Blog Posts

Ex-Ferrari Engineers Are Building a Carbon Fiber Two-Stroke Superbike

1/31/2018

When it comes to packing big power in a small package, it's hard to beat a two-stroke engine. Dirty emissions have largely sidelined the two-stroke in modern machines, but a newly-founded motorcycle company hopes to bring it back in an ultra-lightweight bike available in street and track variants.
The Vins Duecinquanta is a carbon-fiber monocoque bike packing a 249cc V-twin two-stroke with electronic fuel injection. With an eye on extreme lightness, the street bike promises a curb weight of less than 210 lbs. No power figure is given, but with such a featherweight bike, it's almost guaranteed to be quick.
If that's not extreme enough for you, Vins also plans to introduce a Duecinquanta Competizione, a track-only variant cranking out more than 80 horses and weighing less than 190 lbs. Top speed is targeted at 150 mph.

Vins, based in Maranello, Italy, is the brainchild of a team of five who met each other while working at Ferrari in design and engineering. Their first prototype bike, the 100cc Powerlight, was introduced in Milan a few years ago sporting a carbon fiber monocoque.
While it's unclear whether Vins can get a two-stroke engine past European emissions regulations, the idea of a superlight two-stroke bike is extremely intriguing to us. Even at prices that, frankly, put it well out of our reach: $48,000 for the street bike, more than $60,000 for the track model.

HERE’S WHAT IT’S LIKE TO FIND $8 MILLION WORTH OF CARS IN A RANDOM GARAGE

1/31/2018

We hear about barn finds all the time, but rarely do we catch wind of a find as wild as this. Hagerty’s Barn Find Hunter video series was fortunate enough to discover not one, but two seven-figure 1960s classics hidden inside a neglected garage in North Carolina, untouched for almost 30 years.
In the video, host Tom Cotter stumbles upon a collection of abandoned cars scattered amongst aging garden tools and lawnmowers. There seem to be five cars in total; an E30-generation BMW 3-Series, a Morgan, a Triumph, and—wait for it—an all original Shelby Cobra 427 plus a Ferrari 275 GTB alloy long-nose. Talk about a find.

The cars, covered in dust from sitting since 1991, were parked by the current owner after his trusted mechanic died in a motorcycle accident. Instead of looking for a new mechanic to keep them running, he simply stopped driving them.
Every car inside the garage looks to be in impeccable condition, save for a few rats nests. We’re sure with a change of fluids, some new tires, and a nice detail, they’ll be in top shape.
Original versions of both the Shelby and the Ferrari routinely go for several million dollars at auction, and judging by the originality of this pair, it’s no question they’ll demand big dollars should they cross the auction block.

The Chevy Corvette ZR1 Just Smashed the Ford GT's VIR Lap Record

1/31/2018

Just last week we told you a Ford GT set a new lap record for production cars around Virginia International Raceway's Grand Course West layout. Now, that record has been broken by the new Corvette ZR1.
Chevrolet announced today it was able to lap a 2019 ZR1 equipped with the optional eight-speed auto and ZTK performance package around VIR in 2:37.25. That's 1.37 seconds quicker than the Ford GT's time, making the ZR1 the fastest production vehicle to ever lap the course.
Aside from a harness bar and five-point harnesses, Chevy says the ZR1 used was totally stock, set up with alignment and aero settings specified in the owner's manual. The $2,995 ZTK package gives the car a whole bunch of aggressive features, including an adjustable carbon fiber wing, a front splitter, Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires, and track-ready magnetic ride control. The lap was set during validation testing earlier in January leading up to the car's production.
The driver, vehicle dynamics engineer Jim Mero, is known for his mastery of the Nurburgring behind the wheel of Chevy products. If anyone was going to break the record, it would be him. Chevy was keen to note that Mero is an engineer, not a pro-driver, which was definitely a dig at Ford, which set the record using Ford GT race driver Billy Johnson.
Also, like Ford, Chevy claims it wasn't going for a record, rather the time was set during validation testing for the ZR1. What's next? Dodge takes a Viper ACR, sets a new record, and then claims they didn't intend to set the record because a child was driving it, it was stuck in third gear the whole time, and the kid parked it near where the oak tree was for a brief picnic. It could happen. Probably? Maybe?
Chevy released a video of the entire lap, which you can watch right here.

Perhaps the most impressive part of this ordeal isn't the ZR1's lap, but rather a lap set by the Chevy team earlier in a manual-transmission Corvette Z06. They were able to lap the car around VIR's Grand Course West in 2:39.77—a little more than a second slower than the Ford GT. Not bad for being a quarter of the price.

That Time the Luftwaffe Experimented with a Rocket-Launched F-104G Starfighter

1/18/2018

Almost every aviation enthusiast has probably seen the famous test videos of a North American F-100 Super Saber being launched from a portable trailer using a large rocket booster.
The origin of “Zero Length Launch”, often called “ZeLL”, was the perceived necessity that aircraft would need to be boosted into flight after available airfields and runways in Europe were destroyed in a nuclear attack. Using motor vehicle highways as improvised runways, often practiced by NATO and former Warsaw Pact air forces, may not have worked as well since the aircraft would be more vulnerable to air attack. With the Zero Length Launch concept, aircraft could actually be boosted into flight using a disposable rocket booster from inside a hardened aircraft shelter, presuming no one else like hapless ground crew were inside the shelter at the time of launch.
“ZeLL” was an interesting, if ultimately impractical, concept. It could be argued that the “ZeLL” concept somehow validated the need for V/STOL (Vertical/Short Take Off and Landing) aircraft such as the Harrier and, decades later, even the F-35B Lightning II.
What many aviation history buffs don’t know is that the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, experimented with a Zero Launch System on their F-104 Starfighters. The concept made more sense with the F-104 Starfighter, an aircraft conceived almost purely as an interceptor.
Rocketing the F-104 into flight as a sort of “manned missile”, the interceptor would rapidly climb to altitude and engage an approaching bomber formation says Nathan Finneman. The Starfighter was a suitable candidate for ZeLL launch operations since it began setting altitude records as early as May, 1958, when USAF test pilot Major Howard C. “Scrappy” Johnson zoom-climbed to an astonishing altitude Record of 27,811m (91,243 feet, or 17.2 miles high) from a conventional take-off.
Interestingly, Germany had tested a rocket-powered, vertical launch interceptor during WWII called the “Bachem Ba-349 Natter”. The aircraft would be fired from a launch tower, fly to the allied bomber formations using rocket boosters and engage them with unguided high velocity aircraft rockets (HVARs) mounted in the nose. If all went according to design, the aircraft and pilot would then recover to earth using separate parachutes. The concept did not do well for the Germans in WWII, with the only manned test flight ending in disaster and the death of Luftwaffe test pilot Lothar Sieber.
Apparently undaunted by their WWII experiences with the Ba-349, the modern Luftwaffe working in collaboration with the U.S. Air Force, used a single F-104G Starfighter to test the ZeLL concept in 1963. Oddly enough, the German F-104G version of the Starfighter was a multi-role aircraft evolved from the original pure interceptor design mandate of the F-104.
Unlike its early, distant predecessor the Ba-349, the Luftwaffe F-104G Starfighter ZeLL launch tests went well. Lockheed company test pilot Eldon “Ed” W. Brown Jr. remarked after the first of eight ZeLL take-offs at Edwards AFB in California during 1963 that, “All I did was push the rocket booster button and sit back. The plane was on its own for the first few seconds and then I took over. I was surprised at the smoothness, even smoother than a steam catapult launch from an aircraft carrier.”

tags: breed of speed , f104 starfighter , missle man , rocket launch, luftwaffe , nathan finneman , aviation , cold war

Your grandparents Generation was Cooler than you think.

1/17/2018

Heres a short film pretty much summing up a race with skiers being pulled behind vintage porsche 550 spyder and 356 coupes. Legendary to say the least.

Survive the Drive: Blacksmiths dad hired a helicopter to find his missing son after crash

1/17/2018

TONY Lethbridge couldn't sleep.
It was early Monday morning and his 17-year-old son Samuel was missing.
It had been almost 24 hours since anyone had heard from him.
It was out of character and his family feared the worst.
A few hours earlier, after a series of unanswered calls to Samuel's mobile, Tony and his wife, Lee, had left Canberra and driven home to search for their boy.
“We got back into Newcastle about 1.30am [Monday morning] and went straight to the police station,” Tony said.
“They told us that he might have ran away, he could have done this or he could have done that and we just said it’s out of character; it’s not him.
“They put all the things in motion, and we waited and waited. They just told us to go home and wait.

But Tony could not wait - “I just couldn’t get it out of my head that he’d crashed somewhere.”
Samuel had been driving back from the Central Coast around 6.30am on Sunday. He had messaged his girlfriend and arranged to meet her at the family home at Blacksmiths after she finished work around lunchtime.
He never arrived.
As Tony's mind raced, he recalled an accident from a few years earlier along the same stretch of the Pacific Highway that he believed Samuel would have been driving on. That driver wasn't found for five days.
“And he’d passed away," Tony said. “That was in my head, so i just thought bugger this I’m not going to sit around and wait.
“With the way the bush is there, if a car goes in your not going to see it. The only way you’ll see it is from the air. And that’s what we did.
“I thought, I’m going to get a helicopter no matter what.
I just rocked in there and said ‘Mate, I’ve got $1000 – I need you to search as much as you can’.
Tony LethbridgeWith the cash in his hand, Tony walked into the Lake Macquarie Airport at 9am. On the dot.
Lee Mitchell, of Skyline Aviation Group, said the man looked "anxious and fatigued".
“He asked if he could, no - he said, he ‘needed a helicopter bad’,” said Mr Mitchell, a helicopter pilot with 18 years' flying experience.
“He told us it was for his missing son and said he believed his son had run off the road somewhere.”
The company had cancelled training flights for that morning because of high winds whipping the Hunter Region but it immediately agreed to start the search.
As Tony - who struggles with flying - drove off to go and pick up his brother, the flight crew readied the helicopter.

Tony’s brother, Michael took the flight while Tony and Lee waited for news from the family home at Blacksmiths. It didn't take long.
Within 10 minutes, they received news that a car fitting the description of Samuel’s vehicle had been spotted just off the Pacific Highway near Crangan Bay.
Immediately, Tony began the frantic drive out to the site.
The car was buried in deep bushland, and it was unclear from the helicopter if there was anyone inside.
The chopper put Samuel’s uncle Michael on the ground near the former big prawn service station.
As Michael made the grim approach to the crash site, the pilot hovered above to provide a reference for Tony and emergency services.
Fearing what he might find when he arrived, Michael began to call Samuel’s name as began the 50m walk down to the accident site.
There was no response.
But then Michael spotted Samuel moving his head inside the wreck. At that point, he sent a text message to his brother – “He’s alive”.
“When I got there, I ran down there and it was just jubilation,” Tony said.
“It was unbelievable, to find him there.”
Trapped in his vehicle for what was nearing 30 hours, Samuel was dehydrated and suffering serious injuries. A broken thigh bone was protruding three inches through the skin.
“You wouldn’t have seen him if it wasn’t for the helicopter, because I couldn’t see him from the road,” Tony said.
If the helicopter wasn’t hovering above, I would have never had found him.
Tony LethbridgeTony said it was likely the car was travelling around “80 kmh” when it ran off the road and had been totally destroyed. It’s believed the car hit a concrete pole – which ripped the driver’s side door off – and spun, rolled and luckily, landed on its wheels.
Emergency services arrived on the scene and had to cut the vehicle open to pull Samuel from the wreckage.
Stable and in intensive care on Tuesday afternoon, Samuel had undergone several scans since arriving at John Hunter Hospital
With a broken arm, dislocated elbow and little fractures “here and there” according to his dad, it is expected his recovery will be a long process. Surgery on Wednesday on his arm and leg should heal the most immediate problems.
Samuel was described by his dad as a “good, tough and very fit kid” who plays for Belmont-Swansea Football Club in the NewFM under-19’s soccer competition.
The 17-year-old had only started an electrical apprenticeship on Friday with Nova Electrical. That will now have to be put on hold.
“He spoke to me when I got down to the car, I grabbed him and I said: ‘Mate, dad’s got you’.”
Samuel’s first words to his father were: “I’d love a drink”.
“They were the only words he spoke,” Tony recalled.

Steve McQueen’s “Lost” Bullitt Mustang Is Finally Found.

1/16/2018

In 1968, as his celebrity was cresting, Steve McQueen produced and starred in Bullitt. He had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor the year before for his dramatic role in The Sand Pebbles. But in the crime thriller, he played a tough San Francisco police detective, Frank Bullitt, who was battling a mob boss. The movie was moody and noir-ish, and a well-reviewed box-office hit.
But despite all of this—and co-stars Robert Vaughn, Robert Duvall, and Jacqueline Bisset--Bullitt is recalled today mainly for its car chase, a 10-minute masterpiece shot in and around San Francisco, and completed in a souped-up, Highland Green, 1968 Ford Mustang fastback (and a 1968 Dodge Charger). The scene helped the movie win the Oscar that year for film editing. Full-size replicas and best-selling toys were made of the car, and are still made today. So long is its shadow that Ford has even produced limited-edition versions of the Mustang as recently as 2009.
“I feel like with Bullitt, the car chase is synonymous with the movie,” said Molly McQueen, Steve McQueen’s 30-year-old granddaughter. “So, while there is a story that holds up, it kind of falls by the wayside because the movie is all about the car chase.”
Two different, specially prepared Mustangs were used in filming. One was the “hero car” driven by McQueen throughout the film. The other was used mainly for the hardcore sections of the chase and jump scenes. Both were thought to be lost to the crusher, but the jump car was discovered in the spring of 2017 in a junkyard in Mexico. Now, the car driven by McQueen has also been found, and it was just unveiled Sunday in Detroit, along with a new 2018 Bullitt-edition Mustang, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the movie.

After Bullitt wrapped, the hero car was sold to a studio executive in Los Angeles, who kept it briefly before selling it, coincidentally, to a police detective. The officer shipped the car to New York and kept it for about three and a half years before placing a for-sale ad in the back of Road & Track magazine in 1974. His $6,000 asking price was somewhat steep, but Robert Kiernan, a New Jersey insurance executive and Mustang fan, went out to look at it. He bought it for his wife to use as a daily driver.
The Kiernans used the car avidly for years, adding more than 30,000 miles to its odometer. But, as with many vehicular toys, mechanical and family issues eventually intervened. “The clutch went out in ’80 and I was born in ’81,” said Sean Kiernan,Robert’s son, who grew up with the McQueen Mustang in his family’s garage. “So it kind of went into storage.”
The Kiernans have kept the car a secret, mainly to ward off rumormongers and gawkers. But that didn’t stop Steve McQueen from finding them in 1977. “Dad had owned the car for three years at that point. And he got a phone call from Steve asking about the car, how it was, if he’d changed anything on it. And McQueen said, ‘I would really like to buy it if there’s not too much involved with it. I’ll replace it with a similar, like kind of car. As long it’s not a crazy amount of money,’” Kiernan said. “But dad declined. He said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’”
McQueen didn’t take no for an answer. “I think a week later, a letter to my dad arrived from McQueen and it had the Solar [McQueen’s production company] letterhead and stamp on it. And it said, basically, ‘I’d love to talk to you again about purchasing my car back, if not too much money is involved. Otherwise we’d better forget it.’ And dad never reached out, he did forget it. And that was kind of the end of that.”
This was a decent decision. The car is now valued at $3 million to $5 million.

tags: breed of speed , mcqueen's mustang, steve mcqueen , bullitt mustang found , nathan finneman , bullitt movie

Breathtaking view of Space Shuttle Launch

1/15/2018

The Space Transportation System (STS) is the formal name of NASA’s Space Shuttle, consisting of an aircraft-like orbiter, two boosters and a huge external tank.
The stack, as the composite of orbiter, tank and boosters is called, has a gross liftoff weight of 2000 tonnes. Its height is 56 m and the boosters with the three Space Shuttle Main Engines generate 30.16 MN of thrust.
Shuttle is able to loft about 24 tonnes of cargo to low orbit and transport typically seven astronauts.
OrbiterThe Orbiter is about the size of an Airbus A320 airliner, but sports the double-delta wings of a fighter. It has a crew compartment in the nose section, followed by a large payload bay and finally three main rocket engines in the aft fuselage.
The Orbiter structure is primarily aluminum alloy, with the engine structure primarily titanium alloy. The whole underbelly is covered by ceramic tiles protecting the Orbiter from the extreme heating of reentry. Each orbital vehicle was designed for 100 flights.
Specifications of Endeavour (OV-105)
Length: 37.237 m
Wingspan: 23.79 m
Height: 17.86 m
Empty weight: 78 000 kg
Gross liftoff weight: 110 000 kg
Maximum landing weight: 100 000 kg
Maximum payload: 25 060 kg
Payload to low Earth orbit: 24 310 kg
Payload bay dimensions: 4.6 x 18 m
Operational orbit altitude: 190 to 960 km
Orbital speed: 7743 m/s (27 870 km/h)
Crew: minimum of two, typically seven, maximum 11

BMW M5 Claims World Record for Longest Drift with 232.5-Mile Slide

1/15/2018

The all-new 2018 BMW M5 boasts some serious impressive numbers from the factory, befitting of the iconic Bavarian super sedan. 600 horsepower. 553 lb-ft of torque. A 189 mile-per-hour top speed. And now, with a little help from an aircraft-inspired mid-run refueling system, a Guinness World Record 232.5-mile-long drift.

The new record smashes the old 102-mile mark set by a Toyota 86 last year, ably demonstrating that the sixth-generation M5 can wag its tail with the best of them despite a switch to all-wheel-drive. It's also a neat bookend for BMW driving instructor Johan Schwartz, who established the first record back in 2013 with a 51.3-mile slide in an F10 M5 at the very same skidpad where he set the new record in December.

The official rules for the record (technically the greatest distance drifted in eight hours) allow for fuel stops, but BMW decided that would ruin the spirit, fun, and danger of a continuous drift. So it looked to the skies for inspiration and developed a car-to-car refueling system, which features a spare M5 tanker carrying an extra fuel cell, a high-pressure hose, and a daring stuntman to lean out and connect the two cars as they drift together on the skidpad.

THE JET-POWERED RACE CAR YOU NEVER KNEW EXISTED

12/28/2017

Let's cut straight to the chase: the Howmet TX is one of the coolest, most futuristic, and downright scary race cars ever conceived. In lieu of a traditional engine, it features an experimental turbine developed by a defense contractor for military helicopters. The car was built to go toe to toe with the likes of GT40s and Porsche 907s, and it actually took multiple wins and pole positions in 1968— the only year in which it competed—before setting several landspeed records.
Only two were ever built as part of a publicity campaign by jet engine manufacturer Howmet (hence the name: Howmet Turbine eXperimental), and the one you're looking at is for sale.

The turbine it uses can spin up to 57,000 rpm, which is eight to nine times faster than your car. Odd as it may sound, it produces just 350 hp, because the real advantage to the turbine is how compact it is: a normal internal combustion engine is downright clunky and heavy by comparison. As a result, the whole car only weighs 1650 lbs.
Inside, it really does look more like a helicopter cockpit than a race car, with enough different switches and gauges to confuse even a modern Formula One driver.