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In the Highway 1 weekly section on cars, by Dan Neil (includes two pictures of Chrome Orange and a silver car).
Catch me if you can
A Lotus Elise calculated just for America is coming in June - light, legal and very fast.
Sir Isaac Newton was English, as anyone who tasted his cooking could tell you.
Catty, egocentric and quite the God-haunted lunatic in this way, Newton was also the greatest scientist before Einstein. One need only ask him, verily.
It was Newton who in "Principa" (1687) laid down the law of fast cars- though for convenience's sake he called it the Second Law of Motion, owing to the fact that fast cars had not yet been invented. It stateth: F=MA, or force equals mass times acceleration, or, if you like, A=F/M, acceleration is proportional to the force applied and inversely proportional to the mass said force is obliged to move.
Newton went on to invent calculus, explain planetary motion and attempt to transmute dog poop into gold. In these endeavors he was mostly successful.
It is a curious fact of history that different nationalities have approached the governing dynamic of fast cars in distinctive ways. The never-terribly-subtle Americans have long favored the F side of the equation - raw, stinking, fire-puking horsepower, the more the better, a la top-fuel dragsters and NASCAR stockers. Call it the Zen of the Bigger Hammer.
The arithmetically gifted Germans, meanwhile, have tended to focus on the equation itself, the function, so that each element - force, mass and acceleration - are set in elegant and optimized balance.
Newton's countrymen, on the other hand, have long been obsessed with M, for mass. The British way is to minimize mass however possible, thus creating an upward spiral of benefits. Less mass means, yes, the car can go faster, but it also means it can stop in shorter distances, corner harder and change directions more quickly because, in each case, there is less momentum to overcome.
At the same time, the stress on components is less, which means - you guessed it - they can be made ever lighter, until the breaking point of materials is reached and the car becomes a rickety piece of dog gold.
Catch me if you can
A Lotus Elise calculated just for America is coming in June - light, legal and very fast.
Sir Isaac Newton was English, as anyone who tasted his cooking could tell you.
Catty, egocentric and quite the God-haunted lunatic in this way, Newton was also the greatest scientist before Einstein. One need only ask him, verily.
It was Newton who in "Principa" (1687) laid down the law of fast cars- though for convenience's sake he called it the Second Law of Motion, owing to the fact that fast cars had not yet been invented. It stateth: F=MA, or force equals mass times acceleration, or, if you like, A=F/M, acceleration is proportional to the force applied and inversely proportional to the mass said force is obliged to move.
Newton went on to invent calculus, explain planetary motion and attempt to transmute dog poop into gold. In these endeavors he was mostly successful.
It is a curious fact of history that different nationalities have approached the governing dynamic of fast cars in distinctive ways. The never-terribly-subtle Americans have long favored the F side of the equation - raw, stinking, fire-puking horsepower, the more the better, a la top-fuel dragsters and NASCAR stockers. Call it the Zen of the Bigger Hammer.
The arithmetically gifted Germans, meanwhile, have tended to focus on the equation itself, the function, so that each element - force, mass and acceleration - are set in elegant and optimized balance.
Newton's countrymen, on the other hand, have long been obsessed with M, for mass. The British way is to minimize mass however possible, thus creating an upward spiral of benefits. Less mass means, yes, the car can go faster, but it also means it can stop in shorter distances, corner harder and change directions more quickly because, in each case, there is less momentum to overcome.
At the same time, the stress on components is less, which means - you guessed it - they can be made ever lighter, until the breaking point of materials is reached and the car becomes a rickety piece of dog gold.
