Car and Driver Sep-15

Sic your dogs on us at: editors@caranddriver.com or join the discussion at: backfires.caranddriver.com WRAPPING PAPER So was I the only person anal enough to notice that you had the same car on the front and back covers of the June issue? SAL GENEVA, ILLINOIS The only person? Yes. The only cat? No—Ed. CALLING 911 You guys must drive your cars hard. You got 13 mpg in your Porsche 911 Carrera GTS on a 275-mile trip [“The Imitation Game,” June 2015]. I live on the Oregon coast and drive in to Portland once a week. I can’t go very fast because there are too many deer and elk wandering around, but I have found that even going over a 1600-foot pass and averaging 60 mph, I get 28 mpg in my 2013 911 Carrera S. On a…

WHY METRO AREAS? The population of a core city rarely represents a region’s full population. A metropolitan area generally consists of one large city and several smaller ones. Detroit’s population is about 675,000. The metro area holds 4.3 million. YOU’RE READING THIS magazine, so you probably enjoy driving. But how much of it? If nearly all your time behind the wheel is spent commuting, likely not much. Sure, you could get out of town and experience the joy of an open, twisty road, but how often do you actually do that? If you have a fun car but answered “not often,” where you live might be the problem. Some of us are closer to good driving roads than others. Some of us enjoy more good weather than others. Then there’s traffic. If you…

FINE ART NHTSA fined automakers more than $126 million last year, surpassing the agency’s 43-year total. Here are the top five civil penalties issued by the safety agency in 2014: JUST AS THE NATIONAL HIGHWAY Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was about to close the books on 2014, a year in which a record number of cars were recalled, it underwent a change in leadership. On December 22, Mark R. Rosekind, a former NASA researcher and member of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), was sworn in as administrator. The GM ignition-switch-defect investigation cast doubt on NHTSA’s ability to police the industry, and Rosekind’s tenure has so far been dominated by the Takata airbag recall, which has ballooned to become the largest consumer-product safety action in history. It’s no wonder then that the…

ANVIL ON WHEELS The Army’s newest four-seat, turtle-back, armored HMMWV, the M1151A1 UAH, carries its center of gravity more than three feet off the ground and, when rigged for an airdrop, weighs 14,160 pounds. CHUTES TO THRILL The aircraft tows a small, 15-foot drogue chute for 5 to 10 seconds before the navigator gives the green light to drop the cargo. At that point, the loadmaster releases the drogue, the sole purpose of which is to pull out the larger, 22-foot extraction chute. The drag on the extraction chute unlocks the platform from the aircraft’s cargo rails and yanks it out of the C-130 at 0.93 g. SKYFALL The military performs heavy airdrops from both C-17 and C-130 transports. A C-130 drops cargo at an airspeed of 140 knots (161 mph) while flying at least…

NASCAR IS THE red, white, and bluest form of racing there is. But the very heart of most NASCAR stockers is born at Grainger & Worrall, a family-owned company in the British West Midlands town of Telford, Shropshire. Every Chevrolet and Ford starting the Daytona 500 this year ran a block cast by Grainger & Worrall. As does every Chevy, Dodge, and Ford facing off in NHRA Pro Stock drag racing. Confidentiality agreements keep G&W from saying what, exactly, it casts for Formula 1 racers, but several teams are customers, including the dominant Mercedes-AMG Petronas. G&W also supplies castings to teams in WRC, Le Mans, and FIA Touring Car racing. Yet, somehow, the company is so off the radar that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page—at least not yet. ARTHURIAN…

My father was fond of punishing inanimate objects. He owned a pair of loafers with metal buckles, and when the buckles chafed his feet, he grabbed a claw hammer and reduced the offending metal to brass parings, resting occasionally to fling the shards down the basement stairs. With each fling, a bad word was involved, but when he finished the job he smiled and handed me the Columbus Dispatch to show me a particularly colorful Formula 1 race report. I also recall a metal recirculating fan that blew air only when it wasn’t pointing at my father. The fan landed maybe 70 feet in our front yard, exploding in a grassy shower of blades and sheared electrical wire. It looked like a hang glider had crashed there. When our lawn-mowing guy…