Featured this week is another one of my favorite cars, the Porsche Carrera GT. My love of this car comes from two main points. One is that it is a beautiful Porsche. The other part is the sound created by the engine. The exterior is very agressive and it just looks like car that is very fast. The noise created by the engine is high pitched and almost the complete opposite of the growl from an Aston Martin DBS.
The Carrera GT was built between 2004 and 2006 and was meant to be the peak of Porsche technology. The engine sits right behind the two seats. It has a 612 hp engine which is more than three times the horsepower of a Honda Civic. The engine is based on a Porsche race car that was never put on the racetrack because of new rule changes. This power has allowed the Carrera GT to be clocked in the 3.5 second range for going from 0-60. This is obviously a very serious car which why if you would like to buy it, you'd have to pay about a half million dollars when it was new.
Personally, I believe one of the most amazing things about cars, that never comes up in stats is the exhaust note that is put out. When you are paying that much, I want something that sounds beautiful every time the engine is opened up. There is such diversity for sounds that are out there. Muscle cars from the 60's sound much different than the Carrera GT. That is what is amazing to follow through the years, which is see how with regards to exhaust note, there has been such an evolution. Companies put a lot of effort into making beautiful sounds from their cars and that comes from having their exhausts tune by music companies like Yamaha so that the engine sounds as best as possible.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
MotoGP
Start watching the video at 3:10. The video is in Italian, but you'll still get the point.
MotoGP is a sport that the United States does not get very much exposure to. However, the best riders are world superstars. The rider with the yellow all over him is Valentino Rossi. He only made $35 million dollars last year, so he does all right. This particular race was controversial because the two riders are teammates and they are going at each other very hard. Yamaha, their sponsor, would have been very upset if they had taken each other out.
MotoGP is a highly lucrative sport where bike makers try and outdo each other to earn bragging rights when it comes to selling their bikes. The bike makers use their motorcycle racing teams as forms of research and development where they can develop the technology and gear that will be in their motorcycles in a few years. Yamaha basically owned MotoGP while Valentino Rossi was on their team, but he has since left to return to Italian bike maker, Ducati.
I think that this video has multiple benefits to watching. It shows something that is different than what most people have seen, which is cars racing. These bikes are much more agile and can easily be thrown around the track from side-to-side. It makes these races much more entertaining, since the bikes are much easier to handle and positioning matters less so than in car races. In the video, there is plenty of passing and even a double pass. The video almost compresses the excitement of a normal MotoGP race into a few minutes to demonstrate how their races differ from the more often seen car races.
MotoGP also has an elegance that is unique to it. The riders don't sit straight on their bike, they throw their body around and place it at dangerous angles so that the power of the bike can be put to the pavement in the best way. It is a physical sport, not in the way that people think when physical sports come to mind. It is about making your body work the machine for incredible results.
MotoGP is a sport that the United States does not get very much exposure to. However, the best riders are world superstars. The rider with the yellow all over him is Valentino Rossi. He only made $35 million dollars last year, so he does all right. This particular race was controversial because the two riders are teammates and they are going at each other very hard. Yamaha, their sponsor, would have been very upset if they had taken each other out.
MotoGP is a highly lucrative sport where bike makers try and outdo each other to earn bragging rights when it comes to selling their bikes. The bike makers use their motorcycle racing teams as forms of research and development where they can develop the technology and gear that will be in their motorcycles in a few years. Yamaha basically owned MotoGP while Valentino Rossi was on their team, but he has since left to return to Italian bike maker, Ducati.
I think that this video has multiple benefits to watching. It shows something that is different than what most people have seen, which is cars racing. These bikes are much more agile and can easily be thrown around the track from side-to-side. It makes these races much more entertaining, since the bikes are much easier to handle and positioning matters less so than in car races. In the video, there is plenty of passing and even a double pass. The video almost compresses the excitement of a normal MotoGP race into a few minutes to demonstrate how their races differ from the more often seen car races.
MotoGP also has an elegance that is unique to it. The riders don't sit straight on their bike, they throw their body around and place it at dangerous angles so that the power of the bike can be put to the pavement in the best way. It is a physical sport, not in the way that people think when physical sports come to mind. It is about making your body work the machine for incredible results.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
The Aston Martin DBS
It is about time that I say a thing or two about my favorite car. It is pictured at the top of my blog with what I believe to be Paris in the background. This behemoth of a machine is a car that most of you have probably seen, but may not know much about, and this car is the British Aston Martin DBS. The styling of the car, is completely unique and it has a plethora of luxury tied into the engineering. Its stylish decide allowed it to be the car of choice for the most recent James Bond flicks, a throwback to the early days when Sean Connery drove an Aston Martin DB5. However, you may recognize the DBS from here:
It's so beautiful. There are many more things to love about this car than its raw sexiness. It has a low growling V12, which I much appreciate since a lot of prestigious cars are attempting to make their cars sound higher pitched and more like a race car.
High end cars are always the best cars to read about since they have so much technology that goes into them and sometimes you hear a feature and go, "Wow, I didn't know they could do that." For instance the DBS has an Adaptive Damping System which allows the suspension to adjust its stiffness to weather and road conditions as well as the manner in which the driver is driving at. Also, the car is made of mostly aluminum and carbon fiber. The floor mats even contain carbon fiber just so the driver can say the floor mats have carbon fiber. Also, it has carbon ceramic breaks (those really strong/brakes I talked about earlier) and a 13 speaker sound system from Bang and Olufsen. The car is more built for practical driving than a lot of Ferrari's which are built to be street legal race cars. I find the Aston Martin DBS to be the best of all world, and thus, the greatest vehicle ever.
It's so beautiful. There are many more things to love about this car than its raw sexiness. It has a low growling V12, which I much appreciate since a lot of prestigious cars are attempting to make their cars sound higher pitched and more like a race car.
High end cars are always the best cars to read about since they have so much technology that goes into them and sometimes you hear a feature and go, "Wow, I didn't know they could do that." For instance the DBS has an Adaptive Damping System which allows the suspension to adjust its stiffness to weather and road conditions as well as the manner in which the driver is driving at. Also, the car is made of mostly aluminum and carbon fiber. The floor mats even contain carbon fiber just so the driver can say the floor mats have carbon fiber. Also, it has carbon ceramic breaks (those really strong/brakes I talked about earlier) and a 13 speaker sound system from Bang and Olufsen. The car is more built for practical driving than a lot of Ferrari's which are built to be street legal race cars. I find the Aston Martin DBS to be the best of all world, and thus, the greatest vehicle ever.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
The Famous Nurburgring
The Nurburgring is the most famous race track in the world. While you may have never heard of it, it famous and is the focus of most high end car engineers. The Nurburgring is used as the place where car companies test out their latest cars built for speed. The track is used because it has straight aways that test a cars high end speeds as well as the handling and suspension in those cars. Car companies put a lot of effort into the race technology that they will use so that they can get quick times when their car is tested on "The Ring." This video shows various parts of the Nurburgring as well as great cinematography. You can get the gist of the Nurburgring and all that happens there through the video.
A car is simply just a compilation of data and tests before it has something to compare it to. Horsepower may seem good, but in a big car, the horsepower may have less effect since it is moving a car. Its 0-60 time may tell you how fast the car is in a straight line, but when a turn comes, what happens? The Nurburgring is phenomenal in that it tests many aspects of a car. As each part is tested, the final score of the car is the time that the car takes to complete one lap. A question that is always asked is what a car's time was on the Nurburgring because there are thresholds based on the times and if your car goes as fast or faster than a car famous for its speed, then you get a lot of respect as a car company. One of the best examples of this was the Corvette ZR1. Everyone knew that it was a fast car but when it posted one of the fastest times for a production car, the ZR1 became a lot more prestigious. It was faster than any Porsche ever built and was almost as fast as the Ferrari Enzo which costs about $1.3 million. The ZR1 only costed about $100,000. The ZR1 got its fame through exemplifying how great the car was built when it was all put together. This is the type of fame that a single lap on the Nurburgring can bring and is a must know place in the car world.
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