Table of contents for August/September 2022 in Road & Track

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…

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…

GUNNAR JEANNETTE has the best job in the world. He is, among other things, the go-to hot-shoe for the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida, home to one of the most valuable collections of vintage race cars on earth. Jeannette spends his workdays in the driver’s seat of some of the most heralded cars in existence, in wheel-to-wheel combat. Most days, these excursions go smoothly. But not on this one. It was five years ago at Porsche’s Rennsport Reunion at Laguna Seca. Jeannette was in a rare surviving 1966 Porsche 906 approaching a corner when another driver scraped his right side. A few seconds later, that same driver swatted him on the other side. By the time Jeannette made it back to pit lane, his 906 had a bent wheel and…

ALTHOUGH WE LIVE in uncertain times, life has never been easier. Tap your phone a few times and a hamburger or a car can arrive at your door. Open your favorite streaming service and a buffet of fresh movies appears as if conjured by Harry Potter himself. But computers don’t make those burgers, cars, or movies. People do. They still write scripts, aim cameras, build sets, rewrite scenes, pull out hairs, and create props. In the case of The Bat-man, the latest film in a media franchise that began as a comic in 1939, that prop is a car. The car. The Batmobile. The Batmobile is an iconic character with a shape that changes with each director. Adam West drove an open-air Barris creation; Michael Keaton, a turbine-powered slipstream that…

THE LAMBORGHINI-GREEN, six-wheeled Jeep TJ parked out front is something of a giveaway. Besides a few under-the-table auto shops and a door store, there’s little reason to end up in this industrial park outside Phoenix. Unless you know what’s behind Wesley Kagan’s garage door. There’s some distance between what it looks like and what it is. What the project looks like is an exoskeleton in the shape of a Sixties grand prix racer, a narrow-body open-wheeler inspired by Jim Clark’s Lotus 49. What it is, or once was, is a first-generation Porsche Boxster S. Continuing to call it a Boxster is either unsatisfactory or dishonest, given the scope of the transformation. The body, suspension, and interior all are unique, hand-built and designed by Kagan, 24. The powertrain was carried over to…

Modifying cars is codified into the history of America. The minute two cars pulled up next to each other at a dusty intersection in the Midwest, one of those coachmen decided his horseless carriage needed to be superior. Customizing is about expression and value. It’s about incremental spending and fine-tuning. It’s a David-and-Goliath story, like making your three-year-old Corvette accelerate as quickly as a $4 million Bugatti. And it’s not just decades—at this point, we’re talking a century of modifying. There’s a solid chance your great-grandfather was an early home-tuner. A hundred years ago, while the Gilded Age barons donned their leather helmets and raced their Mercers, Simplexes, and Bugattis, 15 million average folks were getting the itch for speed behind the wheel of a Ford Model T. A Model…

A. 1967 IGM-Ford Special T.1 Murray grew up in South Africa obsessed with motorsport. He wanted to race but couldn’t afford a car of his own, so he made one in his parents’ backyard. He took inspiration (as well as a nose and front fenders) from a Lotus Seven, but the car was otherwise all Murray’s work. He built the highly modified Ford-based engine in his bedroom. B. 1972 T.4 While at Brabham, Murray designed a 750 Formula club-racing car. It used an innovative rising-rate pullrod suspension, which Murray later adapted for the Brabham BT44. Recently, the T.4 was restored, giving Murray his first opportunity behind the wheel—nearly 50 years after it was built. C. 1972 Duckhams One of Murray’s first jobs in the U.K. was designing a Le Mans…

A. 240Z/260Z/280Z (1970–78) The Datsun 240Z arrived in the U.S. in late 1969 with intentions of challenging Europe’s sports-car dominance. The Z immediately captured enthusiast interest, thanks to its enduring styling, 151-hp 2.4-liter inline-six engine, disc brakes, and independent suspension. The 260Z debuted for 1974, and despite its larger 2.6-liter motor, emissions regulations strangled the car to just 139 hp stateside. The following year, the U.S.-only 280Z debuted with 170 hp, courtesy of Bosch fuel injection. B. 280ZX (1979–83) The 280ZX was always intended to be a more luxurious GT than the 280Z it replaced. The new Datsun retained the same 2.8-liter engine and five-speed gearbox as its predecessor, but everything else was new, including the optional two-plus-two layout. While enthusiasts lamented the softening of the Z, it proved wildly…

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…

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…

LOTUS FOUND ITSELF at a crossroads in the mid-Nineties. It had pinned its hopes on the GM-bankrolled second-generation Elan, but the roadster was a flop, canceled after only a few thousand sold. With its product portfolio down to one model, the aging Esprit, Lotus needed to produce something new and inexpensive. The company’s survival depended on it. A team led by engineer Richard Rackham and designer Julian Thomson came up with the idea of making a back-to-basics car with a mid-engine chassis constructed by bonding aluminum extrusions. No one had glued a car together before, and while it seemed like a huge risk, it made perfect sense. Lotus Engineering had built a few bonded-aluminum prototype vehicles for Land Rover, so it had experience with the technology. “It gave you a…

“WHY BUILD A BIKE FROM SCRATCH THAT YOU CAN BUY AND RESTORE? HE WANTED TO BUILD A REPLICA OF A MOTORCYCLE THAT ALL HIS BUDDIES WOULD NEVER HAVE A CHANCE TO SEE.” KONRAD ERIKSEN WAS HAVINGthe time of his life. Leaning into Turn 10 at Thunderhill Raceway Park in Northern California, he eased onto his motorcycle’s throttle. It was a bluebird day in the spring of 2020. The 650 twin-cylinder launched him forward on a hot lap. He hand-built this 1982 Ducati TT2 replica in his garage and had shaken it down in his suburban neighborhood, but this was his first day on track. Talk about earning your turns; it took Eriksen three years to build this motorcycle. His eyes focused in on Turn 11. But dark smoke was fuming off…

IMMEDI-ATELY YOU CAN SENSE SOMETHING IS OFF. The vehicle in front of you has the face of an Eighties K5 Chevy Blazer, but the bow-tie badge is missing and the proportions are all wrong. That Blazer was never this small, and neither was it a four-door hatchback. The vibe is friendly and familiar, yet at the same time this is something dredged out of the uncanny valley. From Toyama city, 250 miles northwest of Tokyo, comes the Mitsuoka Buddy, the latest from the most unlikely defender of Japan’s coachbuilding heritage. Hand-built automobiles are usually expensive, European, and exclusive. The Buddy is mostly the last of these. Essentially the spirit of a big-body, old-school SUV grafted onto a Toyota RAV4, the Buddy starts at $45,000 for the entry-level model and is…

Brock Racing Enterprises, Bob Sharp, Paul Newman, East African Safari Rally—Nissan’s Z-car has seen plenty of racing glory. Yet the 1994 24 Hours of Daytona was the greatest Z-car day of all. Cunningham Racing’s 300ZX Turbos were five years into their competitive lives as the ’94 season began. That year was also the first for IMSA’s new top class, the World Sports Car prototypes, but the GTS cars like the Nissans were fully developed. So Kiwi driver Steve Millen qualified the No. 75 300ZX on the pole, with its sister 300ZX Turbo, No. 76, alongside it. No. 75 sped to the lead and held it with No. 76 comfortably in second. “The 75 gave us the best chance of winning, but we had also set up the 76 for me…

EVER WONDER HOW real racers find that brake point? The best can push it by a hundredth of a second or even a thousandth. I’ve asked a few how they do it, and the answers vary. But the truth is, finding that precise brake point is as impossible to describe as entropy or string theory. The driver knows how much aero and grip his race car has and what angle and condition the tarmac is affording him. Then, and only then, the Chief Commander in the Sky tells the driver’s brain to tell his toe to press the brake now. The Chief Commander in the Sky has no such discussions with me. And my sense of grip in a car is as rudimentary as just about any automotive journalist’s. 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…

WHEN ASTON MARTIN’S Q division unveiled its one-off coachbuilt Victor supercar at England’s Hampton Court Concours of Elegance in the fall of 2020, the internet released a collective tongue lolling worthy of a bawdy cartoon wolf. Built using the leftover engine and monocoque from a prototype of the marque’s limited-edition One-77 supercoupe, this gorgeous menace featured an uprated version of that car’s howling naturally aspirated V-12—now making 848 hp—and a proper six-speed manual transmission instead of a six-speed paddle-shift automatic. It also hosted custom carbon-fiber bodywork that paid homage to the venerable British brand’s Seventies oeuvre, specifically the DBS V8–based race car nicknamed “The Muncher.” On the cusp of Gaydon’s move into the ultraluxury mainstream with the DBX SUV, the One-77, retro but not slavishly so, felt like an exquisite…

DAVE EATON HAD LUSTED after a Porsche 917 since he saw Pedro Rodríguez win at Brands Hatch in 1970. Taken with the shape, noise, and general 917-ness of the thing, the automotive design engineer living in a small town in Essex, U.K., decided he’d own one someday. Huge prices made that unlikely, so Eaton busied himself with other exotics. Those exotics led him to specialist engineer John Hartland, who sold him an Alfa Romeo Montreal in 1989. “It went like shit off a shovel,” Eaton remembers fondly. The pair became friends when Eaton saw Lamborghini engines in Hartland’s workshop. “I said, ‘I’ve got an Espada,’ and John asked which one, so I said, ‘Well… it’s complete, but the engine’s in bits.’ And that’s when he called me an idiot.” Working on…

For automotive weirdness, it’s hard to top a sports car named for Julie Andrews by an executive obsessed with a Broadway musical. But the Nissan Z survived the Japan-market Fairlady Z moniker the company president gave it, even if the name was too silly for the American drivers the car was created for. The Datsun 240Z debuted in New York on October 22, 1969. Unveilings in L.A. and Tokyo soon followed. Since then, more than 1.5 million people have bought a fun, affordable, and, yes, fair Z. It began with a two-seat hardtop that stickered for $3,626, $300 more than the Datsun’s logical competitor, Britain’s MGB GT, according to Pete Evanow’s Nissan Z: 50 Years of Exhilarating Performance. The term “game changer” has devolved into cliché, but the 240Z was…

I REMEMBER STUMBLING upon the original Porsche 911 Sport Classic on a near-deserted stand at the stifling 2009 Frankfurt Motor Show. I shrugged at it as I shuffled past, jet-lagged, hungover, and sweating a worrying amount. My judgment, in that moment, might not have been entirely sound. But even after resting, hydrating, and returning to a country with functioning air-conditioning, I still didn’t really get the Sport Classic. It wore a ducktail spoiler on its engine lid and black Fuchs-style wheels at each corner. I assumed that the show car must be some sort of rolling advertisement for a line of retro-tinged accessories that the company would begin selling. Wrong. Porsche planned to build 250 examples of this tarted-up 997-generation Carrera S and price each at $225,000 (in today’s dollars).…