Road & Track June/July 2022

John Vincent Aranda GROWING UP IN SAN DIEGO, Aranda was fascinated by pop culture of the past, and he surrounded himself with comic books, cartoons, and video games. All of these have informed his work as a collage artist. His projects run the gamut from site-specific artwork for hotels and restaurants to editorial illustration for outlets like The Cut, Vulture, and BuzzFeed News. Aranda studied at Camberwell College of Arts and Central Saint Martins in London and now resides on the moon. Since 2020, he has illustrated Road & Track’s Dept. of Overthinking column (page 012). Benjamin Rasmussen Rasmussen spent his childhood in the southern Philippines, his college years in a small town in northern Arkansas, and a year in the Faroe Islands with descendants of Vikings. For 10 years, the photographer drove…

PUTTING TOGETHER A MAGAZINE issue about travel is not as simple as you might believe. Sure, it’s not difficult to put together a clichéd travel magazine. There are strict conventions about what can go on the cover (a washed-out overhead shot of an anchored yacht in an aquamarine harbor, a happy couple splashing off the transom), and the stories dive deep into what we in the business call “service journalism”—we went here and ate this to make it easier for you to go here and eat this too. This issue, Vol. 11, is our second travel-oriented Road & Track, and this time we decided to explore the broad notion of Escape. I put it to our very able staff to come equipped with ideas that look at this intriguing concept in…

ONE OF THE GREATEST escapes is in your hands, literally, right now. Life is full of obligations, compromises, conflicts, and inevitabilities. Stuff you don’t want to do, you hate doing, you regret choosing, and to which you must resign yourself. The oppressive burden of living. To escape it, there are cars. “We act as though comfort and luxury are the chief requirements of life,” goes an aphorism that’s been attributed to numerous notable people through the years, “when all we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” Whether it was Charles Kingsley, Albert Einstein, or some 19th-century Methodist pamphleteer who said it doesn’t matter. Because that person is wrong. Enthusiasm is a comfort and a luxury, not an alternative to them. And the magazine you’re reading right now is…

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE humanity’s capacity for good or evil. Case in point: the lives of John Dillinger and Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde), two of the most infamous robber-slayers of the “public enemy” era in the early Thirties. In their time, Dillinger and Barrow were romanticized and reviled as they traveled the country, leaving behind a trail of death and carnage. Dig into their stories and you find two things ever-present: guns and getaway cars. Specifically, Ford V-8s. In fact, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow died in a maelstrom of bullets while in the front seats of a 1934 Ford V-8. Their “death car” now sits on exhibition at Primm Valley Resort & Casino in Nevada. In the Ford archives, two of the most controversial documents remain letters from Dillinger and…

“I BOUGHT IT JUST when COVID hit,” explains David Green. “It became my pandemic project.” The project’s three-two downshift is a bit rough. The gearbox is one of the few things Green didn’t rebuild, and everything but the paint was done in one shop. But otherwise, it’s a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle restored to showroom-new condition. Well, better than new, with modern sound deadening, body panels that have been tailored to fit snugly, and perfect single-stage Zenith blue paint so deep, there ought to be a coral reef underneath it—all beyond 20th-century production standards. Green, a semiretired real-estate developer, shares a shop in Santa Barbara, California, with Jack Bianchi. After a career racing and fixing Ferraris, now Bianchi plays with old Indy cars. Until recently, Green’s obsessions were mostly Porsche 356s; he refreshed…

SILLY-OPENING DOORS are the price of entry in the supercar market. See: McLaren’s dihedral “butterfly doors,” Lamborghini’s “Lambo doors,” and Koenigsegg’s “whatever-he-calls-those-doors doors.” The lure is inescapable. The issue is that in certain circumstances, crazy doors can make a car inescapable too. As in, how do I open a whimsical door if I’ve crashed and am upside down? This was precisely the thinking around Stuttgart in the mid-Aughts as Mercedes-Benz designed its SLS AMG supercar. Coming on the heels of the borderline-gaudy Mercedes SLR McLaren, the SLS would have a design that was more tasteful, more Mercedes. Naturally, it would also have top-hinged gullwing doors, the most famous silly supercar doors and the ones most closely associated with the three-pointed star. Mercedes had last used the gullwing doors on a production car…