Table of contents for July 2017 in Road & Track

The racing, the cars, the heroes. Since 1947, Road & Track has been there for it all. The proof is in our archives, hundreds of nondescript manila folders stuffed with photographs, race reports, correspondence, and manuscripts. They provide a quiet reminder of mortality: Many of the files’ subjects, and the people who cataloged them, are no longer with us. But digging through the contents brings the past to life. Enzo Ferrari glares from a Kodachrome slide. The Lamborghini Miura’s performance screams through scribbled test notes. Here’s a glimpse at a handful of the relics collected over seven decades of celebrating speed. Jim Clark flips through the September 1963 issue at the Italian GP. THE RACING R&T was one of the first American publications to showcase the grandeur of European grand-prix racing,…

ROAD & TRACK has taught me a lot, but the first thing I remember it telling me was that Ayrton Senna was dead. Those quicksilver hands and that yellow helmet, the last fiery icon in Formula 1, snuffed at 34. It was 1994. I was 13, and I had never bought a car magazine. That first one I paid for had a $2.95 cover price and an August date. I still have the thing, though I don’t know why. All I know is that every time I try to throw it away, my arms freeze up. Senna died in May of that year. By August, when this magazine ran his obituary, I still had no clue he was gone. I barely knew he was alive to begin with. Our city…

IT’S LIKE AN ATHLETE WITH AN incredible figure wearing a sack.” That’s how McLaren design director Frank Stephenson described the MP4-12C (which had been designed almost entirely before he arrived in Woking) during a 2015 interview with Road & Track. In approaching its first supercar since the F1 with a race team’s focus, McLaren had made a crucial miscalculation. The 12C, when it debuted for 2012, lacked the one thing that you can’t put a number on: wow factor. A Band-Aid rebranding, as the 650S, for 2015 couldn’t fix that. The 720S, the 650S’s successor, does not want for wow. The 720S is as polarizing as the 12C was unimaginative, as innovative as its ancestor was predictable. Take the headlights: They cleverly, but controversially, borrow from the tuner world, using…

PRESCOTT THOMPSON, ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO You should have at least acknowledged that the Alfa outclassed the Merc and the BMW in every one of your objective performance categories (0–60, braking, top speed, etc.). ANTHONY PALLADINO RESTON, VIRGINIA Noted. But numbers aren’t everything. The Mercedes beat the Alfa in nearly every other facet. What bothered me was the whipping you gave the M3, a car with a $10,000 cheaper base price and down 60 hp. DOUG BAUER VERO BEACH, FLORIDA What’s with that tacky plastic plate on the Giulia’s grille? It’s like a wart on a beautiful woman’s face—I can’t help wincing when I see it. JIM JISTEL HOUSTON, TEXAS You will have to do a special article on the technique used for maximum acceleration in the Mercedes C63. Right foot…

IN JUNE 1946, scarcely a year after hostilities had ended in Europe, the tiny Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud hosted a grand prix. The cars ran on cobblestone roads through town, mostly out of necessity; gas was still rationed, so spectators would have been hard-pressed to drive to a track. One of the fastest cars, an Alfa Romeo Tipo 158, had survived the war hidden in a cheese factory while its driver, Jean-Pierre Wimille, was fighting in the French Resistance. The event is a footnote in grandprix history, but it demonstrated the hunger for racing after the war. Two American enthusiasts 3600 miles from Saint-Cloud shared that hunger. They featured the race on the cover of a new magazine called Road & Track. We’ve been paying close attention to the action…

IN 1987, ON A 15.5-MILE TEST OVAL in Ehra-Lessien, Germany, a 469-hp twin-turbo Porsche 911 went 211 mph. Only it wasn’t technically a Porsche—it did not wear a Stuttgart VIN and was known legally as a Ruf CTR. The car had been completed just one week before, in a small garage in the village of Pfaffenhausen, by a 37-year-old man born in the house next door. And for a brief, shining moment, it was the most potent production device this magazine had ever seen. A moment we made happen. The July 1987 issue of R&T holds a test called “The World’s Fastest Cars.” It was the second running of an experiment we first tried in 1984. The ’87 version includes nine exotics, from an Isdera Imperator 108i to a Lamborghini…

LEGEND For ENGINE TYPES, I is an inline design; H is a horizontally opposed, or flat, design. V, VR, and W describe cylinder configurations; the number following the letter is the number of cylinders. An additional letter, a “t” or an “s,” designates turbo- or supercharging; “tt” is twin turbo; “qt” is quad turbo; “d” designates diesel; “h” designates hybrid. “FC” designates fuel cell; “EV” designates an electric vehicle. RED BOX = leader in that category. 1estimated; 2electronically limited; 3automatic/automated transmission. ACCELERATION is measured with one foot of rollout subtracted. TOP SPEED is typically as reported by the manufacturer, but we occasionally measure or estimate it. BRAKING distances are measured from the beginning of pedal depression to a complete stop. ROADHOLDING is the average cornering grip measured around a full…