Road & Track December/January 2022

Huseyin Erturk Introduced to the car world at a young age by his father, Erturk would later move to Los Angeles, where the city’s vast automotive culture stoked his passion. Influenced by masters such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, he started photographing interesting cars he found on the street, aiming to capture not only their beauty but also their unique character. Now he gets to take photographs for carmakers and publications around the world. Jim Hatch Growing up in New Jersey, Hatch loved drawing and motorcycles, passions that became a vocation. He earned a BFA in illustration and eventually joined the team that conceptualized and built the Petersen Automotive Museum in L.A. He stayed there for six years as founding exhibit designer and art director. In 1998, he opened…

WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS, the modern V-6 engine inspires ambivalence at best. Yet a strange thing happened this year: Maserati, Ferrari, and McLaren introduced new 3.0-liter V-6s worthy of excitement. Maserati has a long history with V-6s, launching its first in 1971 and then using the Biturbo V-6 to power much of its Eighties lineup. For its new MC20 supercar, Maserati created an engine called the Nettuno (Italian for Neptune), a twin-turbo unit making 621 hp and 538 lb-ft of torque. The Nettuno has some commonalities with Alfa Romeo’s V-6—itself derived from Ferrari’s V-8—but it also brings fascinating technology to the fore, notably a passive prechamber ignition system. Derived from Formula 1 tech, the system uses a small separate combustion chamber (with its own spark plug) above the main combustion chamber. Matteo Valentini,…

COURTESY OF GENERAL MOTORS THERE WAS AN INTERNAL rallying cry and credo heard on the walkways of the Facebook campus in the early 21st century: “Move fast and break things.” Mark Zuckerberg’s intention was to encourage risk for the sake of innovation and not get caught up in making the perfect product at a time when no one really knew what the product would be. Tesla has become a mighty player on the world stage, but it embraced Facebook’s “Move fast and break things” ethos a little too tightly. It’s a testament to the people actually building Teslas that the brand didn’t collapse under the ego of its current CEO. For a variety of very important reasons, the law-abiding leaders of the heavily regulated auto industry can’t—and probably shouldn’t—move so…

IMAGINE THE COOLEST gearhead bar on the planet, where the most powerful and brilliant minds in the auto industry gather to talk shop and get smashed. Elon Musk would sip chilled Beefeater and discuss the evolution of EV charging infrastructure with Mary Barra. The Ford Performance executive team would roll out blueprints of the next GT race car, the paper stained with rings from shot glasses. It would be more than a bar; it would be a laboratory of automotive innovation where the future of mobility would take shape. Many years ago, at the dawn of the automotive age, that very bar existed in the Hotel Pontchartrain, at the corner of Cadillac Square and Woodward Avenue in Detroit. In the early 20th century, when the industry was just getting off the…

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF MASERATI AND FERRARI WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS, the modern V-6 engine inspires ambivalence at best. Yet a strange thing happened this year: Maserati, Ferrari, and McLaren introduced new 3.0-liter V-6s worthy of excitement. Maserati has a long history with V-6s, launching its first in 1971 and then using the Biturbo V-6 to power much of its Eighties lineup. For its new MC20 supercar, Maserati created an engine called the Nettuno (Italian for Neptune), a twin-turbo unit making 621 hp and 538 lb-ft of torque. The Nettuno has some commonalities with Alfa Romeo’s V-6—itself derived from Ferrari’s V-8—but it also brings fascinating technology to the fore, notably a passive prechamber ignition system. Derived from Formula 1 tech, the system uses a small separate combustion chamber (with its own spark…

MARCHIONNE: MARK THOMPSON/GETTY IMAGES; MULALLY: SLAVEN VLASIC/FILMMAGIC/GETTY IMAGES; MUSK: MAJA HITIJ/GETTY IMAGES; DE NYSSCHEN: EARL GIBSON III/GETTY IMAGES, PIËCH: SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES; PALMER: TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; WINKELMANN: MARK SULLIVAN/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES…