Road & Track

Mark Scicluna Scicluna is an illustrator working in his native Malta who grew up saturated in American comic books, video games, and cartoons. “I’m a big fan of comic books from the Sixties and Seventies,” he says. “I’ve always been consuming American media.” Though he’s worked as an illustrator on momentous projects like the Grand Theft Auto game series and his style is so blisteringly American, he has visited the United States only once, in 2015. “I’d like to go to the San Diego Comic-Con,” he says. “Or the New York Comic Con. Whichever.” Presumably Road & Track’s first Maltese contributor, he illustrated this issue’s story about the role of superstition in race-car drivers’ lives (page 078). Miguel Valenzuela “I’m always called when they need something energetic and weird,” Valenzuela claims. “And I…

LIKE JACKIE STEWART, the late Karl Popper was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Popper, a dang good philosopher of critical rationalism, presumably never set a fastest lap or won a grand prix, but he knew science. “The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error,” Popper wrote in his book Conjectures and Refutations. “But science is one of the very few human activities—perhaps the only one—in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.” Motorsport isn’t strictly scientific, but screwing up the science is a clear path to frustration.…

THIS WASN’T PART OF THE PLAN.It’s hot as hell in Texas. Of course. But pit road at the mighty Circuit of the Americas is bubbling and frothing like whitewater rapids, and rain is coming down so hard that it physically hurts when I dart out for a peek at the dark clouds overhead. Meanwhile, in box 16, the McLaren Solus GT waits. Impatiently. It has a slight, lithe build, but its pure-motorsport V-10 engine spits out venom and fury as it comes up to temperature. Maybe the noise will scare the rain clean away. The precipitation is bad on so many levels. Today should be about confronting new things. Downforce, primarily. That invisible phenomenon we all think we know and understand. The dynamic enabler used in promotional material for every new…

Formula 1 is about progress and bleedingedge technology. Yet fans look back. Always. To the slim elegance of the Sixties cars dancing through the turns. To the mighty, treacherous old circuits last seen in the Seventies and the wild turbocharged missiles of the Eighties. Mostly, though, I mourn the passing of the lightweight, hyperagile, money-is-no-object cars of the late Nineties and early 21st century, when the V-10 ruled. In the hearts and minds of many fans and engineers, it still does. Speaking on the Beyond the Grid podcast, Mario Illien, who built the Mercedes V-10 engine as co-founder of Ilmor Engineering, now Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains, explained the magic, manic nature of that period. “Almost every race, we had something new on [the engine]. It was a continuous development and…

IT HASN’T HAD quite the impact of GPS or the atomic bomb, but in the pantheon of items created by U.S. government researchers, the NACA duct must be considered one of the most enduring. After all, the duct, or “submerged inlet,” was developed by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the predecessor to NASA) in the Forties and has changed not one bit since. For a particular kind of usage, there really isn’t a better design than the one created some 80 years ago at the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in what is now Silicon Valley in California. The research that led to the NACA duct was declassified in 1951, and it took only a handful of years for the ducts to start appearing on race cars. The most famous of the…

THEY DIDN’T EVEN KNOW they’d been robbed. One of auto racing’s strangest capers involved a couple of curious race-car engineers, crash-test technology, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and the brazen application of open-air espionage. And a quarter century after it took place, the targets were still unaware. Teams make dozens of tiny decisions about suspension and aerodynamic adjustments on their race cars that help elevate contenders from the also-rans. Documented in notebooks and laptops with detail and precision, setups are honed and perfected for years. They’re racing’s nuclear launch codes, guarded with paranoia. For the newer or less distinguished teams, finding the right chassis settings requires time spent on trial and error. Unless you were Team Scandia at the 1998 Indianapolis 500, tired of dealing with an ill-handling car that wanted to spin and…