Hyperleggera

The Circle Opens

Welcome to Hyperleggera, a blog about the deca­dence of auto­mo­biles and other machines that go fast in inter­est­ing ways.

Words: Peter Orosz

if you will, with the mother of all burnouts, pow­ered by six­teen cylin­ders of German engi­neer­ing, older than John McCain, throt­tled into exis­tence by a man who feared for noth­ing, except the safety of Frau Rose­meyer, who died last Novem­ber aged one hundred.

This was back when racing cars were seri­ously cool.

A full dodgeviper­ful of power deliv­ered across con­tact patches the size of thim­bles, an engine slurp­ing through a quart of racing fuel every mile and you wear a canvas helmet grab a thin wooden steer­ing wheel—

[which also serves as your harness]

—and corner your way along the 14 miles of the Nürburgring Nord­schleife. Down­force will not be invented for another forty years, save for a freak of engi­neer­ing that will kill you at Mach 0.35 on a wind­spent stretch of Auto­bahn 18 months later.

This was back when the auto­mo­bile was on the upswing.

We are enter­ing a dark age of vehi­cle engi­neer­ing, with super­sonic com­mer­cial air­craft moth­balled in Bar­ba­dos, with super­cars whose com­put­ers limit your speed to less than one third of what Bernd Rose­meyer was doing when his Auto Union dis­in­te­grated into shards of alu­minum sev­enty years ago.

Lock­heed SR-71’s are relics of a space age long gone and kids these days don’t build rocket planes and super­charged race cars that scare you but build Face­book wid­gets instead. An age where safety tri­umphs over progress every single time. Where Achilles would sham­ble into battle wear­ing Kevlar heel protectors.

As if a Myr­mi­don moth­er­fucker would ever choose old age over glory.

Like the racing suits of the men who drove them, the Sil­berpfeile were white, becom­ing silver only when Alfred Neubauer and Man­fred von Brau­chitsch scraped the paint off a Mercedes-​Benz W25 to comply with weight rules. We have come full circle. The auto­mo­bile is yet again white: a white good.

And until we build scramjet-​driven hyper­sonic jet­lin­ers that trans­form into ekra­noplans at will, the only cars worth noting are the point­less ones.

The road­sters pow­ered by air-​cooled tank engines. The Audi R8’s and the Pagani Zondas. The ricers you hack with hand­held gaming con­soles. The two-​barrel Webers on vin­tage V12’s. The S54B32’s revved into the eight thou­sands and count­ing, the sound echo­ing off the façades of townhouses.

If you built a car, would Bernd Rose­meyer drive it?

Wel­come to Hyperleggera. Expect no white goods. Only white riots.

∞ Published on Friday, June 6th, 2008

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