Road & Track August/September 2022

WHEN I WAS A COLLEGE KID, I worked as an apprentice in my school’s Buildings and Grounds garage. There, two mechanics named Robin and Spike maintained a decrepit fleet of Econolines and Chevy work vans just enough to ferry the plumbers, electricians, and carpenters around to class-room buildings and dorms. Robin and Spike rightfully had little trust in my ability to fix anything. I was limited to changing out alternators, flushing fluids, and greasing tractor chassis. It was a pleasant place to work. I loved cars and garages, and we could smoke inside. Spike was a wild young upstate New York shit-kicker who groomed a perfect mullet, drank cans of beer by the case, and had a cool side project that brought out the artisan in him. He was crew chief…

Cayce Clifford ORIGINALLY FROM NEW JERSEY, portrait and documentary photographer Clifford gradually moved west, spending time in the mountains of Utah before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. She travels often for work and recently collaborated on projects with Wired, the New York Times, and Time. For this issue, Clifford went to Reno, Nevada, to photograph Konrad Eriksen and his beautiful re-creation of a classic Ducati racing bike in his garage (page 076). Kate Francis Working under the banner Brown Bird Design, Francis, an illustrator in Austin, Texas, has been drawing for publications for 15 years. Originally a graphic designer and art director for Ready-Made and Martha Stewart Weddings magazines, she drew instructional how-tos and infographics to accompany stories. Francis endeavors to convey clarity with a touch of humor in her technical…

HERE’S WHAT HOPE LOOKS LIKE, wrought from carbon fiber. The Bisimoto 935 K3V has no internal-combustion heartbeat, but it’ll still quicken the pulse of the most hidebound enthusiast. This car sports a shape from Porsche’s late-Seventies Le Mans championship era, a curb weight under 2700 pounds, and 636 electric horsepower delivered with light-switch torque. The 935 K3V is a monster—and proof that creativity can thrive in a battery-powered future. Modern electric performance comes from the factory in a sealed box with a “Do not touch” sign. With the likes of a Porsche Taycan, how a machine performs is determined by how much you paid. Modifications are limited to changing the wheels and maybe applying a bumper sticker that reads “My other car has carburetors.” By contrast, the 935 K3V, created by Bisimoto…

JOE HARMON KNOWS about working with his hands. Starting in 2006, the industrial designer from North Carolina spent about 20,000 hours (think about that amount for a second) building “the world’s only wooden supercar,” as he calls it. He carved the Harmon Splinter out of maple, ash, birch, hickory, cherry, walnut, balsa, and oak. While a Corvette engine powers the car, he handcrafted the rest of the Splinter himself, down to the wooden spokes in the wheels and even a stately Harmon logo. Recently, I test-drove a Cadillac CT5-V Black-wing, which bore a plaque on its supercharged 6.2-liter V-8 that read “Handcrafted by Anthony Terry, Performance Build Center, USA.” There were no noticeable fingerprints on this hulking motor. Clearly, not one single component of this engine was actually built by hand.…

A 500-MPH CAR doesn’t run on willpower or good intentions. Nothing about it is standardized. It’s all hand-built, every element demon-tweaked and optimized. Compromise isn’t an option. Any screwup will be catastrophic. Faith motivates, but science guides decisions. And the scientist building the massively turbocharged 560-cid V-8 engine is 83-year-old Kenny Duttweiler. “We should get 3800 horsepower out of the big engine,” Duttweiler says with the enthusiasm of someone in thrall to his work. “So if the salt is right and the weather is good and the engine does everything it’s supposed to, the car should go 500 mph.” He rocks back in the beat-up chair behind the beat-up desk in his tiny beat-up shop office in a well-aged cinder-block building behind a sandwich shop in Saticoy, California. “I know that’s…

YOU DON’T NEED a garage to build your own car. You don’t even need a driver’s license. The first cars many of us work on are constructed by our own hands, courtesy of a kit with plastic blocks from Denmark. “We’re not just for kids seven- or eight-plus,” says Chris Stamp, the design manager for Lego’s Speed Champions, a series of kits that distill the form and spirit of our favorite enthusiast vehicles. “Anyone who’s got an inner child or anyone who ever had a poster of a vehicle on the bedroom wall or anyone who just likes cars, that’s who we appeal to.” Speed Champions are less complex and detailed than the Lego Technic sets, with their thousands of bricks. These smaller-scale models each have around 300 pieces. With Speed Champions,…