He calls himself, Proximacentuari, and he did this by hand. Using a CAD model of a real Ariel Atom frame, the tubes were shaped for him by a local Utah fabricator but he did all the welding and sourced all the parts, many of which came from junk. The stainless-steel panels came from old appliances. There are also parts of a kayak in there. The engine, trans and instrument cluster come from a wrecked Acura RSX and the rear suspension uses shocks from a Yamaha R1. He also re-designed and made some parts to fit his parameters. It took him 800 hours and he finished it just before going to college. Here’s his Flickr page for a full set of photos. (Source: Motorcities.com)
People who knew Serena Sutton-Smith said she had a history of erratic behavior. The 54 year-old bartender emerged from a side road without stopping, nearly causing an accident with Paula Small. Small then pulled over to speak with Sutton-Smith and while Small was getting out of her car, Sutton-Smith rammed her Vauxhall Nova into Small’s Fiat Punto and then kept her foot on the accelerator.
Gordon Murray, designer of the Brabham BT46B "Fan Car", Ayrton Senna’s MP4/4, the McLaren F1, the Rocket and soon the T-25 city car, answered questions from NYTimes readers. A couple of the highlights from the Q&A include him saying that it’s the twilight of performance cars and that he would only change the brakes and headlights of the F1 in order to compete with today’s supercars.
Pirelliplans to introduce two tires in 2010 with computer chips either glued to the inner liner (Cyber Lean) or embedded into the carcass (Cyber Tyre). The simpler Cyber Lean will gather data such as pressure, temperature and average load. Data can then be sent to the car’s on-board computer to inform the driver. The chip will be powered by the mechanical vibrations from the tire as it turns, perhaps like a self-winding watch. The Cyber Tyre will feature a chip with a triaxial acclerometer and will be able to give data actual on potential friction coefficients, the force of contact and load. Pirelli engineers are trying to integrate this data with a car’s safety systems such as traction, ABS and stability control to help "correct wrong behaviour in advance."
Two-hundred-and-forty mph is the projected top speed, but that’s not really the point. The point is the designer and engineer, Joe Harmon, is using wood in every area possible to build this car, which he calls, the Splinter. He’ll be using a twin-supercharged Northstar V8 to push the 2500lb. car, so if it’s got a small frontal area and proper gearing, 200-plus shouldn’t be a problem. On his site and blog, Harmon states he’s using wood in ways similar to carbon fiber (weaving) and that wood has a strength-to-weight integrity that’s better than steel or aluminum. He also addresses heat and other issues in his FAQ section.
I’ve left New York. What started as a ten-day trip to hammer out some business with Alex turned into five weeks of sleeping on his blue velour sectional, plenty of brainstorming, a ton of new friends and adventures the wooly world of startups that I couldn’t conceive of when I boarded that eastbound redeye in Sacramento over 4th of July weekend. But come to an end it has. We’re off to Monterey in 144B. We’ve enlisted the talents of Autoblog’s resident Northern California boy, Damon Lavrinc, to handle additional driving duties. We’re also attempting to warp the poor man’s brain. We’ve never attempted a driveplan that involved meeting an airline flight before, but that’s exactly what we’ll be attempting this time when we pick up Liz Moses.
She claims that she’ll bring some much-needed sense to the proceedings, but we’re a bit curious as to how much sense anyone who hitches a ride in a fake German police car crewed by a bald man, a bearded man and a blogging man could possibly have. Nevertheless, we intend to make our trek a memorable one. We’ll be broadcasting live video from Seero, as well as putting together one of our signature maps. We’ll be ruminating on the nature of driving in today’s America, passing through hamlets large and small as we travel the entire length of Interstate 80 — from the George Washington Bridge in New York to the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, then tooling down 101 through Silicon Valley and south to Steinbeck Country — where we’ll take in the goings on during what’s internationally recognized as the most fantastic collection of automotive events in one weekend. If you call yourself a car guy and haven’t made it to Monterey, mark your calendars. And once you experience it, you’ll want to come back every year.
A group of UC Berkeley scientists, led by Xiang Zhang, and funded by the military, recently published an experiment in the scientific journals, Nature and Science, whereby the metamaterials they created proved capable of bending light in three dimensions, thereby rendering an object invisible. The experiments were carried out on a nanoscale but the scientists said there’s no reason why larger items such as people, cars, tanks and tankers, couldn’t be made invisible as well. The fact that this research was funded by the military means there’s little chance such materials will trickle down to civilian applications. However, if you’re a communist dictator and want to buy nuclear know-how, get in touch with this man.
Sources: AFP via DiscoveryNews, Nature, Science, Howstuffworks, beconfused, BBC
Image: tvcrazy.net
Shot just days before this Audi R8 - appropriately code-named "Blackbird" - was shipped to the start of this year’s Bullrun, Alex Roy interviewed the car’s anonymous owner on what even he admits may be the most technologically advanced rally car on the road.
Can you say, "liquid-cooled, infra-sonic, pulse generator?"
