Brooks Walker tried for decades to sell his parking aid to automakers. A Thirties Packard was the first vehicle to show the device in action: As a powered wheel mounted parallel to the rear axle lowered, the car would swing its backside toward or away from the curb. The drawback was loss of trunk space. Detroit wasn’t buying.

Replace destinations with summits.

Outback Wilderness. Well-equipped at $38,445.*

Subaru, Outback, and X-MODE are registered trademarks. *MSRP excludes destination and delivery charges, tax, title, and registration fees. Retailer sets actual price. Certain equipment may be required in specific states, which can modify your MSRP. See your retailer for details. 2023 Subaru Outback Wilderness with available equipment shown has an MSRP of $40,290.

ILLUSTRATION BY AT E L I E R O L S C H I N S K Y

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THERE’S

A SUCKER

BORN EVERY

G E N E R ATION

TH E

VACUUM CAR

BREAKTHROUGH THAT JUST KEEPS

BREAKING.

BY M I K E S P I N E L L I

PHOTOGRAPHY BY B E N E D I CT R E D G R O V E

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TH E

DISTANT

WAIL

OF AN ELECTRIC

MOTOR

A. The channels that run along either side of the cockpit usher air directly out the rear of the car. B. More technology demonstrator than real car, the Spéirling did not prioritize ease of ingress and egress. C. The overgrown Tic Tac at the center of the Spéirling is where the driver, and only the driver, sits. B

cuts through the ambient hum. There’s a shhhwhoosh of moving air, and a sports car the size of a Victorian eyeglass case rockets past the grandstands at something like Mach 8. The crowd erupts in oohs and aahs and incredulous laughter. What the hell was that? On a nearby video wall, cameras track the McMurtry Spéirling as it shoots up the 11th Duke of Richmond’s driveway. On the screen, it looks over-fast and under-scaled, like a Micro Machines toy. Dust swirls as it jukes through Molecomb Corner, the Goodwood Hillclimb’s perilous 90-degree left-hander, ﬁxed to the ground as if by magic. For the Spéirling, that magic is fan aerodynamics. Fan cars are a motorsport engineering breakthrough that keeps trying to break through. The concept is simple and effective, like a hovercraft in reverse: Surround the bottom of a car with movable skirts, creating a plenum chamber that holds its seal at high speeds while traveling over tarmac and curbing, then install a fan or two to evacuate the air. As the air accelerates, it creates a low-pressure zone that pulls the car toward the ground, per the Bernoulli principle. Voilà! Downforce without wings. Fan aero is a motorsport engineer’s dream. With an external wing, negative lift (i.e., downforce) increases with the square of a car’s speed, and drag is the cost of doing business. In contrast, fan cars generate downforce as soon as the fan starts spinning, and they do it without the drag a wing produces as it mashes against the air. “With conventional aerodynamics, the forces just keep increasing with speed,” explains Willem Toet, a professor of motorsport engineering at the University of Bolton in the U.K. and a former head aerodynamicist for the Ferrari and BMW

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A. This image is in no way distorted. These are the actual proportions of McMurtry’s little record breaker. B. McMurtry isn’t ready to reveal all its downforce-generating secrets or why the Spéirling’s rear end appears to be an Aztec death whistle.

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Glen with Jackie Stewart at the wheel. Despite these milestones, it’s been a largely unfulfilling five decades for fan cars. C H A PA R R A L 2 J Chaparral was in a bind. After years of building and fielding successful racing cars loaded with aerodynamic wonders, the team and its principal, Jim Hall, needed a new performance edge. McLaren drivers Bruce McLaren and Denny Hulme were dominating Can-Am. The formerly no-rules racing series had, in 1969, banned movable aerodynamics devices, such as the suspension-mounted wings that were among Chaparral’s primary innovations. That same year, McLaren swept all 11 races in the series, leaving Chaparral’s low-wing 2H racing car in the dust. As the legend goes, a young racing fan handed Hall a crayon sketch, inspiring the development path that led to the world’s first fan car. Hall would lean heavily on the General Motors R&D center, which he’d worked with for years, to build something groundbreaking. Throughout the final years of the Sixties, the Chaparral 2J fan car took shape. The main body was fiberglass, with a rear deck fashioned out of aerospace-style honeycomb panels to resist the outside atmosphere’s deep desire to crush it as the fans evacuated air from the plenum. Initial testing revealed uncontrollable oversteer with the fans on, so engineers ensconced the entire engine bay within the plenum area to keep vacuum pressure centered. A 465-cid aluminum Chevrolet big-block V-8 paired with a semiautomatic three-speed transaxle provided motive force. A separate engine powered two axial fans lifted from a military tank engine. Using pulleys and belts and running at wide-open throttle, a 247-cc, 55-hp Rockwell JLO two-stroke, two-cylinder snowmobile engine drove the fans. Leading edges on the fan vanes were reinforced to survive strikes from fastmoving debris. As testing at Hall’s own Rattlesnake Raceway in Texas demonstrated, all sorts of stuff would inevitably get sucked into the blades. Over time, an elaborate system of skirts took shape, fabbed out of General Electric’s Lexan polycarbonate plastic. A series of cables guided the skirts to rise and fall with suspension deflection, keeping them just above the track surface. An articulated apron designed to flip 180 degrees to manage encounters with track detritus was held forward by flaps driven by vacuum pressure. With the total plenum area at around 7400 square inches, and the fans maintaining a pressure of

A. The boxy Chaparral 2J of 1970 was the first of the suckers. It was quick but unreliable in its one season of Can-Am competition. Then it was outlawed.

PHOTOGRAPH BY BERNARD CAHIER/GETTY IMAGES

Sauber F1 teams. “That applies to both drag and downforce. In a fan car, the fan is operating at the speed that you determine. You can go to maximum [downforce] at zero speed, and it will give you an acceleration right off the line and maximum in low-speed corners.” While less effective in high-speed corners, fan cars have the edge over wings for distributing downforce evenly. “If you place it sensibly, a fan car also has the advantage of being centrally located,” Toet says. “So when you change the power of the fan, you’re not changing the aerodynamic balance in the vehicle, just how much [downforce] you’re generating.” From a driver’s perspective, fan aero could also improve the craft and the spectacle of auto racing. “You can sit at 150 miles an hour nose to tail around a corner, and you wouldn’t lose any performance,” says Max Chilton, McMurtry development driver and IndyCar and F1 veteran. “With any other downforce, if you’re in dirty air, you lose it. In F1 cars, single-seaters, or anything with downforce, the racing is compromised because you can’t follow. This will completely cure that problem.” With twin electric-powered fans and proprietary ground-effects bodywork, the 2205pound McMurtry Spéirling prototype generates more than double its weight in downforce, making it strikingly effective in the tight bends of Goodwood’s 1.16-mile hill-climb course. With the footprint of an F1 car from the Sixties, the Spéirling—it means thunderstorm in Irish— sprints onward, blitzing past a centuries-old flint wall dubbed the “meat grater.” Driver Alex Summers, a British Hillclimb Championship winner, settles into a flat-out final sprint and crosses the finish line at 149.1 mph, just under the Spéirling’s gearing-limited maximum of 150 mph. The run is a scorcher at 40.05 seconds, putting the Spéirling atop the board for 2022’s Goodwood Festival of Speed Qualifying Shootout and priming it for Chilton—absent from Goodwood on Saturday to attend a wedding—to attempt a record-setting run the next day. David McMurtry, an Irish engineer and billionaire captain of the measurement-equipment industry who once worked on the Concorde’s axialflow turbojet engines, founded McMurtry Automotive. The electric-sports-car startup based in Gloucestershire has returned fan aero to racing tarmac for the first time since the Brabham BT46B won the Swedish Grand Prix in 1978. Eight years before then, the Chaparral 2J—the earliest competition fan car in history—first raced at Watkins

The Brabham BT46B fan car shares a large, circular protrusion at its rear with the new Gordon Murray Automotive (GMA) T.50 road car. Both are fans. And both were put there by designer Gordon Murray. Despite family resemblance, the T.50 and the BT46B are dissimilar vehicles whose fans serve very different purposes. The BT46B, which the Brabham F1 team ran at the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix, was a sucker car. Its fan created a low-pressure zone under the car that pulled the BT46B toward the ground, thereby generating downforce without the drag penalty of a wing (or, if the FIA asked, it cooled the engine). The fan nestled into the T.50’s rear bodywork is part of a less radical but more sophisticated aerodynamics scheme. Those who read car manuals might remember that Murray’s 1994 McLaren F1 used two 120-mm fans to accelerate underbody air up over a steep section of the rear diffuser, which created around five percent more downforce (and a two percent reduction in drag). The T.50’s 400-mm fan operates on the same principle but is more comprehensive.

Like the F1’s fans, it reduces turbulence and air separation over the entire width of its rear diffuser, in concert with other aerodynamic components. For example, in its highest-downforce setting, the fan activates, a set of rear spoiler flaps flip up, and the diffuser ducts open. The result is 50 percent more downforce instantly. The system has other settings, including the low-downforce Streamline mode for Autobahn sprints, which drops the flaps below the bodywork by –10 degrees, stalls the diffuser, and cranks up the fan to its maximum 7000 rpm to create a “virtual longtail” that reduces overall drag by 12.5 percent. A Brake Boost mode extends the flaps up 45 degrees, opens the diffuser ducts, and maxes out the fan, doubling downforce and reducing the T.50’s stopping distance from 150 mph by 10 meters. For the most brutal acceleration, V-Max Boost mode reduces drag to a minimum and isolates fan power to the T.50’s 48-volt starter-generator, eliminating parasitic drag on the naturally aspirated V-12 and delivering up to 690 hp for a short period. “The Brabham was a really simple, crude device,” Murray said in a GMA video. “It was a vacuum cleaner.”

0.25 psi inside it, the system could generate as much downforce as the car’s weight. In his memoir Faster! A Racer’s Diary, Stewart remembers getting behind the wheel of the 2J at Watkins Glen for its first competitive outing. On race day, the 2J was slow out of the gate, owing to its semiautomatic transmission. Stewart found his footing, but mechanical issues reared up. “In the fourth lap, I’d moved past Peter Revson to take third,” he wrote. “As I was closing in on Dan [Gurney], a vapor lock forced me into the pits, and then, back out for only seven laps, I lost the brakes completely, which forced me to call it a day.” Driver Vic Elford, who replaced Stewart after Watkins Glen, brought the 2J home in sixth place at the next Can-Am race at Road Atlanta. It was the only race the 2J finished that season, as reliability issues continued to vex the team. More ominously, race organizers met behind the scenes to debate the 2J’s legality. The skirts, they eventually ruled, were a “movable aerodynamic device.” The Chaparral 2J was history. It was eight years before the next fan car hit the track. BRABHAM BT46b If you’d wandered into the pits at the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix, you might have wondered why Brabham-Alfa Romeo’s racing car had a plastic trash-can lid sticking out from under its rear wing. The makeshift shield was to keep other F1 teams from eyeballing the business end of the world’s second fan car ever to enter competition. Rewind to the previous year. In working up the Brabham BT46, designer Gordon Murray gambled that ditching conventional radiators in favor of surface coolers would lower the car’s drag and give Brabham a shot against the dominant Ferrari and Lotus teams. According to veteran F1 engineer David North, who was Murray’s assistant at the time, the team soon realized the airstream was passing over the outside of the panels, bypassing the cooling fins altogether. “It didn’t have much drag, but it wasn’t cooling either,” North recalls. “So we gave up on the idea.” The radically designed, cutting-edge BT46 needed a major reboot, and they rushed to find a solution. “We realized a good place to put a radiator would be on top of the [Alfa Romeo flat-12] engine,” North says. “It was a great big space with nothing in it, but the only way we could get air to it would be with a fan.” The ideas started flowing. “We obviously were aware of sliding skirts from the Chaparral 2J and from the Lotus 78,” North remarks. “If we had a fan, we could suck air from underneath the car like the 2J did,

PHOTOGRAPH BY KEYSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

This Is Not a Vacuum Cleaner

A. Convenient how that enormous enginecooling fan at the back of the 1978 Brabham BT46B also produced an enormous amount of downforce by evacuating air from beneath the car. It won the only F1 race it ever contested.

so it’s not an aerodynamic device, but an aerostatic device. We could also use the fan to pull air through the radiator.” The team posited that if they could prove the system’s primary function was cooling and its aerodynamic effects were secondary, they had a shot at getting the BT46B through scrutineering. It worked. “We were legally obliged to use the engine to drive the fan,” North acknowledges, so Murray designed the fan system to have reduction gears connected to the gearbox shaft, running at engine speed. Mechanics installed a slipper clutch to reduce gearchange shocks, and a dog clutch allowed them to disconnect the drive while working on the car with the engine running. They installed an axial-ﬂow fan with carbonreinforced nylon blades. These were promptly damaged by sucked-up debris from the ground, so Murray replaced them with cast magnesium. A simple arrangement of skirts designed to rub on the ground, with strips of ultrahigh-molecularweight polyethylene attached to protect the edges,

completed the sides of the plenum. “They lasted a race distance but not much more,” North admits. Steel leaf springs held the side skirts to the ground, and sliding panels sealed off the uprights, driveshafts, and wishbones. The rear skirt was angled rearward and sealed easily by suction, but the front skirt was a more complex issue. “That was the tricky problem—how to design a front skirt that’s able to climb over debris and doesn’t create a big high-pressure region ahead of it,” North recalls. “[We] drilled one-inch holes through the front skirt, and behind there was a sailcloth bag, a double bag running across behind it, and holes inside that bag as well.” The idea was for dynamic air pressure coming through the holes to inflate the airbag to counteract the dynamic load on the front of the skirt. Drivers John Watson and Niki Lauda soon put the BT46B to the test at the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix. After qualifying third, Lauda moved past pole sitter Mario Andretti in the Lotus to finish first, while Watson, who’d qualified second, sufR&T VOL. 14 059

A. The Red Bull X2010 was a digital flight of fancy. It was theoretically capable of producing nearly as many g’s as an F-22 Raptor fighter jet. B. The stubby Spéirling is not short on performance. It can fire itself to 60 mph in about 1.4 seconds. C. The McMurtry’s fan-based system generates 4400 pounds of downforce at a standstill.

fered a stuck throttle, spun, and retired from the race. On balance, Brabham’s second development gamble had paid off. “The authorities deemed [the BT46B] legal,” North continues. “They said, ‘You can have your points in the race, but we’re going to change the rules at the end of the season, so you can’t have it next season.’ Bernie [Ecclestone, owner of Brabham] was under a lot of political pressure from other teams, so he voluntarily withdrew the car on the basis that we’d keep our nine points from winning the race in Sweden. So that was the end of the 46B.” What would have happened had the BT46B continued to race? “BT47 would have been far more sophisticated,” North says, with “a much more effective skirt system and twin counterrotating fans. The only limit would have been the driver’s ability to withstand lateral acceleration. Perhaps the entire cockpit could have been designed to rotate about the roll axis. Who knows?” RED BULL X2010 A decade ago, Red Bull designer Adrian Newey opened his pencil box, and the Red Bull X2010 ﬂowed out. It was a ﬁctional racing car envisioned for Gran Turismo 5 after franchise founder Kazunori Yamauchi challenged Newey to create the fastest F1 car possible, free from rules and regulations. With Newey’s imagined fan aero system, the X2010’s theoretical lateral acceleration num-

ber was off the charts at 8.75 g’s. Sebastian Vettel would likely have faced serious medical issues if he’d tried to race it at Monza. We’ll never know. M C M U R T RY S P É I R L I N G We call them fan cars, but the skirts are the whole game. “You’ve got this frictional component, which generates heat,” observes Thomas Yates, McMurtry Automotive managing director. “It’s a really harsh environment. But once you can get to a solution that works, then it unlocks a huge number of other opportunities.” With no racing-series organizers to placate, McMurtry engineers operate in a world where any solution within the budget allocated is fair game and rulebooks don’t tamp down innovation. “We did a load of research and concluded that the real reasons for fans being banned in the Seventies were predominantly political,” Yates says. “There were some technical challenges, but nothing that couldn’t be resolved with modernday technology.” Once the development team committed to making the Spéirling a fan car, Yates concludes, they developed the entire vehicle around fan downforce, and it “became fundamental to the design of the car and the chassis.” T H E G O O D WO O D R E C O R D On Sunday, at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, Max Chilton slips beneath the canopy of the McMurtry Spéirling prototype. During qualifying the day before, driver Alex Summers had already bested the official hill-climb record of 41.6 seconds, set in 1999 by Nick Heidfeld in a McLaren MP4-13 F1 car. During the final shootout today, Chilton is going for the official record. He’s also taking on an unofficial record of 39.9 seconds set by Romain Dumas during the Qualifying Shootout in 2019 in the electric Volkswagen ID.R. Chilton’s launch out of the gate looks ballistic, as if it should be measured in feet per second. His run looks flawless and terrifying, yet Chilton is as calm as if on a parade lap. “When you’re in it, you just put so much belief in this thing,” Chilton remarks. “It’s got so much grip. But from the outside, you think, ‘How on earth is he doing that?’ But it’s got so much performance from the downforce that you just trust it.” Chilton’s run gets the same response from the crowd, whose oohs and aahs suggest this stuff never gets old. It’s a racing car with fan aero, the first one since 1978 to emerge victorious. Chilton blasts over the finish line at 149.1 mph. His time: 39.08 seconds.

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ELON MUSK’S BIGGEST COUP AIN’T ROCKETS.

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IT’S THE QUIETLY BUILT SUPERCHARGER NETWORK ...

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THAT TRUMPS ALL COMERS.

BY L AW R E N C E U L R I C H ILLUSTRATIONS BY M I K E M C Q U A D E

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ELON MUSK HAS YET to change life on Mars, but the man has changed life on our planet forever. We know about the cars, rocket ships, and tunnels; Ludicrous, Twitter, and Grimes. But for all of Musk’s achievements, including putting Tesla on track to sell 1.4 million EVs globally in 2022, his most underrated breakthrough may be Tesla’s biggest modern edge: the Supercharger network. “Without the Supercharger network, we wouldn’t be talking about Tesla today,” says Dan Ives, a Wall Street tech analyst and regular television commentator on Tesla and EVs. “It was the core DNA of their success, along with innovation and engineering. Now it’s the linchpin of their brand and their competitive moat against other automakers.”

Tesla Hatched The Egg; Rival Automakers Were Chicken For the ﬂedgling Tesla of roughly 2008 to 2012, life-or-death priorities included developing the Model S and opening a California factory. Then there was solving ﬁendish battery riddles, plus

managing an IPO, Wall Street, and the government. Musk staved off personal bankruptcy as he poured $55 million into the company by 2008, even as he pushed SpaceX toward liftoff. Considering all the Hail Mary plays, it’s striking that Musk & Co. could draw up one more for a far-ﬂung global charging network. But from the early days, executives including JB Straubel, the chief technical officer Musk considered a co-founder, saw game-changing potential. “JB was always stoked about the idea of charging fast,” says Troy Nergaard, a former Tesla senior engineer who led Supercharger development. “We were all excited about getting power into the car quickly, if the battery could accept it.” Current and former Tesla employees recall chaotic yet inspiring times. Even as incumbent automakers scoffed at the Silicon Valley upstart, Tesla solved the chicken-and-egg conundrum that kept EVs in an embryonic state by birthing car and charger simultaneously. Charger prototypes sprung from a company lab in Palo Alto. California’s ﬁrst six Superchargers, erected

starting in 2012, stacked a dozen of the Model S’s 10-kW onboard chargers. That ingenious modular design, Nergaard says, may explain some of the Supercharger’s reliability advantage over competing chargers. “The core of the Supercharger is the core of the vehicle, and fast-charge makers who don’t come from an auto environment don’t necessarily have that rigor,” Nergaard says. Along with Tesla’s wizardly innovations in batteries, software, and controls, the sleek Superchargers pushed free DC electricity into the groundbreaking sedans at unheard-of speeds, courtesy of 90 kW of charging power. “We knew we could charge at faster rates than had ever been done,” says Ali Javidan, a former Tesla engineer who led prototype R&D. “We knew road trips were a big deal, not just because of the family fantasy, but because that’s a decision-maker in car buying. So we started choosing our favorite corridors and putting in Superchargers.” In October 2011, Nergaard and his team put bare-bones Supercharger prototypes, electronic guts still showing, through their paces at Tesla’s Fremont factory. Tesla invited early reservation holders for Model S ride-alongs, which required quick charges to keep the amusement rides going. “That was the first time we tried charging multiple vehicles back-to-back,” Nergaard says. On the morning of September 24, 2012, Nergaard’s engineering team set out from Folsom, near Sacramento, in a pair of Model S cars. It was history’s first fast-charging long-distance EV road trip, like Thelma & Louise minus explosions. “It was so fun to see it function in the wild for the first time,” Nergaard says. That afternoon, the team rolled into Tesla’s design center in Hawthorne, near Los Angeles, in time for Musk’s public reveal of the network. The era of long-distance EV driving had begun, soon to sweep the globe. That evening, Musk, wearing a black “Supercharger” T-shirt, bounded onto a stage, flanked by a roughly 20-foot obelisk and smothered in rock-concert smoke. This was ostensibly the Supercharger that Musk said would sprout along the world’s highways. In another now-familiar Barnumesque flourish, Musk declared the Superchargers, fed by his SolarCity panels, would generate enough juice to power every Tesla. “You’ll be able to travel for free, forever, on pure sunlight,” Musk told the delighted crowd. Only a handful of solar Superchargers materialized. The overweening obelisk was never seen

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again. But Superchargers were real. Days after the reveal, a New York Times reporter drove a Model S 531 miles from Lake Tahoe to L.A. over 11.5 hours. “The one big holdout with most EVs today is that you can’t take a road trip,” Straubel said at the time. “What happens if I want to go across the country? I can’t tell you how many times we get that question.” The question was answered. As of the third quarter of 2022, in the midst of a global expansion, Tesla has more than 4200 DC stations—almost 1700 in North America alone—with nine individual stalls per station on average. A June milestone saw the company open its 35,000th Supercharger stall in Wuhan, China. Earlier this year, Tesla erected a 14-stall Florida station using a clever new preassembly system in just eight days.

First-wave buyers needed the reassuring backstop of public charging. And not just early adopters: J.D. Power surveys show that charging anxiety, not range anxiety, remains the top barrier to EV adoption. Javidan calls the Supercharger network, which gives buyers coastto-coast reasons to choose a Tesla over models from Ford, GM, Hyundai, or Volkswagen, “a perfect example of what makes Elon, Elon. He’ll say, ‘I can create a better user experience. So how can I force this future sooner?’ And he’s got the guts to say to engineers, ‘Pencils down. Let’s ship it to customers and make it better over time, even if there’s bad and good to that.’” So why didn’t other automakers build or fund their own networks (Rivian is trying) or cut some partnership with Tesla? Martin Eberhard, who co-founded Tesla in 2003—before Musk notoriously forced him out in 2007—suggests a few reasons. Volkswagen’s German EV department, where he worked post-Tesla, was a Siberia for engineering “losers,” he says. They were tasked with making dreadful compliance cars to help the company prove the pointlessness of EVs, in Eberhard’s view. “It was clear people at the top didn’t buy into it at all,” he says. As for chargers, that kind of holistic problem-solving “is outside automakers’ paradigm. To them, that’s Chevron’s problem or whoever.” Eberhard recalls a pointed dismissal from Wolfgang Hatz, Volkswagen Group’s imperious engine chief: “Mr. Eberhard, I am four years from mandatory retirement,” Hatz said. “By then, I guarantee

Superchargers 0

2013

2015

2017

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Halt and Catch Up

Number of Open Superchargers Worldwide

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2023

Superchargers per Country (Top 5)

U.S. 35%

China 33% Other 22%

France 3%

Canada 4% Germany 3%

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Superchargers per State (U.S.) Open Under Construction Permitted

100 percent of our proﬁts will come from internal combustion. So why am I talking to you?” Hatz would spend nine months in a German jail beginning in 2017 for his role in Dieselgate, enough time to mull the irony: That sooty scandal sparked VW’s about-face on EVs. VW’s $2 billion U.S. settlement also birthed and funded Electrify America, one of several charging outﬁts that has failed to match Musk’s trustworthy plugs. “Tesla has put the full force of the company behind the network as one integrated user experience,” says Chris Nelder, an energy author and analyst who has advised the White House on infrastructure. “No one else is approaching it that way, so they don’t have the same commitment.”

what Musk really cares about

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It helps that in America, Tesla’s proprietary network must only be compatible with Tesla models (at least for now). Rivals wrestle with interoperability concerns. Seemingly every customer of Electrify America, ChargePoint, or EVgo can relate horror stories of malfunctioning chargers. A San Francisco survey of nearly 660 non-Tesla chargers found just 73 percent working properly. Others were unresponsive or had screen issues, broken plugs, or payment or network failures. “Take a 400-mile road trip in a non-Tesla, and there are clear risks,” Ives says. Spotty reliability, Nelder says, “has become a black eye on the industry. People need to feel that when they show up to a charger, it will work.” Americans bought more than 330,000 EVs in the first six months of 2022, up from less than 15,000 in all of 2012. Many are taking a leap of faith: For nearly 80 percent of Ford F-150 Lightning buyers, the pickup is their first EV. At the Lightning launch in Texas, Darren Palmer, Ford’s EV vice president, acknowledged that charging’s “black eye” could ultimately bruise automakers who sold those EVs. Ford has taken matters into its own hands, sending teams of “Charge Angels” to test stations, diagnose issues, and nudge partners to fix them, pronto. The initiative underscores vulnerabilities for automakers that don’t build and operate their own networks. A Tesla pilot program in 13 European countries, where newer Teslas run a common CCS2 plug, gives owners of other brands a limited taste of Supercharging. Musk hasn’t pulled the trigger on this availability in the U.S., protecting his golden goose.

CHARTS SOURCE: SUPERCHARGE .INFO

U.S. States

A. Tesla has installed these happy, hollowed-out monoliths throughout the country (and in many parts of the world).

“Between Detroit, China, and everyone else, 100-plus automakers are going after the EV market. There’s no reason for Musk to play nice in that sandbox,” Ives says, even if monetizing often-idle, unproﬁtable chargers remains a vexing challenge. Yet Javidan believes that Musk, determined to sprinkle EVs over the earth’s surface, may open the network to common Ioniqs and ID.4s, or be carrotand-sticked into it by governments. Setting aside small numbers of Superchargers for non-Teslas— with premium pricing, slower speeds, or limited features—might be considered a civic responsibility, and it wouldn’t anger Tesla owners. “He really cares deeply about these issues,” Javidan says. “I don’t see a scenario where he’d say no to the rest of the world.” With plug installations lagging behind expected EV demand, the White House is mounting a

$5 billion cavalry to spur construction of 500,000 chargers, part of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill. At Detroit’s recent auto show, vintage–Sting Ray owner President Joe Biden hopped into a Cadillac Lyriq, noted his preference for the Corvette Z06, then announced $900 million in funding for chargers in 35 states. While new plugs and jobs should be welcome, some question whether this public-private partnership will create serious Supercharger alternatives. Will it just waste money on companies, municipalities, or contractors with poor track records? Under the current plan, charging companies must achieve 97 percent reliability as a funding condition. Nelder advised the administration that oversight and accountability were in order but acknowledged that near perfection seems optimistic. Eberhard suggests that rather than always trying to be “Tesla 1.1,” automakers and charging stakeholders should seek new ideas and unmet needs. Curbside charging for urban residents, who currently feel locked out of the EV game, is an obvious opportunity.

Mack Trucks or Musk Trucks?

PHOTOGRAPH BY FILIP RADWANSKI/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES

The Department of Energy estimates that medium- and heavy-duty trucks emit a bit more carbon dioxide than all passenger cars combined. TeraWatt Infrastructure has quickly raised $1 billion for truck charging. As ever, Tesla is also thinking big. Its commercial truck, Semi, is slated to arrive by year-end. Fueling electron-huffing Semis, which are targeting 500-mile ranges, has Tesla purportedly readying Megachargers with up to 1.5-megawatt power. That’s enough, Nelder says, to power a midrise office building, an enormous tech challenge anywhere, let alone desolate trucking outposts from Wyoming to Minnesota. For smaller jobs, Tesla’s ever-tardy Cybertruck, billed as a utility vehicle with sports-car performance, is expected in mid-2023. Tesla has also revived its long-awaited solar promise, including a possible plan for V4 Supercharger stalls on Interstate 8 in Arizona, fed by huge solar arrays, with storage in Megapack batteries. Musk keeps dreaming and promising. Tesla’s announced goal of building 20 million cars and trucks a year by the early Thirties seems quixotic even by Musk’s standards. But ask the short sellers: Whether the plan is to dominate global EVs or reﬁll batteries, it rarely pays to bet against Musk.

High-proﬁle drivers on the breakthrough moments that made their careers. BY A . J . B A I M E

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‘It Was like God Had Just Spoken to Me’ MARIO ANDRETTI, 1963

“ M A R I O A N D R E T T I , you have just hit the big time!” The shrill voice came piping through the loudspeaker at the small-town dirt track in Hatfield, Pennsylvania. The announcer was, unmistakably, Chris Economaki, the “dean of motorsports journalism.” Mario Andretti had just won a feature race, and he was still in the car on the cool-down lap when he heard Economaki’s plaudit from above. “It was like God had just spoken to me,” Andretti says, looking back on that 1963 Labor Day weekend victory. But it wasn’t just one win that day. Andretti accomplished something that had never been done and likely hasn’t been replicated. The day began with a heat and a match race 30 miles from Hatfield in Flemington, New Jersey. Twenty-three-year-old Mario had been in the U.S. for only eight years, having spent most of his childhood in Italy. His family had lost almost everything in World War II and come to America penniless. Andretti was already Ferrari mad by the time he got to this country and was determined to make it on the American racing scene. He started out in three-quarter midgets and won a lot, earning a ride in 1963 in the American Racing Drivers Club series (ARDC), which ran up and down the East Coast. Brothers Bill and Ed Mataka of Maplewood, New Jersey, owned the No. 33 car Andretti drove. It was Offenhauser powered and bright yellow with the sponsor logo “Jersey Speed & Marine” painted on the nose. “I won that first match race and the feature in Flemington,” Andretti recalls. On those tracks, in those days, it was ten-tenths all the way. “Every A

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lap was like a qualifying lap,” he says. “It takes a lot out of you.” Right after, Andretti trailered the car from Flemington over the state line into Pennsylvania. The Hatfield Speedway dirt track was a third of a mile and banked—“a very fast, very interesting track,” he recalls. By now, the sun had set and the lights were on. Andretti won his heat and went on to win the feature. Then things got really exciting. There was a legend about a midget driver named Shorty Templeman. The night before the Indianapolis 500 in 1956, on a quarter-mile paved track that used to be across the street from the Brickyard, Templeman won three feature races in one big event—one in the afternoon, one at night, and one after midnight. In 1963, the ARDC was scheduled to run a third feature race due to a rainout earlier in the season. If Andretti could win it, he would match Templeman’s achievement of three features, and unlike Shorty’s race, the third ARDC race would be run before midnight, so all three would be in one day. Andretti went out and won that final race. “As far as is known,” he says, “in sanctioned events, this is the only time three features were won within one day. That put my name on the map nationally.” The following year, Andretti debuted in Indy car, running 10 of the season’s 13 races. In his first full season, in 1965, he won the national championship, snapping A.J. Foyt’s streak of four straight titles. Even now, Andretti still hears Economaki’s voice over the loudspeaker at that small-town Pennsylvania track. “It was this amazing thing,” he says, “that I’ll never forget.”

LEFT PHOTOGRAPH FROM MARIO ANDRETTI, RIGHT PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

‘I’m a Driver Who Happens to Be a Woman’ JA N E T G U T H R I E , 19 7 7

A. Mario Andretti entered the big time in 1963 with an amazing Labor Day weekend of racing. B. A clearly delighted Janet Guthrie upon becoming the first woman to qualify for the Indy 500.

THE PRESS CALLED her the “goddess of racing.” When Janet Guthrie debuted in Indy car for the 1976 season, she had a helmet-clad Athena—the Greek goddess of war—painted on the car’s nose. “We’re all drivers here,” she told a reporter before the Schaefer Beer 500 that year at Pocono. “I’m a driver who happens to be a woman. There is no reason—physical, emotional, or psychological—that a woman cannot drive a car as well as a man. And when men don’t feel ashamed of being beaten by a woman, we will have come a long way.” Guthrie had a daring childhood. “I was born an adventuress and grew up insufficiently socialized,” she says today. “My first love was flying. I soloed for the first time when I was 16, got a private license at 17 and an instructor’s and commercial license before I got out of college.” She was a development engineer at an aviation firm when she bought a seven-year-old Jaguar XK120M and discovered motor racing. She raced SCCA for years, plus the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring. “After 13 years, I was out of money,” she says. “I had one used-up race car, no insurance, no house, no jewelry, no husband. I was saying, ‘Janet, you should come to your senses.’” Then a phone call changed everything. Longtime Indy-car team owner Rolla Vollstedt wanted Guthrie to drive for him and become the first woman to qualify for the Indy 500. That year, 1976, she didn’t make the cut; Vollstedt’s car wasn’t quick enough. But press attention got her a NASCAR ride. She became the first woman to compete in the Daytona 500, finishing 12th in 1977. Then in May it was back to Indy, which in those days utterly eclipsed any other race in the Western Hemisphere. “Rolla had gained enough sponsorship money to purchase a better car,” Guthrie says. “On the first day of practice, I set the fastest time. I went back to the garage, and Rolla said, ‘Well, Guthrie, that oughtta get their attention.’” While straining to make the field, Guthrie crashed at 191 mph. She still made the grid, qualifying 26th out of 33 positions. Even before she returned to the pits, she knew: “My life would never be the same.” Her achievement made newspapers all over the globe. Before each Indy 500, track owner Tony Hulman made his famous pronouncement: “Gentlemen, start your engines!” This time he said, “In company with the first lady ever to qualify at the Indianapolis 500, gentlemen, start your engines!” Guthrie made it 27 laps before her engine blew. She went on to start 11 Indy-car races with one topfive finish and 33 NASCAR Cup races with five top 10s. She didn’t just break the racing glass ceiling; she motored through it at nearly 200 mph.

‘I Went from Chump to Champ’ D AV Y J O N E S , 1 9 8 6 , 1 9 9 6

WANNA SEE AN UP-AND-COMING professional athlete in his worst moment? Search “Davy Jones Road America crash” on YouTube. The year was 1986, and the Chicago-born driver was 22, racing a BMW-powered March GTP in IMSA. Jones tucked in behind a Nissan going through Road America’s famous kink when he lost downforce on the car’s front end. The vehicle was in pieces in seconds, and Jones was lucky to be alive. “The car was absolutely destroyed,” he remembers. He ended up in an ambulance, fearing this shunt could be a career ender. The team manager, John Dick, came to Jones and said, “Davy, BMW and all the powers that be just lost a million-dollar race car. But the team believes in you. We’re going to build you a new car. We’re going to go to Watkins Glen, and we’re going to kick ass.” And that’s exactly what happened. Four weeks later, Jones and teammate John Andretti won at

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Watkins Glen. “I went from chump to champ,” Jones recalls. That victory launched Jones’s trajectory. But as many fans know, that’s where this story really gets interesting. Jones debuted at Le Mans with the Jaguar factory team in 1988. For four straight years, he competed in the Silk Cut XJR-9. He led the race every time but came up short in each, finishing second in 1991. Then: nothing. Jaguar folded the team. Five years went by before Jones got picked up by Joest Porsche. The team bought Jaguar’s XJR-14s and redid the bodywork on one of them, making it an open-cockpit and flat-bottom car. Engine: Porsche turbo 3.0-liter flat-six. Testing at Circuit Paul Ricard revealed that the machine had what it took to be a winner, and Jones thought maybe this was his time to break through. On Memorial Day weekend 1996, Jones placed second in one of the closest Indy 500s in history, behind Buddy Lazier (who two months earlier

had broken his back in 16 places after a crash in Phoenix). Then Jones took off for Le Mans, where he co-drove with Alexander Wurz of Austria and Manuel Reuter of Germany. The No. 7 Joest Porsche manhandled the competition for most of the 24 hours, and at the end, on his ﬁfth and what would turn out to be his last go at Le Mans, Jones was in the cockpit a lap ahead of the second-place Porsche 911 GT1. And there it was: the checkered ﬂag, waving in the wind. The team completed 354 laps—over 2991 miles. “When you win a race like Le Mans, you’re ecstatic, but you’re more relieved than anything,” Jones says today from his home outside South Lake Tahoe. “It’s a team effort and takes everybody’s effort to win. You’re so focused on the race and the strategy and the competition. It’s not until a couple of days later that it sinks in. A few days later, you’re, like, fucking A! We won that thing!” No American has won it since.

LEFT PHOTOGRAPHY FROM DAVY JONES, RIGHT PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT LESIEUR/MOTORSPORT IMAGES

A. In 1986, Davy Jones (holding champagne) found redemption after a huge, potentially career-ending accident mere weeks before. B. With teammate John Andretti, Jones won the IMSA race at Watkins Glen. Ten years later, Jones took second place at the Indianapolis 500 and won the 24 Hours of Le Mans. C. Jamie McMurray setting a NASCAR Cup record that still stands, with a 2002 rookie win at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

HEROES ARE MADE when ordinary people are thrust into extraordinary situations. Then— through courage, talent, and some luck—they cement their place in history. That’s the story of Jamie McMurray’s drive at Charlotte Motor Speedway in October 2002. “I was this guy from Missouri who grew up in a normal family,” he recalls. Just two years earlier, he was racing a pickup for an underfunded team. At Charlotte, McMurray shocked the NASCAR world by winning in just his second Cup race. It all started at age eight when he first climbed into a go-kart. McMurray didn’t come from a racing family, making his rise all the more unlikely. He climbed the ranks to the Craftsman Truck Series, then to NASCAR’s second tier, which at that time was the Busch Series. Then came that phone call. At the Protection One 400 in Kansas on September 29, 2002, Sterling Marlin crashed brutally, and x-rays revealed a cracked vertebra in his neck. Team owner Chip Ganassi called on McMurray to fill in for Marlin. McMurray had never won in the truck or Busch series. He finished 26th in his first Cup race at Talladega. Then the whole circus moved on to Charlotte, where NASCAR fans treat the sport as a religion. “Charlotte was probably my least favorite track,” McMurray recalls. In practice, his lap times were close to dead last. He came into the pit, and team manager Tony Glover said, “You weren’t kidding—this is not a good track for you.”

Throughout practice and qualifying, however, McMurray got himself dialed in. Rain delayed the start, but when the green flag waved, McMurray and his team used brilliant pit strategy and crackling performance to cycle into the lead. “As drivers, you always hear about clean air and how much faster you can run when you’re out in front,” he says. “When I got out front, I was, like, wow! The car was really fast. I’d never experienced that before.” McMurray led 96 of the last 100 laps in the No. 40 Coors Light car. “I remember everything about the last lap,” he says. Bobby Labonte was tucked close behind in second, so one little mistake could have cost McMurray the race. Team manager Glover said calmly over the radio, “Okay, little buddy, the next one back is the winner.” The checkered flag waved, and the TV announcer yelled, “Unbelievable!” The scene in Charlotte’s victory lane was insane. McMurray’s father had flown in for the race and got to see it all. “When I got to victory lane,” McMurray says, “I put myself in Sterling’s shoes. I knew he was at home with a broken neck. Someone gave me a cellphone, and Sterling was on the phone. He couldn’t have been nicer. He said all the things you would want him to say.” McMurray raced his first full year in Cup the following season, winning Rookie of the Year honors. Now McMurray is a TV analyst with Fox. His achievement of winning in only his second Cup race is a record that still stands.

‘Okay, Little Buddy, the Next One Back Is the Winner’ J A M I E M c M U R R AY, 2 0 0 2

‘Oh My God! Oh My God!’ ALEXANDER ROSSI, 2016

fuel into the car. Team co-owner Bryan Herta had an idea. They would go off strategy and skip the last planned pit stop, which meant they would have to hit an insanely high fuel-mileage number. “I didn’t think what we were doing was going to work,” Rossi says. Nearing the end, when drivers started pitting for a final fuel stop, Rossi stayed out. He captured the lead, babying the throttle. “We were going to run out of gas on the last lap,” he says. “It was just a matter of where and how big of a lead that we were going to have when that happened. Could we coast across the finish line and have enough buffer to win?” Rossi heard over his radio when he entered the final lap: “Half a lap lead! Half a lap lead!” On TV, the announcer yelled, “Can a rookie win the 500 on an economy run? . . . What a story that would be!” When Rossi’s engine started to sputter, he heard over the radio: “Full throttle! Full throttle! . . . Bring it home!” The motor died after Turn 3. Carlos Muñoz was chasing in second as Rossi moved through Turn 4, clutch in so the car could freewheel. He crossed the line four seconds ahead of Muñoz. “Checkered flag!” Herta yelled over Rossi’s radio. “You just won the Indy 500, baby!” Through the television, fans could hear Rossi saying “Oh my God! Oh my God!” “It was about as close as you could’ve cut it,” Rossi says, looking back. “They calculated everything perfectly. And that is how a guy who was never supposed to win the Indy 500 won it.”

A. Indianapolis 500 rookie Alexander Rossi coasted, out of fuel, across the finish line to win the 100th running of the race. A

PHOTOGRAPH BY JONATHAN FERREY/GETTY IMAGES

SITTING ON THE GRID at the Brickyard in the No. 98 Andretti Autosport Honda, Californian Alexander Rossi knew that he was unique among the field of 33 drivers set to start the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500 in 2016. He grew up a Formula 1 fan, lived and competed for much of his life in Europe, and had never been to an Indy 500. “I had to be the only one on the grid who had not dreamed of winning this race my whole life,” he recalls. It was only months earlier that he lost his ride in F1. As luck would have it, the Andretti Autosport team had a seat for him, so he began his rookie IndyCar season in March at Long Beach. He was 24, and when he arrived in Indianapolis for practice, he had just three races under his belt—only one on an oval and zero on a superspeedway. He qualified 11th at 230.048 mph. Not bad, but there was no expectation among anyone that Rossi could actually win as a rookie. “I was fortunate to join IndyCar with a toplevel team,” he says, “so I could make the transition smoothly.” Getting used to the car on road courses was less stressful because an oversteer or understeer moment might mean a spin or going offtrack. But on an oval, the same thing might mean hitting a wall. “It’s like learning to fly an airplane,” he says. “You can’t learn by crashing the plane.” At the start of the 500, with more than a quarter-million people in attendance, Rossi stuck with the pack, fighting in close combat. But panic ensued in pit stops when the team couldn’t get

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With the stunningly low-drag Vision EQXX concept, Mercedes eyes a future in which we slip more effortlessly through the air around us. BY D A N I E L P U N D

PHOTOGRAPHY BY G R E G PA J O

THE AIR HASN’T CHANGED in the 100-plus years since the beginning of the automotive era. Well, okay, it now smells generally less like a typhoid ward or horse manure. But air acts as it always has when you jam an object through it. Ever notice that the vehicles intended to skirt the air’s resistance share some fundamental traits? A low, rounded front end. A plunging roofline that leads to a taffy-pulled, tapered rear end that ends abruptly. And, of course, ugly wheels, either on display or covered by spats. That’s the work of generations of aerodynamicists toiling over equations and wind-tunnel experimentation. It’s work that was gleefully interrupted beginning in the second half of the 20th century. This era, the tail end of which we are in now, is defined by powerful internal-combustion engines fed by cheap fuel available at nearly every street corner. So put away your weird prewar Tatras and streamliners; we’re going to drive this damn barn (’58 Imperial, Hummer H2, etc.) defiantly through the air. Mercedes-Benz, which has produced its own stately but wasteful machines over the years, has a different view of the future. Called the Vision EQXX, it’s an electric four-door-sedan concept that employs a radically efficient aerodynamic form. In recognition that the energy of current electric batteries quickly depletes and takes a long time to replenish, there’s no room to sacrifice slickness to indulge style. With a highly efficient drivetrain and a light curb weight (for an EV), the EQXX managed a trip from Stuttgart, Germany, to Silverstone, England, fully 747 miles, on a single charge. Its absurdly low 0.17 drag coefficient was critical in making that happen. We asked longtime Mercedes aerodynamicist Alexander Wäschle to walk us through the EQXX’s more notable aero achievements.

“

The Vision EQXX demonstrates the benefits of passive and active aerodynamic detailing regarding electric range. The outstanding drag coefficient of 0.17 was achieved in close collaboration with Mercedes-Benz design. Together we overcame challenges to create an ultra-slippery exterior that retains the Mercedes-Benz design ethos of ‘sensual purity.’” This is the corporate way of saying that the EQXX does not look like a GM EV1.

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“

The basic shape of the car is very important. The smooth, round front and greenhouse are particularly important on the Vision EQXX, as is the long, smooth boatlike taper at the rear. To reach such a low drag coefficient, you have to optimize each part and each contour around the complete car.” Rear-seat passengers will have to be short to clear the plunging roofline.

“

At Mercedes-Benz, designers and aerodynamicists have been working closely together for decades. We know one another personally and have a deep understanding of the goals of our counterparts. While design-

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ers think in terms of proportions and aesthetics, we as aerodynamicists work with technology and functionality. We are constantly looking for compromises or completely new solutions. One good example of that is the active rear diffuser, which extends rearward by [7.8 inches] at speed. It delivered significant progress for aerodynamics—an improvement of 10 aerodynamic points [or Cd 0.001]—while giving the designers considerably more design freedom at the rear end.”

“

If you look at cars with a drag coefficient of 0.17 (like the W125 Rekordwagen from

1937 or the C 111-IV), they have one thing in common: They cover the rear wheels to create more efficient aerodynamics. To be honest, it doesn’t look elegant, and that’s why the designers were not happy with it. Another important aspect is the track width. Designers love to create a good stance, which means the tail should be broader than the front. As aerodynamicists, we prefer it the other way. The compromise: Design accepted a [two-inch] narrower rear track, and we sacrificed the spats. To be honest, when looking at the Vision EQXX: It was the right decision, even if the drag coefficient could have been better with spats.”

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“

The sharp-edged rear end is similar in concept to a Kamm tail, but it’s CFD [computational fluid dynamics] optimized for the complex threedimensional wake behind the car and defined by the length of the car as well as by boundary conditions of the styling. Its interaction with the active diffuser also has a big impact. All of this minimizes the ring vortex formed in the car’s wake.”

“

Specially designed tires from Bridgestone and smooth-faced wheels are mounted completely flush with the body to reduce drag.”

“

When looking at every detail, we obviously talked about using cameras instead of side mirrors. In the end, it was a trade-off between drag and energy efficiency. As mirror cameras require dedicated screens that consume energy, the aero-optimized mirrors won. To reduce the frontal area, we shaped a double mirror base.” Typically, side mirrors add between two and eight percent to the overall drag of a design. The EQXX’s are below two percent.

“

We are learning a great deal from the technology program of which the Vision EQXX is part. This applies not just to specific aerodynamic measures but also to the digital development processes we used. Aspects of this are already flowing into our development processes for future production models.”

“

Wheels play a big role in generating aerodynamic drag. Therefore, a lot of different measures are leading the air smoothly along the wheels to reduce aerodynamic drag. It starts with the air curtain in front of the front wheel, which leads the air coming from the front bumper directly to the aero-shaped rim covers. Behind the front wheel, the air breather collects the air from the wheel well again and carries it without separation along the front door.”

“

A cooling plate installed in the vehicle floor keeps the electric drivetrain cool under normal driving conditions without any aerodynamic disadvantages. When more cooling is needed, ducts at the leading edge of the nose open and allow air to pass through a radiator and out through flowoptimized ventilation openings in the hood. This arrangement significantly reduces cooling drag.”

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A BEAUTIFUL SHAMBLES

When an E C C E N T R I C W H E E L M A N conspired to win the purse at L A

PA N A M E R I CA N A ,

he phoned A

CA R R E R A

FLEDGLING

R OA D & T R AC K

for help. The pair moved mountains to get L A N C I A’ S M AST E R P I E C E on the grid. Like any grand adventure, the journey became the destination, and the destination A B E AU T I F U L D I SAST E R . Seventy years on, we search for meaning in T H E

BY K Y L E K I N A R D

O N LY CA R T H AT S U RV I V E D I T A L L .

PHOTOGRAPHY BY C AYC E C L I F F O R D

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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE DE VIRGILIO FAMILY

ON A DUSTY TEXAS RUNW AY, a cargo plane touches down four days late. A low-slung, rose-red Italian coupe rolls onto the asphalt. “And there was the Lancia,” Bill Brehaut wrote in Road & Track, January 1952. “A perfect lady she was too.” There’s a finality to his words, as if this Lancia’s story would tie up neater than a Christmas ribbon. The car had already crossed two continents and the Atlantic. It survived an aerial engine fire and an emergency landing. Finally, it reached the starting line of La Carrera Panamericana. Surely nothing could blunt the mighty Lancia’s ambition. Then a blown head gasket did just that. Yet the real story isn’t about one car’s disastrous moment, but rather the rare highs before the fall. The Aurelia set the bar for every sports coupe that came after, spurred on as it was by a forgotten Formula 1 ace. The editors of this magazine delivered the car to the foot of its destiny, and for one glorious moment, everything felt possible. To find that silver lining among the wreckage, we must first go back. In 1947, Gianni Lancia’s eponymous company arrived at a crossroads. Gianni’s father, Fiat test driver Vincenzo Lancia, co-founded the company in 1906 in Turin. He died of a heart attack in 1937. A decade on, his son Gianni had finished an engineering degree and was poised to carry Lancia forward. What Lancia lacked in resources, it made up for in imagination. When the Marshall Plan doled out cash to kickstart the Italian auto industry, Lancia was passed over. Vincenzo had cooperated with wartime communists to overthrow the fascists—a reasonable bargain, but not to the Yanks. It left Lancia with prewar tooling and a shoestring budget.

However, Fiat and Alfa Romeo, newly flush with Lira, were bereft of the one thing they could not buy: Lancia engineer Francesco de Virgilio’s genius. Correspondence shows that even mighty Enzo Ferrari courted de Virgilio. For a decade, he tried to lure the Lancia engineer with prestige, offering him titles like capo ufficio tecnico (chief technical officer). It’s plain to see why. On May 4, 1950, at the Salone dell’Automobile in Turin’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Lancia unveiled de Virgilio’s masterstroke. They called it the Aurelia. It was a rolling quantum leap in production-car design, and its groundbreaking engine, chassis, and packaging were delivered with Italian panache. At the Aurelia’s heart, the first production V-6 engine: 60-degree cylinder angles, overhead cams, and a rotating assembly balanced to perfection. It was a notion thought impossible just years before. The Aurelia also debuted the first production rear transaxle and radial tires. Later Aurelias received the first production five-speed manual transmission. The Aurelia’s independent front suspension (a de Virgilio design borrowed from the earlier Flaminia) was paired with one of the first fully independent rear suspension systems on a production vehicle. More than the technical breakthroughs, the clever packaging of these ideas stands out decades later. The independent rear suspension used triangulated semi-trailing arms and coil springs, an evolution of de Virgilio’s early studies of swing arms and de Dion tubes. These arms were linked to the transaxle by a set of curious offset bushings, which improved geometry across the wheel’s travel. The arms tied into the trans-

A. (Previous Page) The dancing Lancia, graciously loaned by Strada e Corsa BV. B. This Lancia Aurelia’s gentle curves hide tons of engineering genius (and one helluva story). C. The brain trust: Gianni Lancia (center) with engineers Vittorio Jano (right) and Francesco de Virgilio.

A. Our account of the trip to La Carrera remains one of the great feats of gonzo road tripping. Catch a full reprint of the story on our website.

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A. Factory paperwork for the Lancia’s delivery, a one-way ticket to disaster and glory. B. Bonetto earned his nickname, “the Pirate.” The F1 ace raced flat out, with gusto for days. C. The charming work bay of Antique Auto Restoration, where good folks (and hot metal) abound.

axle rigidly, allowing its case to act as a stressed member of the chassis. All of this in 1950. The technological leaps would have embarrassed any production car from Italy—even Modena—in an era when most fast cars still sported a live axle and leaf springs. The Aurelia set a high-water mark, the source from which all sports coupes would trace their headwaters. None other than legendary F1 impresario Juan Manuel Fangio fell hard for the two-door Aurelia. “It actually is a car in which impetuosity, common sense, imagination, and daring are beautifully blended,” he gushed in Velocita (later translated and reprinted in Style Auto). “All the most admirable virtues are grouped in the Lancia Aurelia GT, mild as a lamb, if necessary as lithe as a panther, as tough as the camels who manage to cross the desert chewing a small morsel of food. It’s a smart, fast, impressive car.” But before Fangio, there was another admirer. Every photo of Felice Bonetto looks the same: black-and-white, heavy film grain, Bonetto at the wheel of something slinky and Italian. His brow is furrowed and his pinched fingers hold a match to the end of a suggestively lengthy cigar. Born in Brescia, Bonetto raced F1, the Mille Miglia, road rallies, circuits—anything that might turn up a payday. He was good too. Unlike the gentleman racers of the era, Bonetto raced to put bread on the table. A driver ahead of his time, Bonetto proved a savvy pitchman with a nose for business, the missing link in racing’s transition from a diversion for the idle rich to pure motorsport. In 1951, a win at La Carrera Panamericana paid $18,500—an enormous prize when most American families brought home $3700 annually. But Bonetto had no ride of his own. Instead, he pitched his friend Gianni Lancia: Bonetto would take the cutting-edge Aurelia GT coupe, modified for race

I F I R S T T O O K I N T H E A U R E L I A’ S C U R V E S AT A R E S T O R AT I O N S H O P outside Monterey, California. It’s hard to argue with Brehaut’s appraisal. Low-slung and compact, the Lancia’s body is muscular and feminine, a design classic built by Pininfarina. Its satin, red body drapes over the mirror-polished wheels like silk cloth. From every outside angle, this Aurelia hints at racing roots. La Carrera’s organizers stipulated that cars in the Lancia’s class must remain relatively stock. Yet, bizarrely, only the camshaft proﬁles of the cars were scrutinized post-race. Lancia, with the cleverest engineers on earth, explored the limits of the rulebook. Our Aurelia’s A-pillars rake lower than a production GT’s,

DOCUMENTS ON TOP LEFT AND OPENING SPREAD COURTESY OF STRADA E CORSA

duty, and raise Lancia’s banner on the international stage. Gianni balked. As of that year, Lancia had a factory-backed F1 effort to attend to. La Carrera Panamericana was a world away and an expensive gamble. Undeterred, Bonetto rang the offices of a small American magazine. In exchange for a handscrawled livery on the car’s fender and access to the vehicle for an exclusive and lengthy road test, R&T would ship the car stateside, then deliver it to La Carrera Panamericana. Lancia prepared the Aurelia and sold it to Bonetto at fair value, making this Aurelia one of the earliest factory Lancia racers ever built and marking the Aurelia’s foray into factory-backed competition. The pieces were set in motion, R&T’s editors salivating at the prospect. The Aurelia was a pure competition car built from a peerless production coupe. For Bonetto, a driver who understood opportunity better than most, it was a chance for life-altering victory. For Road & Track, it was chasing the kind of adventure that would become a hallmark of the brand. “Sometimes around the offices of Road and Track, the personnel kicks up its heels and does exactly what it wants to do,” we wrote in the 1952 piece. “This was one of those times.” But racing is ﬁckle. On the ﬁrst day of La Carrera Panamericana, the Lancia V-6 blew a head gasket. Bonetto’s race ended, and it was a long way back to Italy. The car and its blown engine were deemed too expensive to ship back home; R&T had only offered a one-way ticket. Later Aurelias made good on the promise of this early race car, but this spectacular chassis—one of the oldest, if not the oldest, surviving factory Lancia competition car on earth—was robbed by chance of its time in the sun. For all it represents to this magazine and all it did to pioneer technology on roads and racetracks, this time capsule was too tempting to leave shut.

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meeting the short leading edge of a chopped roofline. The Aurelia’s doors were pounded into shape from thin-gauge steel, the hood and trunklid built from lightweight alloy. The car’s naturally aspirated 2.0-liter six fires in a breath. It’s a shock—straight-piped, loud enough to make you wince. The engine snorts through two chunky carburetors perched atop the cast intake manifold, twice the number found on bone-stock Aurelia sixes. You’ve never heard a V-6 this angry. At idle, only a low rattle. But on throttle, at 2100 rpm, the engine goes on cam and throws a haymaker at your eardrums. It’s a wall of sound, a grinding racket, like two animals fighting over food. I aim the Aurelia inland to California’s hill country, Spanish missions dotting the horizon. At any speed, steering effort is lighter than you’d expect, courtesy of a slow rack that asks for hand over hand over hand to whip a two-lane U-turn. At a gallop, none of the road’s texture reveals itself to your palms. If something more than a prayer held you against the plush seats, you wouldn’t have to grip the wheel with anything more than a fingertip’s whisper through high-speed sweepers. On straights, the car tracks dead on. A little wrist nudge noses the Lancia into the bends squirming up the canyons of Monterey County. With every input from the wheel, a sashay follows as the body sets politely against coil springs. This race car rides smoothly, acknowledging comfort as a key to running top speed over long distance. The four-speed shifts beautifully. There’s zero play once you’ve slotted the shifter into any gear. It’s improbably intuitive too; this early Aurelia’s cabin is a mirror image of any American road car. Wheel’s on the right. First gear sits forward and right, next to your kneecap, with fourth situated rearward on the passenger’s side. You rip the tricky second-third interchange with your left hand every single time. The Aurelia blossoms along the coastal roll of California’s Highway 1 and its swooshing inland four-lanes. The long fourth gear stifles the Lancia’s V-6 at legal speeds but makes sense near triple digits. This was an object built for a purpose: to consume Mexico’s length flat out, from Tuxtla Gutiérrez near the Guatemalan border up to Ciudad Juárez, just across the line from El Paso— 1933 miles at full scream. The brakes wilt under your soles with typical Fifties drum-brake mush, asking for a bootful of stomp before biting. But their actual stopping power, if you’re willing to flex your quads, holds up to modern traffic. Even riding on period-style narrow tires with a kiwi-sized contact patch, this Lancia could outbrake any modern SUV, I bet.

PA R K I N G I N F R O N T O F C A R M E L ’ S S P R AW L I N G M I S S I O N BAS I L I CA provides a second chance to take in the Lancia, its grandeur lit by the honeysuckle sun. The details boggle. An oil-pressure gauge sewn from art deco daydreams, fluttering like a hummingbird’s heart while the engine hums, has no temperature reading on its face. Instead, two needle-thin hashes sandwich the elegantly serifed word normale that points to a range of acceptable temperatures. Concentric gold filigree surrounds the gauge in a radiant ripple. It’s a mechanical jewel that doesn’t function so much as stoke wild swings between panic and adulation. You could spend a day with a loupe poring over all the details on this car and still miss something divine. If the Aurelia seems impossibly overengineered, it was also impossible to sell profitably. Lancia built more than 18,000 Aurelias, including LHD hardtop convertibles meant to lure wealthy Americans. But with Lancia’s ancient tooling requiring intensive hand-built processes—the company had its own foundry for bolts and other fasteners—Gianni could not keep up with the bills. In 1956, a family of Italian industrialists acquired Lancia, attempting to bail out a sinking ship. Then, in 1969, Fiat took over. The Lancia family’s golden era ended for good. But before the corporate takeovers, Lancia, Bonetto, and the Aurelia flew close to the sun. The trio took second in class and eighth overall at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1952, plus third at the 1953 Mille Miglia in the Lancia D20 (essentially a race-prepped Aurelia) and first overall at the 1952 Targa Florio in an Aurelia B20 competition car. Still, racing success could not save Lancia from eating itself. Chasing victory eventually consumed Bonetto as well. Two years after the cargo plane, desert, and blown head gasket, Bonetto returned to La Carrera Panamericana in a Lancia D24 factory car powered by a 3.2-liter version of the Aurelia’s screaming six. Before grand road races, Bonetto painstakingly marked dangerous corners with paint. When a competitor ahead of Bonetto stalled and obscured those markings, he missed the warning signs and entered a 60-mph corner at 120. The Lancia crashed into the balcony of a house, the main impact against Bonetto’s head. He died instantly. Despite Scuderia Lancia’s grief, the factory team pressed on, claiming every spot on the podium. Fangio stood on the top step, brokenhearted. It was at once Lancia’s greatest triumph and darkest tragedy. Seventy years later, all of that history still feels palpable. The Aurelia’s seats are ripped to tatters,

the leather ﬁnish worn down to hide, receipts from long days at high speed. Staring over the Lancia’s short hood, ghosts of the past appear. “Felice Bonetto sat here,” I kept thinking, unsure why it mattered, but sure that it absolutely did. As I sat and felt the V-6’s idle, some other thoughts occurred to me. Good cars are nothing more than an assemblage of the right parts. A rip-snort engine, a snick-snick gearbox, grippy rubber—that recipe is simple. But great cars like the Lancia Aurelia are built from groundbreaking ideas: pioneering chassis and suspensions, revolutionary engines, breakthrough engineering. Bonetto’s death and Lancia’s failure may complicate the legacy of the Aurelia, but they do not dull its shine. This Aurelia GT reminds us that not every racing story resolves with a victory. Still, there is nobility in struggle. So what does it mean that Lancia pioneered so fearlessly in the Forties and Fifties only to go belly up? Or that Bonetto hit it big only to meet an early end, his name known only to motorsport historians? Or that this then-ﬂedgling magazine laid all its cards on the table so a car with a handdrawn livery could bleed out on Mexican asphalt an ocean away from home? What was the point of it all? From the cab of this Lancia, my hands on the wheel Bonetto once held, I can’t tell you exactly what it all means. I can’t tell you why we should gamble when failure is the expectation, not the exception. But what one visionary automaker, its doomed driver, and Road & Track reached for 70 years ago is not diminished because they couldn’t grasp it, even if only the car remembers.

A. (Previous pages) This Aurelia would seem familiar to any hot-rodder. Chopped roof, squat stance, ear-bleeding yelp. B. The Lancia’s cabin, built in service of beauty and smiles. C. An evolution of the first production V-6 engine, snorting through twin Solexes.

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BY M I K E D U F F

ILLUSTRATIONS BY T I M M c D O N A G H

THE FIRST RECOGNIZED AUTOMOTIVE speed record was set in 1898 by the French aristocrat Count Charles-François Gaston Louis Prosper de Chasseloup-Laubat. He entered an electric Jeantaud in a test organized by an early auto magazine and covered the flying kilometer in well under a minute. Like 57 seconds. Astounding. That’s 39.24 mph! That was barely faster than a galloping horse and much slower than the speediest locomotives of the era. Yet the car would soon overwhelm the train. In 1904, an elegant 4-4-0 steamer belonging to England’s Great Western Railway became the first vehicle in the world to (disputably) break the 100mph barrier, albeit briefly and on a falling gradient. Two months later, Louis Rigolly, another Frenchman, pushed the automotive record to 103.56 mph in a 13.5-liter Gobron-Brillié race car. From that point on, the land speed record has been held by loosely defined automobiles and the occasional rocketpropelled sled. The bar soon jumped as increasingly powerful cars, and increasingly brave drivers, flung themselves at glory. Benchmarks fell quickly: 150 mph in 1925, 200 mph in 1927, and 300 mph in 1935, when Malcolm Campbell took his Blue Bird V, powered by a supercharged Rolls-Royce aero engine making a reputed 2300 hp, to the salt at Bonneville. But record setting also proved dangerous; onetime record holders J.G. Parry-Thomas, a Brit, in 1927 and Frank Lockhart, an American, in 1928 both died during failed attempts. Many other record setters were killed chasing ever further-out benchmarks before World War II. Postwar, the jet age brought a new challenge: cars that exceeded what was possible with wheel-driven propulsion. But the French International Association of Recognized Automobile Clubs (AIACR), precursor to the FIA and arbiter of the record, insisted that vehicles setting the record be wheel driven. So when young Americans built jet-powered specials, they found themselves excluded from the “official” record. The generational clash was summed up when Craig Breedlove’s jet-propelled Spirit of America went 407.45 mph in 1963, but the official record skipped him and went to Donald Campbell’s wheeldriven gas-turbine Bluebird Proteus the following year, although it had “only” been timed at 403.10 mph. (Spirit was also a three-wheeler, and therefore not a car, contended the AIACR.) Technology won, and the rules were straightened out as it became clear that wheel-powered cars couldn’t keep up with jets and rockets. A period of intense rivalry between the jet cars followed, as Breedlove’s Spirit and Art Arfons’s Green Monster traded times on the salt at Bonneville. No fewer than five new records were set during 1965 alone. The following year, Breedlove’s second Spirit, with a bigger engine and four wheels, moved the record past 600 mph. The figure seemed unbeatable until Gary Gabelich’s rocket-powered Blue Flame, surely the most beautiful record setter ever, managed 622.407 mph running on a cocktail of liquefied natural gas and high-test peroxide in 1970.

Half a century later, only two cars have gone faster. Teams led by Scotland’s Richard Noble created both. A record-obsessed adventurer, Noble produced his first challenger while still in his twenties. Thrust 1 (the juvenile name was part of the fun) combined a truck chassis with a military surplus jet engine. It was insane, and was written off when Noble crashed at 140 mph in 1977. He enlisted expert engineering help to create Thrust 2 and used his considerable charisma to raise the money to take it to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert in 1983. There he drove it to 633.468 mph, beating Gabelich’s record. Success triggered more interest, and Breedlove promised to build a challenger. Noble responded in kind with the Thrust SSC—as in “supersonic car”— wisely giving up driving duties to active-duty Royal Air Force fighter pilot Andy Green. The aim was to break the sound barrier, which they achieved at Black Rock in October 1997, less than a month after setting the last slower-than-sound record. By traveling at 763.04 mph, Green became the fastest human to travel on the planet’s surface. More than 25 years later, he still is. But the costs of building and running the Thrust SSC, even with a volunteer staff, had nearly been too much. The $160,000 fuel bill for the record attempts was only paid after the car had reached the desert. So when Noble announced plans for an even more ambitious project in 2008, built to break the 1000-mph barrier using both jet and rocket power, the obvious question was where the money would come from. Bloodhound SSC engineered its new project to utilize both a Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet engine and a secondary rocket motor produced by the Norwegian company Nammo. The pair provided the extra thrust required to reach four-figure speeds, with mind-blowing solutions throughout; the original proposal was to use a Formula 1–spec Cosworth 2.4liter V-8 just as a fuel pump for this motor. The project’s slipping timeframes soon showed how hard all of this rocket science was. In 2012, Noble said the project needed $28 million and would run on a dry lake bed in South Africa in 2014. By 2015, the planned trip to Africa had slipped to 2016, and the budget had increased to $61 million, with much of that unsecured. Eventually, Bloodhound ran at low speed on an airport runway in the U.K. to raise interest. Behind the scenes, Noble also tried to put together a sponsorship deal with the Chinese Geely Group. But it didn’t succeed in time. In 2018, the project went bankrupt. Yet the Bloodhound story doesn’t end there. Having rescued Bloodhound from the junkyard, the wealthy British industrialist Ian Warhurst was persuaded to buy the whole outfit and fund the longdelayed trip to South Africa, although one where the car would run only on jet power. He reportedly spent more than $1 million, with the Bloodhound managing an impressive 628 mph. But it didn’t raise enough commercial interest to fund a full attempt. “I might have proved I’m a bit mad by paying what I’ve paid for, but I’m not mad enough to carry on,” Warhurst said after he bowed out.

Bloodhound SSC is now parked at the Coventry Transport Museum alongside Thrust 2 and Thrust SSC. Its jet engine has been removed and sent back to Rolls-Royce. But hope of another rebirth hasn’t died. Stuart Edmondson, formerly Bloodhound’s head of engineering and another former RAF officer, has taken over as CEO and is committed to a new attempt based around a switch to synthetic fuel for the jet engine, with an electric motor serving as fuel pump. “I think land speed records have an association with the car world of the past—fossil-fuel-breathing machines tearing across the desert,” Edmondson says. “I know from discussions we’ve had, that has put people off, and the world is changing massively. That’s why we should be pushing boundaries in terms of sustainability, not just records.” Edmondson admits that the earliest a full attempt in South Africa could happen is 2024 and is commendably forthright on the question of cost. “The ﬁgure is $10 million to get a land speed record,” he says. “We’ve been to the desert, we’ve proved the logistics, and we got a huge amount of aerodynamic data back from the previous run. We’ve got a car that can break the land speed record.” Will it ever get the chance to break the record? Will anyone still care if they do?

THE LAND SPEED RECORD is run to an agreed standard, one that has remained largely unchanged for more than a century. The lesser, unofficial record for the fastest production car is not. Over the years, the title has been claimed on the basis of manufacturers’ own ﬁgures and car-magazine test sessions. Road & Track even drove the Porsche 959 to its credited 198-mph vMax in 1987. But the lack of a level playing ﬁeld has created endless arguments about the rules and methodologies used. It’s also created some outright cheating. The biggest cause of controversy is whether, as with the LSR, a production car must have its speed averaged in two directions or peak speed is the goal. Either philosophy produces a different champion. When Bugatti’s works daredevil, Andy Wallace, drove the Chiron to an astonishing 304.77 mph in 2019, he did so at Volkswagen’s vast Ehra-Lessien test track in Germany, with that speed recorded as only a transient peak and in a single direction. For Bugatti that was good enough, especially as telemetry later proved the Chiron had actually left the ground over a seemingly innocuous transition between two different sections of asphalt while traveling at 278 mph. But many said the record hadn’t been broken and that the Koenigsegg Agera RS’s 277.87 mph, set on a closed 11-mile stretch of Nevada highway in 2017, still stood. Guinness World Records, the self-appointed arbiter of records, used to have a Fastest Production Car category. The most recent award of this title was in 2010, when French sports-car veteran Pierre-Henri Raphanel drove the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport to 267.85 mph. That was also at Ehra-Lessien, but it was

A. (Previous pages) It’s been a quarter century since the Thrust SSC broke the sound barrier, reaching 763 mph. Will anyone find the bravery, space, and money to break the ultimate record?

A. (Previous pages) In 1998, Andy Wallace took a McLaren F1 to a two-way average of 240.1 mph, setting the production-car top-speed record. B. Bugatti became entangled in a speed contest with a couple of lesser-known carmakers. Once it surpassed the 300mph mark in 2019, Bugatti promptly walked away from the competition.

set as a two-way average, despite the fact the track’s protection barriers were designed to work in only one direction. Guinness later canceled that record since the car’s speed limiter, with which it was sold to customers, was de-energized. Then Guinness reversed the decision and reinstated the achievement. To add to the confusion, some previous Guinness productioncar speed records had been one-way and based on manufacturer claims, while both the Jaguar XJ220’s 217.10 mph and the McLaren F1’s 240.10 mph had been achieved with factory rev limiters raised. Probably sensibly, Guinness World Records has since bowed out of this one, conﬁrming last year that there is no holder of its Fastest Production Car title. Instead, it arbitrates on such important matters as the world’s fastest motorized toilet, currently a bowel-loosening 70.55 mph. Having broken 300 mph, Bugatti opted to drop the mic on record setting, saying when it announced the Chiron’s peak that the company won’t seek to defend its title. But that doesn’t mean others aren’t trying to go faster, as ludicrous as the idea of a road car capable of covering ﬁve miles a minute may be. But all of those resources, all of that money spent chasing ultimate speed—whether jet-powered desert sled or million-dollar hypercar—what does it mean in 2022? When R&T ripped up to 190 mph in the Ruf Yellow Bird decades ago, the pursuit of 200 mph in a production vehicle felt vital. That level of performance proved a point beyond bench racing. After Ferrari crested the 200-mph mark with its road-legal F40, McLaren’s legendary F1 took the crown and held on tight. Cars became faster, easier to drive, more reliable. Then Bugatti’s Veyron swooped in and settled the bet for another generation. Few companies were capable of challenging Bugatti’s masterclass, a vehicle built to showcase the engineering might of the entire Volkswagen Group by virtue of superior speed. With the 300-mph mark now broken, and major manufacturers out of the game, what’s left to prove to consumers and enthusiasts? Now the four-door BMW M5 can brush up against 200 mph without breaking a sweat, and 300 mph can only be chased by oligarchs with hypercar bank accounts. High speed has become so democratized as to become uninteresting. Hyperspeed is unattainable by mere mortals, even if the engineering remains fascinating. The land speed record feels similarly tenuous—millions spent for an incremental achievement. With the move to pure electric propulsion, the window on ultraspeed seems to be closing even faster. EVs can do huge acceleration but struggle to carry the energy required for sustained velocity. Also consider that the Chiron consumes gas at the rate of nearly four gallons per minute at peak speed and the societal implications of such performance art. The world has instead turned its eyes to new boundaries: acceleration, range, efficiency. Boutique vehicles from Hennessey, Koenigsegg, and Bloodhound may yet smash their respective speed records. But no matter how fast they travel, the world may have already left them behind.

BY J A S O N K AVA N A G H

PHOTOGRAPHY BY R O S S M A N T L E

T h e sto ry o f h ow turbochargers went from u n r u ly e n g i n e w r e c k e r s to t h e n ea r - u n i v e rsa l ac c o u t r e m e n t fo r m o d e r n gas m oto rs .

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SEPTEMBER 1918, ATOP PIKES PEAK IN COLORADO, A MONSTROUS 27-liter Liberty V-12 military aircraft engine mounted in the back of a Packard truck came alive on boost. American engineer Sanford Moss had fitted the engine with a turbine-driven supercharger, or “turbocharger,” in a bid to ram more air and fuel into it, generate more power, and blunt the effect of thin air at high altitude. It worked. The breakthrough arrived too late for use in World War I, but B-17 Flying Fortresses clouding the skies above Europe in World War II had turbochargers fitted to their radial engines, thundering power taking the fight to the enemy. Early automotive efforts were similarly warlike. The first turbocharged entrant arrived at the Indy 500 in 1952, and by the late Sixties, the turbo Offenhauser engine began its dominance. In Can-Am racing, the Porsche 917/30 was so powerful and dangerous that it killed the entire series. But in road cars, mass adoption of turbochargers was perpetually just around the corner. While they were ubiquitous on roadgoing diesel engines for decades, it wasn’t so long ago that turbochargers’ widespread deployment on gasoline engines seemed ever out of reach. The snail’s behavior was too violent for civilian life. Today the corner has been rounded and is receding quickly in the rearview mirror. Among every major automaker, turbocharged gasoline engines have become the norm rather than the exception. Companies renowned for high-revving naturally aspirated gems, such as Honda and Ferrari, are increasingly transitioning their fleets to turbo power. Other automakers like BMW now offer nothing but turbocharged mills. Surely, industrywide adoption of turbochargers on gasoline engines became inevitable because turbos simply got better, right? While the strides made in turbocharger control and efficiency over the years are undeniable, today’s highly accomplished turbocharged gasoline engines emerged

largely from a confluence of hard-won incremental gains in engine development and the pressure of legislation. The breakthrough of turbochargers into the mainstream occurred less because turbos got better at making boost and more because engines got better at handling it. Historically, turbocharged gasoline engines traded heavily on their ability to provide outstanding performance. Yet, thanks to their ability to kick pumping losses to the curb, they’ve always had the potential to deliver a combination of performance and efficiency their naturally aspirated brethren only dream of. Instrumental in cultivating this potential was mitigating the effects of knock, an unsavory type of combustion that can destroy an engine’s internal components. Unimaginative engineers describe the deleterious limit imposed by knock as “the knock limit.” They should have called it “the destroyer of worlds” to articulate its impact more clearly. Knock can dole out harshness to all spark-ignition engines, but for turbocharged ones, the knock limit looms like the Grim Reaper. Compared with naturally aspirated engines, boosted engines develop significantly higher cylinder pressures and temperatures. That’s like blood in the water to knock, as its likelihood— and severity—is linked to precisely those factors. Normally aspirated engines can generally run at optimum ignition timing without the knock limit getting in the way. Think of the knock limit as the Armco barrier that lines a Formula 1 track. For nonboosted engines, the Armco sits outside the runoff area. Its presence doesn’t influence the racing itself, so you can potentially use the whole track with abandon. For a turbocharged engine running at high load on pump gas, the knock limit nearly always

A. The life of a turbo is an extremely hot and frenetic one, so it must be built with absolute precision. B. Lightweight and endowed with a load of turbocharger tech, Jim’s cart was still not particularly quick. C. Turbine housing assemblies with Variable Turbine Geometry (VTG) vane packs installed.

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precludes the ignition timing that would produce best results. Accordingly, a turbocharged engine must operate as close to the knock limit as possible without overstepping. Here, our metaphorical Armco barrier sits flush with the track surface. There is zero runoff. To be fast through a chicane, you must drive as close to the barrier as humanly possible. But the penalty for getting even slightly too rowdy with the right pedal at the wrong moment is the Armco wreaking absolute havoc on your day. It’s a tricky balancing act. Primitive turbo engines had no means to identify or address a knocking condition in real time. In extremis, these engines blithely ran past the limit and smashed themselves into an engine soup of melted pistons, eroded cylinder heads, and pummeled bearings. In racing applications, you could just throw high-octane fuel at the problem. Early production engineers didn’t have that luxury, leaving avoidance as the only tool in their box. They’d dump the engine’s compression ratio into the basement, run it rich, set the full-load ignition timing a comfortable margin away from the knock limit, and hope for the best. Porsche stuck with this approach on the mighty 911 Turbo for a while, starting with the first one in 1974 up through 1990. These workarounds kneecapped efficiency and contributed to turbo engines’ characteristic sog-then-surge power delivery. The first mainstream-production turbo gasoline engine, Oldsmobile’s 1962 Turbo-Rocket V-8, kept the compression high and employed a water/methanol (Turbo Rocket Fluid) injection system to enhance octane rating and cool the hot intake air. It was complex and expensive. Worse—at least for owners unfamiliar with turbo technology—was the need to top off fluid reservoirs consistently lest the engine melt down. Despite the shortcomings of early turbocharged efforts, their rush of boost was addictive. Better solutions to addressing knock would change the game.

A. As with the internalcombustion engine, the fundamentals of the turbocharger haven’t changed in a century.

MIGRATION TO ELECTRONICALLY CONTROLLED IGNITIONS WAS THE breakthrough that allowed knock-detection systems to flourish. Initially, a block-mounted microphone was tuned to resonate at the frequency a knocking engine produces. When the microphone sang, electronic controls jumped in to retard the ignition timing to quell the knock. These systems prevented prolonged knocking, which saved a lot of engines from a melty death. But they left performance on the table—early controls weren’t smart enough to know which cylinder was knocking, so the timing was dialed out for all cylinders. It was like benching a baseball team’s entire infield because the shortstop took a line drive to the crotch. These systems also couldn’t discern knock noise from unrelated engine-borne noises of similar frequency and intervened on false alarms like valvetrain noise. Buoyed by cheap gas and adequate engine controls, turbocharged gasoline engines saw a flurry of applications in the Eighties. These were generally found on range-topping models, owing to the extra cost of the turbo and its associated bits and the fact that buyers will pay more for additional performance. It would still be years before turbos were truly common. Over time, the sophistication of engine-control systems grew. By the Nineties, fueling and ignition timing adjustments could be performed independently for each cylinder, a boon for managing knock without unduly hampering performance. Short- and long-term correction algorithms allowed knock-control systems to learn and adapt to ambient conditions, fuel quality, and engine health. Digital signal processing filtered out stray engine noise, even ignoring the knock sensors during the portions of each piston’s travel where knock never occurred, like during the intake and exhaust strokes. This eliminated those false triggering events. R&T VOL. 14 115

OF THESE ENGINE-CONTROL SYSTEMS WERE GREAT FOR DETECTING and managing an already-knocking engine. But why not just make the engine less likely to knock in the first place? As engineers sought to extract higher efficiency from engines to meet rising CAFE standards, they focused on increasing the combustion chambers’ burn rate. It turns out that not only are fast-burn chambers inherently more efficient, but they’re also more knock-resistant. When a cylinder fires, a globe of fire is initiated by the spark plug. The heat from this fireball pours into the cooler, unburned mixture in its path. Speeding up the fireball’s burn rate reduces the exposure time of the unburned mixture to the heat advancing toward it, reducing its propensity to knock. It’s the difference between resting your palm over an open flame versus quickly passing your hand through it. One of the most effective ways to create a fastburn chamber is to ensure a cylinder’s contents (its charge) are churning vigorously at the time of ignition—more activity, faster burn. You can probably already guess that it’s not easy to generate sufficiently intense charge motion without incurring a bunch of other compromises. For example, small intake ports generate high air velocities at low engine speeds, accelerating combustion. The trade-off is that they suck wind as engine speeds climb, choking airflow and limiting performance and efficiency. Or consider elaborately contoured piston crowns with protuberances designed to deflect the incoming intake air deliberately. The additional surface area of all of that piston topology draws energy out of the burning gases that would otherwise provide useful work. Simulation tools progressively advanced the state of the art in sorting out all of these compromises for engines and turbochargers. Empirical, trial-and-error approaches steadily made way for thermal and fluid modeling software.

A. A mess of compressor housings staged for final assembly. B. Racks of turbine shaft and wheel assemblies in front of a grinding machine. And that’s Zema, not Zima, okay? C. BorgWarner’s facility in Arden, North Carolina, is home to turbocharger manufacturing as well as R&D.

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T H E S E A D VA N C E M E N T S INJECTION TO BECOME

ALLOWED DIRECT A R E A L I T Y.

The low computational power available in the early days limited the models’ complexity. Today the ability to numerically assess countless combustion-system configurations—port and chamber geometries, valve events, injectors, piston shapes, and manifolds—with a high degree of fidelity brings high-accuracy modeling to bear on modern powertrain development. These advancements also allowed direct injection (DI) to become a reality. A long sought-after goal of powertrain engineers, electronically controlled DI arrived stateside in some 2006 Toyota and Audi engines. DI facilitated turbocharging in a big way. The pronounced charge-cooling effect achieved by moving the injector into the combustion chamber reaped benefits in knock resistance, which led to higher compression ratios than were possible with port fuel injection. Off-boost efficiency and drivability also improved with the introduction of DI engines, and their higher volumetric efficiency provided more freedom in turbo sizing. Yet another front in the war on knock involved managing the bill a turbo hands you for its services. Unlike a supercharger, which saps power directly from the crankshaft in exchange for its air-boosting capability, a turbocharger exacts a backpressure penalty. That is, the pressure in a turbo engine’s exhaust manifold is considerably higher than that of a supercharged or naturally aspirated engine, thanks to the influence of the turbine in the stream of exhaust gases. Among production turbo engines, it’s not uncommon to see exhaust manifold pressure twice that or more of the intake manifold pressure. No good comes from this high exhaust manifold pressure. Not only does it adversely affect engine breathing for cylinders during their valve overlap period (when both intake and exhaust valves are open simultaneously, albeit briefly), but it also contaminates the cylinder with a higher proportion of hot exhaust gas once the valves close. This extra bit of heat erodes knock resistance.

Variable valvetrains helped counter this effect by allowing the manipulation of valve overlap on the fly or switching to different cam profiles altogether. These systems aided in reducing engine sensitivity to backpressure but did little to reduce the backpressure itself. Simply fitting a larger, laggier turbo would reduce backpressure but alienate car buyers. Instead, turbochargers themselves incrementally became more efficient over the years and packed more airflow-handling potential into ever-smaller packages. These tidier turbos also exhibited less inertia, imbuing them with quicker reflexes when the driver modulates the throttle. The strides made in knock resistance alleviated but did not eliminate the need for fuel enrichment. This technique of hurling excess fuel into the combustion chambers as a cooling measure is certainly effective in abating knock, but it does no favors for fuel economy. Dialing back the enrichment, though, causes exhaust-gas temperatures to increase during high-load operation, battering exhaust valves, seats, manifolds, and the turbo’s turbine housing and wheel. Ensuring the long-term durability of these components led to the development of industry-specific high-nickel alloys and austenitic stainless steels tolerant of ever-higher temperatures. These materials allowed boost to coexist with relatively lean operation in a way not previously possible. Predictably, these metals aren’t cheap. As a result, some manufacturers instead made the calculated choice to continue throwing fuel down the exhaust to keep things cool during mediumand high-load operation because it allowed them to use less costly components. The fuel-economy penalty of this approach sometimes did not show up on the window sticker because the EPA drive cycle consists primarily of lighter loads. In realworld use, these engines often did not live up to the window-sticker promises, and turbocharged gasoline engines suffered reputational damage in the process. All the while, emissions certification posed yet another hurdle to the viability of turbocharged

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gasoline engines in production cars. Thanks to the astonishing effectiveness of warmed-up exhaust catalysts, cold starts are responsible for a signiﬁcant part of an engine’s emissions. A catalytic converter below its light-off temperature is little more than an expensive and ineffective muffler. During a cold start, any massive objects in the exhaust stream act like sponges for precious heat that would otherwise help light off the exhaust catalyst sitting downstream. The turbine housings and heavy cast exhaust manifolds made it increasingly difficult to coerce traditional turbo engines into compliance with ever-tightening emissions standards. Lighter air-gap insulated exhaust manifolds were an outgrowth of the progress in materials research. The hefty turbine housings would have to stay, as they also function as containment devices in the unlikely event the turbo’s spinny bits let go at the mind-bending speeds they routinely reach (200,000-plus rpm). A key tactic to speed light-off was simply opening the turbo’s wastegate during cold starts, diverting exhaust gases around the turbine. However, traditional wastegate actuators worked via boost pressure, which, unless something has gone horribly wrong, is not available at idle. Vacuum-based actuators provided an elegant way to speed lightoff. Later, electronically actuated wastegates provided even greater control. Other factors played supporting roles. Watercooled turbos eliminated oil-coking concerns. Better management of oil carryover into the intake system reduced the amount of octaneannihilating oil that formerly made its way into the combustion chambers. Piston ring sealing improved. No areas of engine development went unexamined in the pursuit of higher efficiency, better drivability, and increased reliability. As we look toward the future of internalcombustion engines for production cars, it’s possible we’ve reached the apogee. Research and development budgets are not limitless, and automakers’ investments are being diverted into battery-electric drivetrains. We’ll shortly see a few more advances in turbocharged gasoline engines, electric-assist turbos being the most signiﬁcant, but it’s clear the sun is setting on the snail. Enjoy the boost while you can.

A. That’s a lot of wheels. According to the EPA, the percentage of light-duty vehicles with turbos rose from one percent in 2000 to 34 percent in 2019. B. Even after all of these years, there is something very elegant about producing more power using waste air. C. With increasingly stringent standards for efficiency and emissions, we might be nearing peak internal-combustion engine complexity.

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BY K Y L E K I N A R D

PHOTOGRAPHY BY D A R R E N H E AT H

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F O R M U L A 1 ’ S U LT I M A T E F A I R Y - T A L E SEASON, SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF ITS UNHERALDED CHAMPION.

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A. Brawn GP’s sprint onto the F1 stage was more than miracle; it was impossible. B. Every story needs a hero, and this story has a hero as improbable as any. C. Early Brawn pit stops were a mess, completed seconds after their better-drilled competition.

THE 2009 FORMULA 1 SEASON is the most miraculous, sensational, improbable coup in motorsport history. It’s a fable wherein the gutter-ball team upends the establishment and blindsides the grid with engineering genius and a driver built to embody the moment. As unlikely as Buster Douglas, Brawn GP rose from the mat to become one of racing’s all-time victorious underdogs. It’s still the only team to win an F1 constructors’ title in its first year. Anyone who claims they saw it coming is lying— except British driver Jenson Button. “We knew the car was good,” he says. From the outside, Button’s career was in free fall. In 2008, he scored just three championship points. His team didn’t fare better. Honda finished ninth out of 11 that year, despite pouring hundreds of millions into the venture. The vultures circled. Yet all was going quietly to plan. The Honda team buzzed in the months leading up to the 2009 season, Button relates. Their simulators spat out hypothetical lap times on par with 2008’s leading cars. It was a confounding, exciting discovery, given the rulebook had been hugely reconfigured after the 2008 season. At the time, legendary F1 designer Adrian Newey called 2009’s regs “the biggest rule changes since 1983.” Shakeups like these almost always stunt lap times as teams chase new ideas. “We heard rumors of people being one-and-ahalf seconds slower than they were the previous

year, if not a bit more,” Button confides. Honda sat well ahead of the curve. But hope could not drown out the shocking present. Three weeks before the season, Honda’s situation devolved. The Great Recession buckled the world’s knees, and Honda corporate cut bait on its F1 program in a panic. The snap decision left Button and the entire Honda F1 staff in limbo. Honda technical director Ross Brawn, who’d spurred on Ferrari’s dominance in the early Aughts, swooped in. He purchased the Honda team and its assets for a single British pound. Honda forked over 100 million pounds, allowing them to step away immediately instead of sinking the money into bankruptcy proceedings. Brawn renamed the enterprise Brawn GP, scraped together some advertising cash, then loaned the team more money from his own pocket to carry on. It was a brash move—one you’d never make without expecting a tidal change in the sport. “It gave us at least a bit of direction and a bit of leadership,” Button recounts. “Everyone within the team was a lot more confident that things were gonna turn around.” But survival is different from success. To stem the bleeding from Honda’s collapse, Brawn cut 350 jobs, creating tension within the team as the enterprise hung by a thread. In the scramble, Brawn GP’s preseason testing for 2009 fell short. They showed up days late to the first test of the season with a car that had only been proved on paper. Simple items like team-branded sweatshirts were in such short supply, many staff braced against cold mornings at the track in simple tees, the only Brawn swag available. But the Brawn BGP 001 had arrived. Finally. Button wheeled the car onto the track at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya and relayed complaints back to pit lane. Understeer at high speed, he said, and the low ride height in the rear caused stability issues. It unsettled his confidence. He returned to the pits, mind buzzing with feedback. “After the first run, we got back in the pits, and my engineer just sat there smiling,” he recalls. “‘You’re six- or seven-tenths quicker than anyone here who’s been testing for six days.’” Button laughs. “And that was on old tires.” The car was fast. More important, it was reliable. Brawn had ditched the Honda power unit, wedging in a Mercedes engine that needed crude spacers to mate with the Brawn chassis. “We were all excited after the first test because nothing went wrong. We’ve got this new engine in the back that doesn’t really fit the chassis properly, but nothing went wrong,” Button enthuses.

A. The Brawn BGP 001. By today’s standards, it looks elegant. In 2009, it debuted a wild front wing and rear aero package. B. A diffuser inlet on BGP 001’s underbody. One portion of the key “double diffuser.” C. A smooth, expansive underbody channeled air into and over the double diffuser. D. Brawn swapped out Honda power for Mercedes, which required cumbersome spacers to get the fit right. E. The cleverly packaged second diffuser. Once competitors caught up to Brawn’s idea, the title was practically over.

ILLUSTRATIONS: MOTORSPORT IMAGES, GIORGIO PIOLA

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Brawn GP’s disarray and Honda’s failures in the two previous seasons were an effective smokescreen. When Brawn took the reins at Honda in 2007, he opted to limp along that year, then sacrificed the 2008 season preparing for 2009. What Brawn and his team achieved on the drawing board would dictate the 2009 championship. The BGP 001 owed its quantum-leap pace to an infamous innovation called the double diffuser. The 2009 technical regulations sought to limit the effect of rear diffusers by paring their dimensions. But Brawn quietly recognized a hole in the regulations. He leveraged channels in the car’s underbody to route air above the rules-compliant rear diffuser to a second diffuser. Two other teams had similar ideas, but Brawn’s worked best. Brawn’s clever interpretation of the rules was so effective that his competitors initiated a lawsuit in protest. That suit loomed over the first half of the season, threatening to undo years of inspired work, first at Honda and then Brawn.

No matter: Button qualiﬁed the Brawn on the pole for the F1’s season opener in Australia, defying speculation that Brawn had run low-fuel during testing to overstate its pace. Then Button won the opener in decisive fashion. His teammate, Rubens Barichello, took second. Despite protests, the FIA declared double diffusers legal for the race while its investigation continued. The constructors’ championship became Brawn GP’s to lose, and the playboy charmer had the world drivers’ championship on a string. All he had to do was hold on tight. Easy. Well, not quite. Even with the perfect tool on track, the team was in disarray. Owing to Honda’s late exit and the subsequent chaos, a championship-quality polish to their effort was missing. “We’d lost our refueling guy. He’d become a plumber,” Button says. “So we had a brand-new guy doing the refueling for the pit stops.” The pit stops were critically slow, Button laments. A sec-

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A. Button’s now-iconic helmet read “Push the Button” on top. We’re still not sure what it means. B. A slew of early victories gave way to a nail-biting finish. C. Two world titles for Cinderella. It was all just a delirious daydream, right?

ond off the best teams on the grid. “Being in that position, suddenly, you’re like, we’ve gotta make the best of this. You end up putting so much pressure on yourself to succeed, because you’re not sure if it’s gonna happen again.” It did happen. Button won the season’s second race from the pole in Malaysia. The stakes grew higher still. Rather than fighting for survival, grasping for a hold that might vault his career up the lower rungs of the F1 ladder, Button was fighting for a title, and he knew it. After a third-place blip in Shanghai, Button stood on the top step of the podium in the next four races. At the end of this stretch, Brawn looked unstoppable. But with the lawsuit overturned, every other team on the grid had developed a double diffuser of their own. The arms race caught Brawn just before the season’s midway point. “We had Shanghai, and I finished third. It felt like a massive disaster not winning the race,” Button says. “And then we got to the British Grand Prix, where we didn’t win, and again it was a disaster not to win the race. We underachieved, and just the pressure keeps building.” Button finished sixth at Silverstone that weekend. Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel won from the pole. Button followed up his stumble with a free fall: fifth in Germany, seventh in Hungary, and seventh in Spain. In the following race, at Spa in Belgium, Romain Grosjean crunched his car into the back of Button’s, ending the Briton’s race. It was the first time Button had retired all season. As Red Bull gathered itself, clawing at Button’s lead, problems developed under Brawn GP’s roof. “Rubens is the nicest teammate in the world, but obviously when you’re fighting for a championship, he thought at times the team were favoring me,” Button remembers. Button’s engineer learned that Barichello’s car had exceeded the self-imposed rear camber limit. The limit existed for the safety of Brawn’s drivers, as high camber on the BGP 001 led to dangerous instability in fast corners. Barichello and his engineers courted danger to close the gap to Button. “Ross went ballistic,” Button says. “Called everyone in and said, ‘Do not ever do this again, overstep the mark.’” With pressure building, Button’s grip on the championship loosened. He appeared scattered. Results waned. The press turned on Button, accusing him of ditching the cavalier spirit of his early season for caution. With Button overwhelmed by the desire to avoid defeat rather than seize victory, his season now seemed set on a glide path that would end with a crash landing.

Ross Brawn, ever the tactician, ran interference. “It’s human nature,” Brawn stated ahead of the Brazilian Grand Prix. “Someone said to me that if you’re playing a football match, and you go in at halftime 3–0 ahead, you don’t play the second half the same way. I can understand that. I wish it weren’t the case, but it creeps in.” Button started from 14th in Brazil, the season’s penultimate race. At the back end of the grid, he was well out of the points he needed to secure the championship for himself and Brawn GP. Caution would not do, but the universe seemed hell-bent on chaos at Interlagos that weekend. Downpours had upended qualifying, opening-lap carnage claimed three cars, and an unsafe pit release ended with Kimi Räikkönen literally on fire. Button survived the carnage and found a rhythm. Then the shackles of caution fell off. Button sliced up the field. In a defining moment of the season, he passed Red Bull’s Mark Webber midcorner, catching a lightning snap of oversteer at the apex. Button snatched the title for good. A little over a decade after the championship, Button slips into a conversation about “The Brawn Year” as if falling into a comfy chair. I ask Button how he contextualizes 2009’s anomaly. In our ranking-obsessed culture, we’re less likely just to stand back in awe. Legacy is subject to constant scrutiny. I offer Vettel as an example. He won four titles with an all-conquering Red Bull car, only for his legacy to be questioned in hindsight. “It was all the car,” the haters say. Same with Lewis Hamilton: six titles owed to a dominant Mercedes. Button rode the double-diffuser Brawn to a title, they say. It wasn’t his talent. “Isn’t that unfair?” I wonder. Button demurs. “When you’re fighting just your teammate for a championship, it definitely takes away from it. Because you’ve still got to win, but your car is so superior to the rest that it doesn’t mean as much,” Button says. He pauses to think. “But it’s lovely when you see seasons like last year where Mercedes and Red Bull are both strong. You know, those years, for me, mean a lot more.” It’s a befuddling nonanswer, but so was Button’s championship season. However he’s placed within the pantheon of champions, even by his own estimation, it’s less important than this: Button sat front-row to one of the greatest miracles in motorsport. After all, history is chock-full of underdogs who almost made it and favorites who accomplished the expected. Does anyone remember their stories?

BRZ. Well-equipped at $28,595.† Professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt. Subaru, BRZ, and SUBARU BOXER are registered trademarks. *Based on competitor information from manufacturer websites as of August 2022. †MSRP excludes destination and delivery charges, tax, title, and registration fees. Retailer sets actual price. Certain equipment may be required in specific states, which can modify your MSRP. See your retailer for details. 2023 Subaru BRZ Limited shown has an MSRP of $31,095.

ILLUSTRATION BY AT E L I E R O L S C H I N S K Y

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DOSSIER

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FORD’S ELECTRIC P I C K U P S H OWS O N E POSSIBLE FUTURE.

BY J O H N P E A R L E Y H U F F M A N

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THIS IS ABOUT SOMETHING very American. In the United States (and Canada and Mexico), pickup trucks aren’t mere tools, but aspirations. The boss drives a pickup here, and the boss’s boss does too. Pickups in North America are status symbols, family heirlooms, and beloved companions. And the all-electric F-150 Lightning adds environmental virtue beyond that. Plus, it’s about the quickest brick Ford has ever thrown. “We’re investing in [internal-combustion engine] segments where we’re dominant and where we think, as competitors leave the segments, we can actually grow,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told Fox Business in September. “I ﬁnd it intriguing that we’re portraying the future of our industry as monolithic. That’s not how it goes. That’s not how it’s going to manifest itself.” The new Lightning is appreciated within a line of personal-use, occasionally high-performance pickups: from the cushy 1955 Chevrolet Cameo to Dodge’s rowdy 1978 Lil’ Red Express and on to the insane turbocharged 1991 GMC Syclone, the 2004 V-10-powered Ram SRT-10, and the two Fords that previously wore the Lightning name— where some utility is forsaken for looks, luxury, acceleration, and audacity. Deceptively, the new Lightning wears F-150 skin. The aluminum cab and body pieces port from Ford’s best-selling F-series more or less intact. This isn’t Tesla’s someday Cybertruck doorstop moon buggy or the ludicrously large Hummer EV bent on domination. If an observer doesn’t know the Lightning’s discreet styling cues, it swims anonymously amid the traffic stream. Under that mild-mannered costume, however, is a Kryptonian thing. It uses a conventionalstyle steel ladder frame, but instead of the rear leaf springs and solid axle used on full-size Ford trucks since 1917, there are independent control arms and coil springs at each corner (the current F-150 Raptor also uses coils). Between the frame rails, where conventional F-150s put engine, transmission, driveshaft, exhaust system, and fuel tank, there’s a tray of batteries and electric motors between both the front and rear pairs of wheels.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY L I S A L I N K E

A. The Lightning hides a sea change under its familiar-looking skin. B. This F-150 allows up to 320 miles of range per charge, plenty for chasing back roads. C. Ford knows: Don’t fix what ain’t broke. The Lightning’s cabin feels familiar to the F-series faithful.

B C

DOSSIER

Combine the Lightning’s two three-phase fixed-magnet motors, and monster torque is available to push (and pull) the more than 6800 pounds of unladen truck. The majority of Lightnings (like the one tested here) come equipped with the 131kWh extended-range battery. That’s up from the standard battery pack’s 98-kWh load of zap. Electric motors make the same torque from the moment their rotor starts moving within their stator. So, no matter the battery pack, there’s a massive 775 lb-ft available in the Lightning. That’s 55 percent more than the 500 lb-ft available from the 3.5-liter twin-turbo V-6, the torquiest non-Raptor version of the F-150 with solely an internal-combustion engine. The F-150 Hybrid, which pairs that turbo V-6 with a supplementary electric motor and battery pack, runs at a stated 570 lb-ft of peak torque. Because the extended-range batteries discharge more efficiently than the standard pack, the base Lightning is rated at 452 hp, while the highercapacity model gets 580 hp. Ford claims a range of 230 miles for the standard Lightning and 320 miles for the extended-range in XLT and Lariat trims. Go for the high-zooty Platinum model, and that figure drops to 300. Ford claims it takes eight hours to recharge the battery from 15 to 100 percent using the 80-amp home charge station that comes with extended-range trucks. That drops to a claimed 41 minutes (to charge from 15 to 80 percent) on a 150-kW Level 3 charger. Dear God and ghost of Henry Ford, this thing is quick. Our testing saw an extended range, 6855pound F-150 Lightning Platinum absolutely blitz to 60 mph in 4.0 seconds flat. Consider this: The 450-hp 2021 Raptor needs 5.2 seconds to reach 60 mph. The only quicker trucks are the mighty Ram TRX with its supercharged Hemi V-8, which reached 60 mph in just 3.7 seconds, and the 835hp, 7135-pound Rivian R1T, which spat in the eye of physics with a 3.3-second 0–60-mph rip. Ford Special Vehicle Team’s head engineer noted in 2009 that the Lightning hot-rod pickup had to die because there was no sustainable market for a high-performance, on-road pickup truck. And anyway, he said, they’d need 600 or more

A. An electric brick worthy of canyon straightaways, the Lightning hits 60 in just 4.0 seconds.

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rodded

tweaks included an aluminum driveshaft, a limited-slip differential, and 4.10 gears out back. Custom shocks and a set of front and rear anti-roll bars helped keep the power under control. The Lightning even used a version of the F-250’s beefier frame. The performance upgrades didn’t come at the cost of capability: The Lightning’s tow rating matched that of standard F-150s. Distinctive 17-inch wheels, bucket seats, color-matched bumpers, a front air dam, and Lightning decals make the first-gen truck easy to identify. It was offered only in black, red, or white exterior paint. Ford sold 11,563 first-gen Lightnings.

B. Second Generation: 1999–2004 After a three-year absence, the F-150 SVT Lightning returned in 1999 as a far more aggressive sport truck than its predecessor. It came exclusively in the regular-cab, short-bed configuration and was no longer as capable at typical tasks like towing as its counterparts. Its payload capacity was a measly 800 pounds when it debuted. That later increased to 1350 pounds. Truckish capability suffered, but the Lightning’s performance improved dramatically. The 5.4-liter V-8 engine, which came fitted with an intercooled supercharger, provided 360 hp and 440 lb-ft when it

debuted, later bumped to 380 hp and 450 lb-ft for 2001. A Detroit Locker rear differential helped keep things tidy during the truck’s 5.2-second 0–60-mph runs. Upgraded front and rear shocks and four-wheel ABS and disc brakes rounded out the major upgrades. Bilstein shocks became standard in 2001. The truck’s body was heavily reworked compared to the standard F-150, with new fascias, fog lamps, air deflectors, and rocker moldings. Unique 18-inch wheels came wrapped in Goodyear Eagle F1 tires. Ford built 28,124 secondgen Lightnings.

– LUCAS

BELL

horsepower to deliver meaningful performance, given the weight of a full-size truck. So Ford took a hard left off-road with the Raptor, exiling the V-8-powered Lightnings to the Island of Misfit Toys. It’s an irony lost on no one that the Lightning has returned with almost 600 hp and absurd acceleration figures while wearing the cloak of environmental virtue, not performance. As impressive as the Lightning’s initial acceleration is, its passing power is even more thrilling. At freeway speeds, the Lightning loafs along almost noiselessly. Slam the not-loud pedal, and the thing squats down and squirts forward as if it were auditioning to star as a fighter jet in the next Top Gun sequel. It’s not the astonishing vertebrae destruction that comes with the Tesla Model S Plaid, but it is leagues more dazzling than any other F-series. More subtle is how differently the Lightning handles from other F-150s. Because the Lightning

A. It’s easy to overwhelm the Lightning’s front tires post-apex, but how many big trucks ask questions about understeer? B. Say it again quick: “Lightning lighting, Lightning lighting, Lightning lighting.”

A. Ford introduces a new concept: the spooky-silent full-size pickup truck. B. Towing is on the menu, just not very far or very fast. C. Who knew the Lightning nameplate would stand the test of time so perfectly?

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spreads its massive weight across its 145.5-inch wheelbase, it’s more settled in its on-road ride. It carries 50.2 percent of its weight on the front wheels and 49.8 percent on the rear. That’s vastly superior to, for example, the F-150 Tremor, which puts 57.4 percent of its heft up front. So, road undulations that have unladen conventional pickups jiggling their tails have no effect on the Lightning. It’s even better in ride quality than new trucks like the Ram 1500 and Toyota Tundra that support their solid rear axles on coil springs. Yeah, the Lightning weighs a bazillion pounds, but it spreads its bulk. Near-perfect weight distribution doesn’t directly translate into sports-car handling. Riding on 275/50R-22 General Grabber HTS60 tires, the Lightning doesn’t put much tread face on the ground relative to its weight and length. The steering is numb and not very quick, but not atypical of other trucks. It’s easy to overwhelm the tires in a corner, even if the Lightning will pull strongly post-apex as it straightens itself out. This isn’t a horse bred for barrel racing. Even in XLT trim, which is one step up from the base Pro level, the Lightning has a comfortable cabin. Move up in trim and the center screen sizes up from 12 inches to a robust 15.5, but that’s too much. The 12-inch touchscreen is plenty big for virtually any function and doesn’t produce so much glare. The easygoing XLT trim, including heated cloth seats, is restrained to the point of being comforting. There’s no pretense that this is a Lincoln. It has the conﬁdence to be a truck’s truck. And it’s a silent operator. Spooky silent. It’s so quiet, things that go unnoticed in other trucks— the sounds of the driver’s palms abrading against the steering wheel or that initial moment when a shoe hits either pedal—are apparent in the Lightning. One can hear what seems to be the body mounts shifting over the frame on speed bumps and road divots. But while the XLT is truck-trimmed, the Lightning has limitations as a truck. First, even though it’s hugely long, much of that length is taken up by the four-door cab. The bed is only 67.1 inches

Foundation Stock The second-gen 2003 Lightning delivers things the new one can’t.

A. The Lightning as it was, an old-school, no-holds-barred, bare-knuckled ball of speed and hyperbole. B. Few F-150 Lightnings survived the intervening decades without modification. Thank the supercharged gods for that.

Nostalgia is a gooey thing. It presents a past more imagined than real—a vision through the Vaseline-covered corneas of youth. But seat time in Jesus Martinez’s 2003 Ford SVT F-150 Lightning merits some bygone myopia. The all-electric F-150 Lightning is quicker but not always better. At 31, Martinez isn’t old enough to have driven his truck when it was new. Unencumbered by memories, he appreciates the pickup’s sensations as fresh things. “It’s all mechanical,” he explains. “That’s what’s so great about it.” Running 100-plusoctane E85, the black Lightning ignites with a vivid whine from the M112 Roots-style supercharger. Approaching its 20th birthday, Martinez’s truck has, well, evolved a bit over the decades. The blower

has overdriven pulleys, the intake is freer flowing, and there’s an aftermarket exhaust that sounds like it’s singing La Traviata in the exact key of a 5.4liter 16-valve overheadcam V-8. The 2003 Lightning was the next-to-last year for this second generation, so it benefitted from an update for 2001, when it sprouted a new 90-mm mass air flow sensor and the finaldrive ratio shortened to 3.73:1. That upped the engine’s output from 360 hp during 1999 and 2000 to 380 for models built between 2001 and 2004. The 0–60-mph romp took 5.2 seconds back then. That’s 1.2 seconds less rapid than its electric son, but it’s a fun 1.2 seconds. Now a novelty, the old Lightning is what was once known as a regular-cab truck. “I like

the cab,” Martinez shares. “It means I can tell people there’s no room for them to come along.” When Ford’s SVT was a thing, all its vehicles wore white-face gauges that reverse-glowed at night. They are here in all their analog glory behind a steering wheel with a thin rim and an airbag the size of a large fanny pack. There’s even a column-mounted wand controlling the fourspeed automatic transmission. “It’s a burnout machine,” Martinez says about his rear-drive, stepside beast. Wearing Nitto tires on stock 18-inch wheels, the aged Lightning has presence and attitude. Some of the decoration is old school—like two-tone upholstery— but it’s not archaic. There’s badassery here, both intimidating and charming.

2003 F-150 PHOTOGRAPHY BY J O S É M A N D OJ A N A

DOSSIER

The suspension is stiff, and the hydraulically assisted steering is almost soulful in its communion with the front tires. Turn-in isn’t quick, but it is satisfying. The comfort comes from the sensations the truck generates, not those things from which it isolates the driver. Roaring along the streets of Maywood, California—gateway to Vernon, the City of Commerce, and parts of Los Angeles—good things that have passed away from current trucks become obvious. This F-150’s cowl is low, and the hood drops away for better visibility. The dashboard doesn’t glow with massive screens but trusts the driver to interpret its info and read a map. It offers things no new truck maker is selling now. Some mist in the eyes is okay.

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long, meaning things like four-wheelers or motorcycles will hang out onto the tailgate. Longer lumber loads will take a supply of red ﬂags to mark the overhang. With that in mind, the greater deﬁcit is that as load increases, range takes a hit. That’s particularly true when towing. While extended-range Lightnings are rated at 1952 pounds of cargo capacity and 7700 pounds of towing ability (and up to 10,000 pounds with the Max Trailer Tow package), trips will have to be planned carefully. Car and Driver, our sister publication, hooked up a 6100-pound trailer and saw the Lightning’s range drop by more than half. Even more daunting, the indicated range calculated by the truck’s algorithm dropped from a predicted 288 miles to a mere 96. For cross-country towing adventures, the Lightning makes little sense. As a machine for bouncing around town, tak-

A. This electric F-150 has proved to be a hit from the get-go. Will the rest of the American truck industry follow Ford’s lead? Surely.

ing the dogs along, or moving some stuff a short distance, the Lightning is ﬁne. And with its large front trunk, it’s a great personal companion if it often runs unladen. It says all the right things about the boss who is driving it. Still, at this point, before the last gas station closes and while there are things worth towing, more conventional F-150s will be a better choice for many buyers. The F-150 Hybrid looks like a solid compromise, considering it’s easy to refuel and carries a 25-mpg EPA fuel economy rating on both the highway and in the city. Also, the Lightning isn’t cheap. From a base price of $54,769, including a $1795 destination charge, the 2022 XLT rose to $76,384 as driven. The Platinum track-test example cost a whopping $93,609. And with all the production already committed, dealers are getting a lot more. There’s something very American about that too.

Height: 78.3 in

2022 Ford F-150 Lightning Platinum

Wheelbase: 145.5 in Length: 232.7 in Front Track: 68.1 in

Width: 80.0 in

Price

Transmission

Base .................................. $92,669 As Tested ........................... $93,609

Driven Wheels ........... all-wheel drive Type ............................... direct-drive Rear Differential: mechanical locking Reduction ratios between motor and wheels ................. F: 9.719 R: 9.611

Layout: Dual permanent-magnet synchronous AC motors Configuration: front/rear transverse mounted

Test Results Acceleration

100

1/4-mile

12.7 sec @ 107 mph

Steering

Battery

Assist .................................. electric Turns Lock-to-Lock ...................... 3.3 Turning Circle ... 47.8 ft (curb-to-curb)

Liquid-cooled lithium-ion pouch, 131.0 kWh

Suspension

MPH

Engine

Rear Track: 68.3 in

Front ...................... double wishbone Rear ... independent semi-trailing arms Torque

775 lb-ft

Horsepower

580 hp

Batteries Compared Standard

Extended-Range

Brakes and Tires Front: 14.0 x 1.3-in vented disc, 2-piston calipers Rear: 13.8 x 0.9-in vented disc, 1-piston caliper Stability Control: partially defeatable Tires: General Grabber HTS60 275/50R-22 (115T) M+S Extra Load

Body and Chassis

Capacity, kWh 98.0 131.0 Horsepower 452 580 Range, miles

Construction: body-on-frame Material: steel frame, high-strength, aluminum alloy Doors/Seats: 4/5 Cargo Capacity: 52.8 ft³ (box), 14.1 ft³ (front trunk)

Weight

230 300/320 Efficiency, MPGe city 76 78 Additional Cost, $ 0 10K

ILLUSTRATION BY C L I N T F O R D

0–60 mph

4.0 sec 30 0

SECONDS Results in graph omit 1-ft rollout of 0.3 sec.

Top Speed (MFR)

110 mph

Roadholding, 300-ft Skidpad

0.77 g

Curb Weight ....... 6855 lb (as tested) Weight-to-Power ............. 11.8 lb/hp

Fuel EPA City/Hwy ............... 78/63 MPGe Capacity: 131-kWh extended-range battery Range .............................. 300 miles

Braking 70–0 mph

180 ft

Curb Weight

6855 lb F: 50.2% R: 49.8%

DOSSIER

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AIRBORNE WEAPON THE NEW 911 GT3 RS HARNESSES THE AIR TO CREATE THE ULTIMATE TRACKBRED PORSCHE.

AFTER A HALF CENTURY of 911 RS models, Porsche could be suffocated by success, having bumped the ceiling of what a gasoline-powered sports car could do. The 2023 911 GT3 RS, though, is a naturally aspirated glutton for (and a spectacular example of) fresh air. The GT3 RS generates 518 hp and 342 lb-ft of torque from its 4.0-liter six. That power is best unleashed on a circuit such as England’s Silverstone, a Formula 1 amphitheater that highlights this superstar’s 9000-rpm vocal range and gripping performance. The RS brims with carbon fiber, in most body panels as well as in its skyscraping rear wing, Race-Tex-clad bucket seats, and, with the Weissach package, anti-roll bars. A Ring-ready suspension is a racer’s dream: Springs are firmer than a standard GT3’s (50 percent more so up front, 60 percent in back), and four intuitive steeringwheel knobs allow adjustment of front and rear rebound and compression. Porsche Torque Vectoring offers a similar plus-minus range of settings for the electronic differential, for either coasting and braking or lockup on corner exits. Air is the GT3 RS’s stock-in-trade, the cooling breeze, vivifying oxygen, and crushing downforce that link it directly to the GT3 R racer that glowers in the Silverstone paddock. Andreas Preuninger, head of Porsche GT vehicles, explains the obvious, saying, “From the first look at the GT3 RS, you know: It’s all about aerodynamics.”

S H E E T M E TA L

BY L AW R E N C E U L R I C H

That look socks your eyeballs like a young Mike Tyson. Another jab comes with the price, $225,250 even before the inevitable knockout blow of dealer markups. Add stuff like ceramic-composite brakes and the $33,520 Weissach package—which trims 33 pounds from U.S-spec models, for a total of 3235—and there’s two GT3 RS vehicles here at Silverstone today that top $304,000. Between track sessions, I cruise the British countryside in a right-hand-drive GT3 Touring, the wingless wonder that could pass for a basemodel Carrera to the untrained eye. The new RS will never pass, with that great, looming wing, lurid color schemes (even the center-locking forged wheels are available in boldly metallic crimson or blue shades), and boastful “GT3 RS” door script. Add a disemboweled hood and enough black plastic aero bits to stock a Corvette Racing shop, and this Porsche is Exhibit A in shattering those deluded souls who claim all 911s look alike. Porsche’s active aero management is practically a German engineer’s doctoral thesis. It starts with an industrial-size central heat exchanger that supplants the luggage frunk of a standard 911 and its three-radiator layout. The single-radiator concept is straight from Porsche’s RSR racer. Cooling surface area drops by 32 percent, necessitating efficiency everywhere else. The radiator is tilted at a 43-degree angle, to catch air through

an S-duct and generate front-axle downforce. Deflecting vanes in the enormous hood nostrils prevent waste heat from shooting straight over the roof and into rear engine intakes. Some redirected air stubbornly flows up and over doors, so a pair of roof fins deflects it again. The design cuts intake temperatures to preserve at least 15 hp. Bladed inlets reduce pressure in front and rear wheel arches, a nod to the Le Mans–winning 911 GT1. Even the signature rear fender cleavage of 911 RS models plays a new role, creating a vacuum to smooth aero rather than drawing combustion air. To pancake the rear end, the swan-necksuspended wing is 40 percent larger than on the previous RS, with visible pistons hydraulically activating its upper section. A two-piece active front diffuser displaces side radiators, pivoting to increase downforce by up to 80 percent. It works in sync with the rear wing, which is taller than the roof, another production-Porsche first, and also functions as an airbrake. There’s actually a bit more drag than in the 991.2-gen RS. But the vast spectrum from the most slippery profile to full downforce is in sight of GTE racers and a new league for a streetgoing Porsche. How new? At 177 mph, a max downforce of 1895 pounds more than doubles that of the last RS and triples that of a standard GT3. It exceeds the McLaren Senna’s pavement push by 121 pounds.

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A. (Previous pages) The new GT3 RS positively bristles with aero doodads, both active and passive. B. The GT3 RS is so aero focused that even its front suspension wishbones are profiled to generate downforce. C. Yes, it’s a track car, but it’s a track car with contrasting stitched-leather appointments. D. A more prominent version of the front fender vents that have become a staple of RS models. E. Its performance more than justifies the additional roll structure seen here. But that feature won’t be offered on U.S. cars.

A. GT3 RS owners can nerd out with individually adjustable controls for differential locking, damper compression, damper rebound, and traction and stability control. B. Unintentional practicality? The RS’s massive rear wing is so tall that it doesn’t even impede rearward visibility.

The racing gods, or unjust British weather forecasters, dampen my initial track foray, pissing rain on the historic 3.7-mile circuit just as I’m leaving the pits. That doesn’t stop me from ripping through gears, via a seven-speed PDK with a shorter final drive than a regular old GT3. Sometimes downforce gets in the way of a car that can crack 184 mph at the top end and scorch 60 mph in an estimated 2.6 seconds. To goose my speed past Silverstone’s grandstand, Porsche’s new drag-reduction system (DRS) flattens every wing. DRS automatically engages when the car goes above 62 mph, above 95 percent throttle, and above 5500 rpm and is doing less than 0.9 lateral g. When it isn’t meeting those four conditions, confident types can push another steering-wheel button to summon DRS, mainly for blinding sweepers where excess downforce would slow the car. Woolen-gray clouds part for an afternoon stint. My first trip to Silverstone—where damp patches still have the RS losing traction, and mistakes in one hurricane-force corner compound irrevocably—is no time to play F1 hero. But I chase a Porsche factory driver anyhow, nipping 150 mph on the long straight. This RS generates tremendous mechanical grip, even on Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires, as opposed to the ultraaggressive Cup 2 Rs we’d be using on a drier, toastier surface. The RS’s arsenal of weaponry, the alertness of its steering and chassis, recalls the Porsche Cup race car. The supple engine’s reworked cams and

shafts add 16 more horses than a GT3 has. It turns delightfully nasty above 6000 rpm, its redline as addictive as nicotine to a button-pushing lab rat. I’m not usually big on right-seat hot laps with pro drivers; they tend to feel like what I’m doing, only faster. I almost never write about them. A trip around a full F1 circuit with Jörg Bergmeister is different. The former Porsche works driver, Le Mans GT-class winner, and ﬁve-time American Le Mans Series champ led driving development for the RS and may know it more intimately than anyone alive. With the track nearly dry, minutes from closing, Bergmeister escorts me at a violent, madcap pace, using every millimeter of Silverstone surface and nearly putting a wheel off at one point. His scary late-braking heroics make my eyes widen and organs leak ﬂuid; there’s no way a street car can stop this quickly. But it does. “That’s where the downforce works the most for you,” he shouts over the shrieking engine and tires. He’s having a ball. I’m wishing for one more go, and for Bergmeister to be my driving coach. The GT3 RS has more bandwidth than any other showroom 911. It’s an onion with many sulfuric layers that will require time, skill, and patience to peel and will bring tears to drivers who skip steps and overestimate their abilities. As for collectors and dilettantes who will happily overpay for one yet barely scratch its speedy surface, let alone drive even once on track, I wish them a 911 Cabriolet with comfort seats and leather air vents. For myself, a GT3 RS and a long residency at Silverstone.

SPECIFICATIONS

2023 Porsche 911 GT3 RS PRICE

$225,250 (base) ENGINE

4.0-liter flat-6 OUTPUT

518 hp @ 8500 rpm 342 lb-ft @ 6300 rpm TRANSMISSION

7-speed dual-clutch automatic CURB WEIGHT

3268 lb 0–60 MPH

S H E E T M E TA L

2.6 seconds

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CRAZY EIGHTS WANT TO RUN EIGHTS ON YOUR DRIVE TO THE SUPERMARKET? THE RIMAC NEVERA CAN.

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BY M AT T FA R A H

EIGHT-POINT-FIVE SECONDS. That’s how long the Rimac Nevera electric hypercar takes to run the quarter-mile. It’s six-tenths quicker than the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport. And at the end of those 1320 feet, the Nevera is traveling 161 mph, according to Rimac. And the Nevera will do it over and over, 30 times on a single charge, on regular old Michelin tires, on the street. In those old-timey days when cars had wheels made of wood, headlamps made of brass, and roofs made of air, some believed a driver’s face might melt off at over 100 mph. With the benefit of hindsight, and thanks to the low-tech and underappreciated windshield, it’s clear the 100mph barrier was no real barrier. Now, when you’re going very, very fast in a car without a windshield, as Jeremy Clarkson learned in a notorious 2007 Top Gear segment on the Ariel Atom, your face does flap like Silly Putty, making for excellent television. But with a windshield? Facial structure is safe. Or so I thought. With my right foot pinned to the floor, I released my left foot from the Nevera’s brake, the car hurtling past 60 mph in 1.9 seconds and not remotely letting up. My face changed shape with cheeks pulled back taut, eyeballs knocked against my brain, and blood rushed rearward inside a well-appointed, virtually silent cockpit with the automatic temperature control set to a pleasant 71 degrees. I experienced extreme tunnel vision and could focus only on one urgent task: figuring out how much road I had left in order to avoid a massive crash. Deep into the triple digits, I developed a headache and mild vertigo. Then I made a U-turn and repeated the process twice more. This much electricity is a hell of a drug. Like most deeply antisocial behavior, exercising nearly 2000 instantaneously available horsepower is physically uncomfortable, instantly addictive, and easy to normalize. Rimac’s people told me the horsepower—there are 1914 ponies, accompanied by 1741 lb-ft of torque—is the least interesting part of the car. That’s difficult to believe. Fortunately, though, it’s not the only interesting part of the car. Rimac also does other

A. (Previous pages) Driven at a moderate pace on a public road, the nearly 2000-hp Nevera feels remarkably unremarkable. B. A simple press of the right pedal will instantly clear the Nevera’s mirrors of any following cars. C. Somehow it seems like the Nevera’s features should be controlled by holograms or telepathy instead of knobs and switches. D. Virtually no one will pronounce the name Rimac properly. E. With its mid-engine proportions and butterfly doors, the Nevera looks basically like any other supercar. But it’s much stranger, and quicker, than them. D

PHOTOGRAPHY BY J A K E C A M I N E R O

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A. Rimac nails ergonomics and build quality in a way Tesla is still incapable of doing. B. The company will build only 150 of these $2 million battery-electric hypercars. C. You may ask yourself, “Why has my face melted?” The answer is the Nevera’s highly antisocial accelerative force. D. The Nevera’s pursed lips and squinty eyes imply that it disapproves of something.

things staggeringly well for a company so new that you are almost certainly pronouncing its name wrong (it’s REE-mats). Build quality is excellent, with tight tolerances between every panel. The materials, paint luster, and overall completeness of the vehicle belie the fact that almost every part is done in-house in Croatia. Tesla has been building the Model S for over a decade now in California using Mercedes switchgear and doesn’t even come close. Though there are some suppliers for things like HVAC fans, Rimac handles the complete powertrain, the entire body, the chassis, and everything the driver touches, uses, or engages with. There are well-considered buttons for primary functions, as well as responsive anti-glare touchscreens for secondary settings, media, and navigation. It’s all intuitive, comfortable, even sumptuous. Have I mentioned it runs eights? The ride is brilliant in Comfort and Sport modes, thanks to an incredibly rigid carbon monocoque paired with an electronically adjustable suspension. While this is no GT4 RS, the handling is more than appropriate given the grand-touring mission statement, and it masks the more than 5000-pound curb weight well. The pizza-platter ceramic brakes, controlled entirely by-wire, are grabby at low speeds. Then I bombed a corner nearly 100 mph faster than I ever have in a regular sports car. I can accept a bit of lowspeed grabbiness for such high-speed effectiveness. Fortunately, the regenerative braking

is effective enough that I didn’t need the brake pedal except for very aggressive stops. The thing about electric vehicles is that at 10 percent throttle, they all feel the same. My Ferrari 328 at 10 percent throttle feels completely different from my BMW M3 at 10 percent throttle, which feels completely different from my wife’s Nissan Pao at 10 percent throttle. Internalcombustion engines give a car personality. Power is good and so is speed, but you don’t need either of them to discern the character of an engine. A small V-8 is different from an inline-six, which is different from a four. Even going slowly, a Ferrari’s got the ﬁzz. At light throttle, all EV motors are the same regardless of peak power output. So in traffic, in the city, there is nothing to remind you that the cage-free Nevera is quick enough to be banned from most U.S. drag strips after one pass. It’s not exciting to cruise in, but on the ﬂip side, the Nevera is usable in the way a Pro Stock dragster is not. It’s no harder to drive than a Tesla Model 3. You give up nothing for all of that thrust. But unless you’re hurtling down the road so fast that the earth’s curvature is an issue, you’re not getting anything for all of those dollars either. To get your money’s worth, you have to rent runways or show absolute unabashed contempt for your state’s vehicle code. Mate Rimac, the 34-year-old CEO and founder of the company (who is so good at his job, he’s now also the CEO of Bugatti), is a pragmatist who understands perfectly well that his untethered

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roller coasters won’t save the planet. His personal collection includes a swath of the most engaging driver’s cars ever produced, including BMW M3s, an M5, a Ferrari 812, and Porsche 911s. “If you want to do your part to save the planet, you’d make more of an impact by not eating meat than you would by switching to an electric car,” he tells me. “But I was so impressed with the power delivery of the EV, and the packaging of the motors compared to a huge petrol engine, that I saw it as the future of the ultrahigh-performance car.” (Again, the ﬁrst production car bearing this man’s name comfortably runs eights.) Porsche, Bugatti, and several other NDAprotected OEMs agree and are now in the Mate Rimac business. But his dream cars are still gas powered. He wants a Carrera GT, a Ferrari F50, and a McLaren F1. A man after my own heart. And he isn’t wrong, on any count. The Nevera is so stupendously rapid, I conclude that all OEMs need to stop chasing metrics with gasoline. Just give up now. If you want to build the quickest supercars around, electric is the only way forward. But that doesn’t mean dumping internal combustion entirely. It just means a shift in perspective: Chase numbers with electricity and emotion with fuel. If enough daily drivers and face-melting supercars abandon combustion, maybe there will be enough environmental credits left to continue with stick-shift wonders like the Porsche GT3? Maybe even bring back a few from the dead? Miro “Mrgud” Zrnčević, Rimac’s full-time test driver, conﬁrmed to my molten face what I already knew: You acclimate to almost 2000 hp quickly, at which point the novelty wears off and you crave more. When it’s this effortless, seeking more is a slippery, never-ending slope. But engagement is forever, even when the car is no longer the fastest thing around, let alone comparatively competitive (see: Ferrari F355). At the helm of the ship taking us into the realm of eight-second daily-drivable hypercars is a person who drives stick on the weekends. The future is safely in good and fanatical hands.

A. The Nevera started life back in 2018 as the Rimac C_Two concept car. B. This is where the internal-combustion engine would have been mounted. C. At more than two and a half tons, this carbon-fiber hypercar is heavier than a loaded Jeep Grand Cherokee.

SPECIFICATIONS

2022 Rimac Nevera PRICE:

$1,965,000 (est) POWERTRAIN:

4 electric motors OUTPUT:

1914 hp 1741 lb-ft TRANSMISSIONS:

direct-drive CURB WEIGHT:

5070 lb 0–60 MPH:

1.9 seconds

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SUPERIOR CARRERA WHILE THE 2022 RUF SCR LOOKS LIKE A VINTAGE 911, IT ISN’T. IT’S BETTER—MUCH BETTER.

BY C H R I S P E R K I N S

PHOTOGRAPHY BY S K A N D E R K H L I F

THIS IS NOT A PORSCHE 911. The Ruf SCR is a carbon-fiber creation from Germany’s Ruf Automobile made from the ground up to look like a 911. It’s not only better to drive than the Porsche but also one of the finest driver’s cars on sale today. Longtime readers of Road & Track will be familiar with Ruf. In our July 1987 top-speed shootout, a Ruf CTR—nicknamed “Yellow Bird” by our staff—posted a 211-mph run that trounced the likes of Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Porsche itself. But that’s not where the story begins. The company started as a repair garage in Bavaria in 1939 and evolved into a Porsche tuner in the late Seventies. One of its first cars was the SCR, Alois Ruf Jr.’s take on the 1978 911 SC. “The SCR was an SC Ruf; that was the whole idea,” Ruf Jr. says. “We brought back more 911 in that model than Porsche was giving it at that time because the 911 SC was a reduced 911.” Fit with a larger 3.2-liter flat-six and Ruf’s gearbox, the SCR was a critical and commercial success. In 2018, almost exactly 40 years after the introduction of that first SCR, Ruf unveiled a new one at the Geneva Motor Show. This one, finished in a coat of Irish green like its forebear, was a distinctly more involved engineering exercise. The company would build the SCR on an all-new carbon-fiber chassis, like the latest CTR introduced a year earlier. Ruf wanted to make a lighter 911 body out of aluminum, but it was too complicated to build and, by his estimation, still too heavy. Carbon fiber made more sense. So why not go all in and create a new monocoque? That would provide very low weight and allow for a double-wishbone suspension with pushrod coilovers, something you couldn’t dream of with a standard 911. The SCR’s carbon-fiber bodywork proportions suggest the air-cooled 964 generation, but a water-cooled 510-hp naturally aspirated 4.0-liter flat-six powers the new car. It’s Ruf’s development of the beloved old Mezger engine last used in the Porsche 997 GT3 RS. From the carbon-bucket driver’s seat, you could fool yourself into thinking you’re in an aircooled 911. The door frames and greenhouse are standard-issue pieces from the air-cooled era, as C

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S H E E T M E TA L

A. Just because it looks like a Porsche and sounds like a Porsche doesn’t mean it’s a Porsche. B. With Ruf-designed chassis and carbonfiber body panels, it’s no exaggeration to say the SCR is “made” in the company’s home town of Pfaffenhausen. C. Upright, comfortable, and with a touch of plaid fabric, the SCR’s interior is a reasonably faithful take on vintage 911s. D. The Irish green paint is a nod to vintage Porsches but also to the first Ruf SCR from 1978. E. The SCR wears a ducktail-like spoiler.

S H E E T M E TA L

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A. (Previous pages) Five gauges with green markings are quintessential oldPorsche style. B. LED angel eyes work much better here than on the countless restomods that also wear them. C. Prioritizing the experience over performance stats, Ruf fits the SCR with a sixspeed manual instead of an auto. D. These three pedals await the touch of your loafers. E. The Mezger-based naturally aspirated 4.0-liter flat-six delivers 510 hp at a glorious 8270 rpm.

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are the dashboard and the expansive view over the hood. Even the door shuts with the familiar 911 clink. Switchgear from a 997, top-hinged pedals, and gorgeous custom-made Ruf gauges shatter the vintage illusion. Still, the driving experience is very 911, honed to an incredibly fine degree. The Ruf-engineered electrohydraulic power steering is beautifully transparent, wriggling in the hands like you’d expect from an old 911. The perfect thin-rimmed steering wheel encourages you to steer with your fingertips. Then there’s the familiar thrum of that flat-six. Aside from a heavy clutch, the new car isn’t difficult to drive. The SCR is just as usable as any 911, but its true character emerges when you find a quiet, twisty road. It gains your trust within a few corners, so speed rises quickly. The perfectly tuned doublewishbone suspension is Lotus-like in the way it breathes with the road surface beneath. That’s not surprising given the SCR’s claimed 2756pound curb weight—hundreds lighter than the current 911 and similar to a G-series Carrera. The stiff carbon tub, featuring an integrated steel roll cage, allows for a relatively soft suspension tune

S H E E T M E TA L

and lots of wheel travel. With the KW dampers in their softest setting, the car simply devours roads. Closer in size to a 997 than any air-cooled 911, the SCR has more stability and can accommodate wider Goodyear rubber—235/35R-19s up front and 305/30R-19s in the rear. All told, it’s more sophisticated and confidence inspiring than an old 911, and certainly much faster, yet just as feelsome. Typical of a carbon car, it’s pretty boomy inside until you let the engine rip. This 4.0-liter has the burly character of the old Mezger, with the usual cabin-filling blare, but it screams like a new GT3 as you approach the 8750-rpm redline. What this engine does from 5000 rpm to the 8270-rpm power peak and beyond is unforgettable. It’s ferocious yet linear. Throttle bodies for each cylinder ensure a pin-sharp response, and I often found myself building a gap to traffic ahead just to downshift and run to redline. ZF designed the six-speed manual gearbox for Ruf, and while the shift action isn’t as precise as a new GT3’s, it’s far better than any air-cooled 911’s without being as notchy as a 997 GT3’s. Can we take a moment to celebrate that this is the only transmission available for this car? It feels about as quick as a new GT3 point to point—expected given its better power-to-weight ratio. You could easily shock and confuse a lot of modern supercar drivers, leaving them wondering why a tiny 911 is keeping up with them. Yet it’s engaging even at moderate speeds. In the age of the hypercar, the SCR stands out. It uses the best technology that has given us fast-beyond-comprehension cars, but it chases involvement above all. The fact that it’s still supercar quick is almost incidental. Almost. The SCR costs almost $1 million. But if you want a driving experience among the finest in the world, it’s worth it. The price hasn’t deterred customers, as Ruf sells as many as it can build. “We wanted to come up with a car that is 100 percent analog, a car that wins your heart and makes you smile,” Ruf Jr. says. He smiled the whole time on our drive, laughing at every trip to redline as if it were his first time in the car. Behind the wheel, you can’t help but do the same.

SPECIFICATIONS

2022 Ruf SCR PRICE:

$927,000 (est) ENGINE:

4.0-liter flat-6 OUTPUT:

510 hp @ 8270 rpm 347 lb-ft @ 5760 rpm TRANSMISSION:

6-speed manual CURB WEIGHT:

2756 lb 0–60 MPH:

3.3 seconds

THE VALLEY OF THE SUPERCARS

There’s an area of northern Italy that has achieved mythical status among car lovers. Throughout Motor Valley, iconic builders have sculpted motorized pieces of art for over a century. In September, guests on Road & Track’s “Maranello a Monza” trip experienced everything the region has to offer, culminating in the Italian Grand Prix. First stops: the Museo Ferrari and Enzo Ferrari Museum, where

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we relived the Prancing Horse’s Formula 1 exploits. Punctuated by decadent regional fare, the following days featured visits to the Pagani factory, the Lamborghini family museum, the Lambo factory, the Panini Collection, the Maserati factory, and the Stanguellini Collection, where we ogled an assemblage of vintage racing and street vehicles. On the way to Milan,

guests toured the restored castle of Antica Corte Pallavicina and its cellars, where artisanal meats are cured. Visits to the Alfa Romeo Museum and the Museo Fratelli Cozzi, one of the finest collections of Alfas on the planet, were followed by a personalized tour of the Zagato Design Studio. Finally, race day arrived. We marched together toward Monza, wondering whether Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc

and Carlos Sainz would bring victory to their historic home track. While Red Bull’s Max Verstappen’s run of wins could not be stopped, our spirits remained high as the group gathered for a final exquisite meal. We eagerly exchanged memories from the week’s adventures and promises of future meetings, whether back in Italy or on one of R&T’s other upcoming Experiences.

– PATRICK

COLLAGE BY L A U R A W E I L E R

CARONE

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Articles inside

The Valley of the Supercars

Superior Carrera

Crazy Eights

Airborne Weapon

Dossier: 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning

It’s a Cinderella Story

The Taming of the Snail

Victory at Last

Shock Value

Already Broken

A Beautiful Shambles

Breaking the Wind

The Lotus Position

The Senna Effect

Watch the Throne

Are E-Fuels for Real?

Third Dimension

Magnum Force

Automatic for the People

Il Gran Torino

The Right Direction