The Mate’s Rear Wing: What Works and What’s Just Expensive Sticker (AeroNEC · 5) You know the car. Hatchback, lowered, and a rear wing the size of a picnic table bolted to the bootlid, tall enough to serve tea on. Top Gear built a whole comedy strand out of cars like it. And the question … Read more
Ground Effect: The Dirty Trick F1 Had to Ban (AeroNEC · 3) In a wind tunnel in the mid-1970s, a team from Lotus watched something that shouldn’t happen. The tunnel’s moving floor — the belt meant to simulate a road rushing past — peeled up off its rollers and stuck itself to the underside of … Read more
How to Glue a Car to the Ceiling: Downforce Explained (AeroNEC · 2) Remember the bit in Men in Black where Agent K flips the Crown Vic onto the roof of the Queens-Midtown tunnel and just keeps driving, upside down, lights flashing? Sci-fi nonsense, obviously. Except the physics underneath the gag is real, and a … Read more
The Wall You Can’t See: Why Your Car Won’t Go Any Faster (AeroNEC · 1) There’s a moment in the old Top Gear Veyron film where James May, flat out at Ehra-Lessien, tries to explain what it actually takes to push a car past 400 km/h. The numbers stop making sense. The engine is drinking … Read more
The Italian Who Walked Away From Henry Ford Detroit, 1920. The Rouge plant was still being built but Highland Park was already running flat out, churning out Model Ts at a pace nobody in Europe could match. Henry Ford himself sat down with a 27-year-old visitor from Turin and offered him a job. Stay in … Read more
Vision EQXX: Everyone bragged about horsepower. Mercedes drove 750 miles on 201 and won There are two ways to impress someone with a car. The easy way and the hard way. The easy way is big numbers. A thousand horsepower, two thousand, nought to sixty in under two seconds — figures that fit in a … Read more
Heriberto Pronello: The Argentine Who Built Ground Effect Before Lotus Did In July 2023, the Brooklands Paddock at the Goodwood Festival of Speed put a 1969 Argentine sports prototype on display alongside two Ferrari 250 GTOs, Jackie Stewart’s Tyrrell, Carlos Reutemann’s Brabham, and the six-wheeled Williams that never raced. The crowd voted it “new favourite … Read more
Jim Hall: the Texan who understood the air while everyone else stared at the engine If you walk into the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum in Midland, Texas, you’ll find oil derricks, rock samples and a hall full of dinosaurs. You’ll also find, almost by accident, the most important collection of racing cars built in America. … Read more
FRANCO SCAGLIONE — THE GENIUS ITALY CHOSE TO FORGET There’s a letter Nuccio Bertone wrote on May 19, 1993. It reads: “I remember with great emotion your contribution to our project. I remember your sharpness in the shape of futuristic cars. I also remember our fierce discussions looking for excellence. Your passion and knowledge of … Read more
