Road & Track April/May 2022

Victor Wang WANG GREW UP in northern China and graduated with a BFA from Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, one of the top art institutes in China. He taught there for four years, then was sent to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a visiting scholar. In 1990, he earned his MFA at Fontbonne University in St. Louis, where he currently teaches. Wang has exhibited widely across the U.S. and internationally and has won awards for both painting and art instruction. His oil painting of a Toyota GR010 Hybrid at Le Mans graces this issue’s cover. Holly Anderson A veteran journalist, Anderson has covered college football for Sports Illustrated, reported from rattlesnake rodeos for ESPN’s Grantland, and contributed to the Golfer’s Journal, MTV, and more. She currently writes for Channel 6,…

Victor Wang WANG GREW UP in northern China and graduated with a BFA from Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, one of the top art institutes in China. He taught there for four years, then was sent to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a visiting scholar. In 1990, he earned his MFA at Fontbonne University in St. Louis, where he currently teaches. Wang has exhibited widely across the U.S. and internationally and has won awards for both painting and art instruction. His oil painting of a Toyota GR010 Hybrid at Le Mans graces this issue’s cover. Holly Anderson A veteran journalist, Anderson has covered college football for Sports Illustrated, reported from rattlesnake rodeos for ESPN’s Grantland, and contributed to the Golfer’s Journal, MTV, and more. She currently writes…

PEOPLE HAVE BEEN OBSESSED with darkness for as long as there have been people. Nighttime, both literal and metaphorical, is a theme spanning everything from classic horror cinema to nuclear Armageddon to naughty behavior to the darkest (pun intended) recesses of your mind. Stuff happens at night. Most important for the readers of Road & Track, the hours between dusk and dawn are when things get weird. Driving at night is not just a darker version of driving during the day. It means less traffic, which means higher speed. It’s after happy hour, which means more intoxication. Wild animals forage and hunt at night, which means more bolting deer and—God help you and your vehicle—galloping moose. Of course, darkness dramatically limits vision, which affects reaction time and, should something unexpectedly bad happen,…

THINK OF THE GREATEST designs in American automotive history. The 1949 “Shoebox” Ford. The ’57 Chevy. The ’64-½ Mustang. The suicide-door Lincoln Continental. The muscular Sting Ray and all its forebears. Every one of the Forward Look Chryslers that flowed from Virgil Exner’s pen. The gobsmacking Buick Riviera. The razor-sharp Eldorado. The jolie laide Avanti. These designs have practically nothing in common. You’d never mistake a Buick for a Lincoln, a Studebaker for a Chrysler. But take another look at those faces. They’re all arranged around a ubiquitous, generic piece of mandatory equipment: the circular sealed-beam headlamp. It was a regulatory necessity—and an unsung motivator that pushed designers to unparalleled creative heights. Starting in 1940, U.S. automakers agreed on the round seven-inch sealed-beam as the universal standard headlight. It made replacing a…

PHOTOGRAPH: HORST DIEKGERDES/TRUNK ARCHIVE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN OBSESSED with darkness for as long as there have been people. Nighttime, both literal and metaphorical, is a theme spanning everything from classic horror cinema to nuclear Armageddon to naughty behavior to the darkest (pun intended) recesses of your mind. Stuff happens at night. Most important for the readers of Road & Track, the hours between dusk and dawn are when things get weird. Driving at night is not just a darker version of driving during the day. It means less traffic, which means higher speed. It’s after happy hour, which means more intoxication. Wild animals forage and hunt at night, which means more bolting deer and—God help you and your vehicle—galloping moose. Of course, darkness dramatically limits vision, which affects reaction time and, should…

IT’S A SHADE FAMILIAR to BMW drivers who aimed their roundel at the dark horizon in the Eighties: the signature red-orange glow emanating from the instruments and buttons. What made those old BMW gauges seem perfectly attuned to night driving? Just ask the 19th-century Czech anatomist Johann Evangelist Purkinje, who was first to describe what became known as the Purkinje effect. Imagine the red-tinted war room in a nuclear sub or the glowing orange instruments in a dark airplane cockpit, and you’ll understand the Purkinje effect’s practical application. In near darkness, our vision thrives on that particular wavelength of light. Broadly speaking, your eyes have two types of receptors: Rod cells handle low-light environments, and cone cells process brighter light. That red-orange wavelength sits in a sweet spot, visible to your…