Índex per June 2017 a Automobile

ANY YEARS AGO MY WIFE SURPRISED ME with a Mario Andretti Racing Experience at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. It was a lead-follow affair in an Indy-style race car. I can still vividly remember the g-forces on my body as I pushed into the corners at 150-plus mph, thinking at the time how punishing it must be on the real pros to sustain it for 200 laps at more than 200 mph with other cars often mere inches away. Although I’ve always had the utmost respect for drivers who risk their lives every time they get in a car, those laps really altered my perception of what it takes to be a pro racer. M More recently and right after I arrived at Automobile, I took a trip to a makeshift…

NE OF LIFE’S BITTERSWEET things is if you live long enough, many people you love, like, and admire will predecease you. That is the way it always was and, for the time being at least, the way it must be. But such realism was cold comfort today as I sat down to write about a couple sad car-world deaths, only to read of another, which I mention first. Cancer has taken Roger Becker, the Lotus chassis engineer whose brilliant career with the Norfolk maker of lightweight sports cars spanned from Elan to Evora. Roger O showed great kindness to me when I was a young journalist visiting Hethel and each time I went back. As a lifelong Lotus man, I’ll miss him and every “add lightness” thing he stood for. Instead…

The property in the midst of an older industrial estate looks more like a car graveyard than a collection’s home. Behind the wire fence rest a good dozen incognito casualties, protected against weather by yellow covers or gray tarp. Behind the gate, however, a tightly packed array of shining BMWs from the ’60s and ’70s await us in what is half warehouse, half workshop. When he ran out of floor space, 48-year-old Rey (last name withheld on request) started stacking the surplus stock on hoists. Right now the head count is 52, but it fluctuates as this makeshift enterprise seems to buy and sell cars on a whim. “I once had 14 2002tii models in various stages from neglect to perfection,” recalls the former football player who made a small…

You’re likely familiar with the “staff and serpent” and “quadrifoglio verde” badges found on Alfa Romeos, but do you know what they represent? On the former, the staff (red cross on a white background) is the official symbol of Milan, Italy, where Alfa Romeo is headquartered. The serpent with a person in its mouth is the symbol of the Visconti family that ruled Milan. Legend says the symbol was won in battle during the crusades when a Visconti knight defeated an adversary who had the symbol on his shield. The quadrifoglio verde badge has its origins with Alfa factory driver Ugo Sivocci, who had grown tired of his multiple second-place finishes in the Targa Florio. For the 1923 race, Sivocci painted a green four-leaf clover (quadrifoglio verde in Italian) on…

It’s not quite 7 a.m. on a chilly Saturday in January, and the line of cars is already stretched a half mile around the perimeter roads of the Fairplex in Pomona, California. From the driver’s seat of Automobile’s Four Seasons Jaguar F-Pace, it all looks similar to rush hour, but we’re certainly not complaining. Instead, we’re car spotting. There’s a brand-new Corvette Stingray, a 1970s Datsun 510, a ’60s Chevrolet C10 pickup, and a group of modified Volkswagen Beetles, rasping out their signature, air-cooled notes each time a gap in traffic opens. On any other day of the week, in any other location, this bout of gridlock would bring endless unkind words, blaring horns, and blood-pressure spikes. But not here. Thousands of people patiently wait for their turn to park…

MCQUEEN IN LE MANS / CAR PLANTS / JAGUAR LAND ROVER CUMBERFORD / ST. ANTOINE / KITMAN / LETTERS PRODUCTION OF THE 1971 film “Le Mans” went awry because leading man Steve McQueen wouldn’t compromise capturing the pressure and magic of the 24-hour endurance race. As revealed in a recently released documentary, “Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans,” the crew completely neglected budgets and deadlines, going so far as to paint autumnal leaves green when the seasons changed. The movie, which features real footage from the 1970 race, garnered little interest after it was released. Since then it’s earned a following of fans who seemingly don’t mind movies without discernible plot arcs. One of those fans is Belgian artist Sandro Garbo, who has converted the 45-year-old racing film into…

For a long time Audi stood for refinement, graceful styling, and intelligent detail design. We owe the benefits of a now almost-universal flush side glass to Audi, along with the serious, widespread application of low-drag aerodynamics for mainstream vehicles. Those huge grilles from more than a decade ago were unpleasantly obtrusive but were offset by the most refined and agreeable interiors in the business. As the market has moved from sporty coupes and sedans to taller, heavier, and bulkier SUVs, the focus has changed, and Audi’s subtle styling refinement has transformed into a blockier, coarser, and more trucklike look. This disappoints me slightly, but Audi buyers are presumably getting more of what they truly want—or, at the very least, what marketers and stylists think they want. The Q8 concept’s grille…

WHEN WILL CAR COMPANIES WAKE UP AND ACTUALLY design a car that’s exciting and stirs the soul? People are so concerned with speed, power, and efficiency that they forget the basic principle of an automobile: its beauty! Not only am I disgusted by how homogenized all cars have become—BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Hyundai, Kia, Nissan, and Honda—but the audacity of some of these companies to charge $50,000, $60,000, and $130,000 for cars that are uglier than my in-laws. Yes, Tesla, you too. Design some damn exciting cars! Stick a piece of turd under the hood and light it as fuel, but make the thing pretty, for heaven’s sake. I look at the mid-1990s, which I consider the golden age of modern car design, and see cars like the Plymouth Prowler and…

ÅRE, SWEDEN ICE CAPADES It seems as though climate change has come to this ski resort some 380 miles north of Stockholm as the SAS plane flies. The puddle of water on top of frozen Lake Ånnsjön gets deeper as the morning goes on. But it doesn’t slow us down as we slalom the new Volvo V90 Cross Country around a couple of tasty but slushy rallyesque lakecircuits. “What do you think the purpose of this is?” my drive partner asks. “Not a damn thing,” I reply. And that is good. Safe and stolid Volvo, now in its seventh year out from under Ford Motor Co.’s thumb, has brought us to this fairly remote area of its homeland in order to develop some positive—the company hopes— impressions of the 2017…

TIM MINGS IS watching, waiting to see if I can comprehend what he’s dropped in my palm. “A valve?” He nods, smirking. It’s tiny, smaller than any valve I’ve ever seen, no larger than a 16-penny nail. It’s out of a Honda Grand Prix motorcycle’s screaming, 125-cc inline-five that shrieked at the sky in the mid-’60s. Maybe 100 of these valves were ever made. The one I’m holding comes from an era when Soichiro Honda all but dominated the Japanese motorcycle market, then cast a glance at the American car and changed our world forever. “They made five of those motors,” Mings says, “23,000 rpm.” We’re sitting in his shop, a single bay in an anonymous office park. One of Los Angeles’ tangled interstate interchanges looms above the place, lending…

MAXIMA WRAP / FOX BODY MUSTANG AUCTIONS / HERB HELBIG 2016 NISSAN MAXIMA SR BMW’s 3 Series infamously lost the sport sedan plot a couple of generations ago by coddling the premium car crowd, leaving the tiny enthusiast segment with an opening big enough to accommodate everything from the Cadillac ATS to the Jaguar XE to the Alfa Romeo Giulia. There was even room for a front-wheeldrive sedan whose nickname, Four-Door Sports Car, has for decades been more of a marketing ploy than canyon-road reality. Fortunately, Nissan took the 4DSC trope well beyond image for the Maxima’s eighth generation. The 3 Series—which we compared with the Maxima SR in the March issue after no less a driver than pro racer Andy Pilgrim praised the Nissan during last year’s All-Stars evaluations—came…

BMW M760 i /VOLVO V90 CROSS COUNTRY PALM SPRINGS ,CALIFORNIA MONSTER BALL At first glance, the 2017 BMW M760i xDrive looks an awful lot like a standard 7 Series. But ogle a little closer, and you’ll notice some unusual bits: a snoutier nose, lower sills, a racier rear end, and on the rear pillars a little badge that says “V12.” That’s right, this thing has 12 cylinders. Salivary glands, engage! Answering a question nearly everyone has asked, the BMW M760i is at long last the application of M division wizardry to Bayerische Motoren Werke’s largest sedan platform. It’s not an all-out M car (no M7 badges, see), but it’s as close as we’re likely to get because, let’s face it, no one is buying a 7 as a track-day car…

The cars represent a half century of sport sedan development from an automaker you could argue invented the modern sport sedan. . At t the break of dawn, our posse drives into Randsburg, California, a mining town just southeast of Death Valley that time has almost forgotten. The few locals who remain turn to stare as tumbleweeds rustle in the distance. Cruising the dusty main street, we spot the firehouse down the road from the White House Saloon and the old General Store. The city jail sits at the far corner, and though the sheriff is nowhere to be seen, causing trouble is probably a bad idea. It feels like we’ve created our own spaghetti western right here in Randsburg. Clint Eastwood’s poncho-clad Man With No Name is notably absent,…

“It’s a good day to get lost out here,” Steve Dobrett says, his voice calm and comforting as it crackles over the radio. During his 24 years as the manager of New Mexico’s Ladder Ranch, he’s explored every inch of this 156,000-plus-acre property. As he guides us to one of his favorite spots at the ranch’s north end, his white Chevrolet Silverado bounces over rocks that we edge around in our Gotland Green Audi A4 Allroad. The wagon’s ground clearance is good, but it’s no truck. Gray rain clouds hang low, and thick fog obscures the rutted two-track, so we take it slow as we scan the horizon for bison. “Do you hear the music playing?” Dobrett jokes as we climb up and over a ridge and see some 200…

THE INFO MODEL YEARS: 1987-1993 I NUMBER SOLD: 790,804 I ORIGINAL PRICE: $12,106 I VALUE TODAY: $3,500 * *Hagerty insurance average value (www.hagerty.com) 1987-1993 FORD MUSTANG 5.0 aunched at the end of the late 1970s oil crisis, Ford’s “Fox Body” Mustang (underpinned by Ford’s Fox rear-drive platform) was meant to signal a return to the car’s musclebound 1960s roots. Instead, the third-generation Mustang started out as a wheezy attempt to revive the fortunes of the Blue Oval’s once great ponycar. L Fox Mustang production began in 1979, and the initial, underwhelming engine range included a version of Ford’s 2.3-liter inline-four cylinder making 88 horsepower carried over from the Mustang II. (Ford later added a more powerful turbo version of the 2.3.) A 3.3-liter straight-six with about as much juice as…

1960 Chevrolet Engineering Research Vehicle 1 Sold at $1,320,000 AUCTIONS | BARRETT-JACKSON, RUSSO AND STEELE | SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA THE STORY BEHIND THE SALE: S/N 2152 BLUE AND WHITE over blue and black interior. 377-cu-in, 400-hp (est), OHV V-8. 4-speed manual transmission. An older restoration showing some wear simply from age and display, rather than use. CERV 1 was the baby of Zora Arkus-Duntov, first Corvette chief engineer. a mid-engine, single-seat race car prototype similar appearance to the cars would come to dominate Formula 1 and Indy-car racing by the mid-1960s. the time, Chevrolet’s corporate policy was that did not race the cars it built, so CERV 1 served instead as a test bed for Arkus- Duntov’s developments. Styled by Larry Shinoda, CERV 1 is said to have been the primary…