Mercedes-AMG says its GT Black Series has set the fastest lap of the famed Nurburgring Nordschleife by a standard and unmodified production car, with a time of 6 minutes, 43.616 seconds for the 12.8-mile circuit. For good measure, Mercedes-AMG said the car was timed at 6:48.047 on the 12.944-mile “total track.”
GT3 racer Maro Engel was the driver for the record-setting lap in the 720-horsepower supercar that Mercedes-AMG says its GT Black Series has set the fastest lap of the famed Nurburgring Nordschleife by a standard and unmodified production car, features sophisticated aerodynamics such as a front carbon fiber splitter that extends in “Race” mode and with rear wing blades in their middle position.
The car ran with camber in the maximum position of negative 3.8 degrees in front and negative 3.0 degrees at the rear. The 9-position traction control was set between 6 and 7, depending on the section of the track where the car was running.
“Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series customers can also take advantage of all these settings andadjustment possibilities,” the company noted.
The lap was done on Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 R MO tires with “soft compound,” the standard equipment for the car.
“That was a really impressive ride,” Engel was quoted.”With speeds of up to almost 168 mph in the Kesselchen section of the track and well over 186 mph on the long Döttinger Höhe straight, the AMG GT Black Series is significantly faster than my GT3 race car.
“To finally drive around the Nordschleife in 6:48.047 minutes with a production road car in these track conditions is really awesome. Like my GT3 race car, the AMG GT Black Series offers a lot of adjustment possibilities, all of which enabled me to create a setup that was tailor-made for me.
Driver and car
“It’s really impressive how much downforce the Black Series generates and how confident and reliably it can be driven, even at the absolute limit.”
Mercedes AMG noted that the outside temperature was 44.6 degrees Fahrenheit and that some sections of the track in the late afternoon run were “not totally dry.” It added that the lap times were “measured by neutral experts from “wige Solutions,” an independent notary which also certified the condition of the vehicle.
Earlier this year, Kubota unveiled this autonomous electric tractor that operates without a farmer inside | Kuboda photos
Highways and byways aren’t the only places autonomous electric vehicles are headed. According to a 215-page report by IDTechEx, a market research that specializes in emerging technology, down on the farm is upfitting to self-driving EVs.
“Electric Vehicles and Robotics in Agriculture 2020-2030” is the title of the report, which notes, “As with cars, we have had the phase of electric variants of farm vehicles based on existing platforms and therefore not very successful but Kubota and John Deere newly have ‘born electric’ concept tractors reading to the strengths by being robotic with triangular tracks.”
Included in the report summary is a photo of the Kubota “Dream Tractor,” which the Japanese manufacturer unveiled earlier this year as part of its 130th anniversary celebration. The report notes that John Deere also has displayed autonomous electric farm equipment.
“This ‘dream tractor’ is a completely autonomous tractor that represents the future of farming drawn by Kubota,” the company said, adding that the tractor operates with artificial intelligence and is designed for “smart agriculture… to address the challenges facing Japanese farmers.”
Among those issues, Kubota said, are an increasing number of farmers retiring because of age.
Kubota added that replacing traditional wheels and tires with “crawler” technology provides stability on uneven terrain and in “wet paddies,” and provides for adjustable ride height.
Kubota’s 1970 dream machine for farming
By the way, this is not Kubota’s first concept tractor. In 1970, it unveiled another “Dream Tractor” at the Japan World Exposition, that one designed for functionality, ease of operation and driver comfort.
While autonomous EVs may be heading to farm fields, the IDTechEx report notes, “Even in the most advanced countries, few farms can provide the power to fast-charge a Tesla or an electric tractor, let alone large farm vehicles.”
Solutions include solar cells that unroll “like a carpet along a field” and tethered drones that turn wind into electrical power.
Jisbar and his painting, ‘Ducati Mona Lisa’ | cambi Auction House photos
Can you imagine Mona Lisa in a Ducati motorcycle jacket and holding her customized helmet?
Well, you don’t have to imagine such an image because it has been painted by Jisbar, the prominent pop-street artist otherwise known as Jean-Baptiste Launay, a Frenchman whose art, entitled Ducati Mona Lisa, will be offered at auction July 16 with proceeds benefiting #RaceAgainstCOVID, an effort organized by Ducati for the S. Orsola Hospital in Bologna, Italy.
The Bologna clinic has developed rehabilitation programs for patients who survive Covid-19.
Jisbar’s painting is part of a “Mona Lisa” series in which he reinterprets Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece in different ways.
Ducati Mona Lisa is done in acrylic on a 41.7 x 55-inch canvas and is among the lots being offered by Cambi Aste at an auction of modern and contemporary art, photography and comics. The auction will be streamed online.
The painting has a pre-auction estimated value of €5,000 to €7,000 ($5,640 to $7,900). For more information, visit the Cambi Auction House website.
The Deluxe 12-window VW bus at Lake Huron after its journey | Robert Duffer photos
The plan was to plop an air mattress in the 1967 Volkswagen Type 2 Microbus and sleep in a van down by the river. It wasn’t a good plan; it was hardly a plan at all.
The Deluxe Station Bus painted orange and trimmed in white with white steel wheels and mirrored hubcaps contained three bench seats firmly bolted in place. It would not accommodate a mattress and I did not bring a tent. That would be but the first challenge in taking an international treasure out for an overnight jaunt.
When I picked it up outside of
Detroit, where it huddled for attention with five other classic Volkswagens,
from a 1984 Rabbit GTI to a Karmann Ghia roadster from the ‘60s, the
liftgate above the rear pancake engine jammed open. Eventually, our man on the
job, Joe, got it unstuck and I was on my way, puttering down the road, not
feeling bad.
Something about that bench seat and the four-on-the-floor manual transmission excited me as much as any other time traveler set to take off. With the front axle underfoot and a split windshield leading the charge, no hood, no exhaust, and 21 glorious windows, anything could happen, except for breaking 70 mph.
The 1493-cc—OK, 1.5-liter—flat-4 engine in this heavily restored example owned by Volkswagen itself makes 53 horsepower, good enough to go from 0-60 mph when it can. Load it up with up to nine passengers and it can’t.
Volkswagen claims an
aspirational top speed of 65 mph, but with the right speed, the right wind
angle, and a blessing from the goddess Fortuna, the speedometer could hit 70
mph. On the Interstate, the wind pushed the Bus around like a bully and his
thugs who only want to be amused. It handled like a boat that mated with a
shopping cart to make a Bus, liable to tip, with swoopy sweeping steering
demands, torsion bar axles in loose communication front and rear, and enough
charm to make me accept that sometimes the destination is a welcome break from
the journey.
I knew this piece of collector art on wheels would draw attention but never in my near 30 years of driving cars had I experienced such widespread and unabashed adoration for a vehicle that transcends generations and demographics. Kids waved, teens gawked, passersby—of which there were many in a 53-horsepower car—flashed thumbs, snapped shots, or nodded appreciatively. Boomers of a certain persuasion hustled to shoot it with their iPhones.
One Boomer in particular, with
curls unfurling from this fishing cap, leaned on the hood of his truck and
waved from the RV park where the road dead-ended and Lake Huron began. Private
property surrounded the stamp-sized beach and there were no good angles. I
ratcheted the parking brake free and pulled into a driveway to back out.
Getting it to reverse was tricky, as promised. It went left of H but not down,
then went into second, then went left of H again, and finally, it found that
narrow groove into reverse. As I pulled away my Boomer fan had grown into five
men, smirking and honoring my efforts with a golf clap. I laughed my ass
off.
There’s a lightness to time
travel, and it’s impossible to take yourself seriously behind the flat wheel of
a Bus.
At the campground of Lakeport State Park on the western edge of Lake Huron, I loosened the wing nuts and propped open the front driver’s window to let in the cool lake breeze. There was no A/C, of course, only a push-button AM radio, an ashtray, and an aftermarket cupholder serving as cabin features. As the sweat cooled on my bald head, heads turned, fingers pointed, and smiles beamed.
The de facto camp host pointed
me in the direction of my site and after I finished loading my firewood, he
loaded a listing in his iPhone for a 13-window Bus, as if he were in the
market, as if his fifth-wheel trailer could fit two Buses.
“Not sure why they call it that,”
he said, counting the windows in the listing. “But this one is yours for
$57,000.”
Windows are the defining marker of a Type 1 and, later, a Type 2, Bus. Not long after that conversation from the neighboring campsite, an older man with a tye-dyed Buenos Dias shirt and a salt-and-pepper rat tail couldn’t contain his excitement. “That a 23-window? Well, I’ll be.” He had a friend, who had a friend, they were in Costa Rica, some things happened, it was rarer than rare, he concluded, doing two full walk-arounds.
The standard Microbus, Kombi, or Type 1, depending on your country, came with 11 windows, three on either side, a rear window, two front door windows, and the split windshield. There were 13-window, 15-window, and the famous 23-window Bus that was discontinued for 1964. It featured two rear windows curving around the rear windshield, one more window on either side of the body for four per side, to match the four port windows on either side up top.
Those models with eight roof
windows and a manually folding rooftop were known as Sambas. Since mine was a
1967, and didn’t have the curved rear windows, it was a 21-Window
Bus—officially, a 1967 Type 2 Microbus 21-Window Deluxe Samba Bus that cost
$2,900. It was the last year of the split windshield, the first year of seat
belts for all seats. A similar Bus auctioned for $143,000 in 2017.
This one was priceless. It was a smile maker, with a magnetism as infectious as its Day-Glo orange and white body and giant smiling VW logo on its bulbous silly face. Two young women with a Polaroid–yup, those are back, too—snapped some shots and offered me one. Teens too cool to express anything but ennui said with a half-lidded nod, “Cool car.”
It made people want to be a part of it. Before the sun set, there seemed to be a good spot on the wooded dune to shoot it. But it would cramp the walkway to the beach. The first full weekend the Michigan state parks had been opened resulted in a packed house.
Some people wore masks, some
didn’t. Some people had campaign signs that read “Our Governor is an IDIOT,”
most people maintained a healthy social distance when addressing the Bus.
Camp hostess Jeanette had circled the wagons and flagged down Ranger A., and together, they agreed to help clear a path. They would get nothing out of it but a picture and the satisfaction of helping a stranger.
It was another tricky move,
maneuvering the Bus around a swatch of woods on a narrow isthmus of solid
ground surrounded by beach sand. Go too far one way, and it could tip into Lake
Huron, which, like Lake Michigan, is at record high water levels. Or I could
get a wheel stuck in the sand. No way the rear-wheel-drive van could pull
itself out of that.
Nothing attracts a crowd, like a crowd of 1967 Type 2 Microbus oglers.
The most frequent comment, after
the initial parlay, was “When is that new one coming out?” The Volkswagen ID Buzz Microbus is
slated for 2022; it’ll be all-electric and hopefully have a name not as awkward
as ID Buzz or as long as Type 2 Microbus 21 Window Deluxe Samba Bus.
Michiganders know the auto
industry like southern Californians know the aftermarket. This buckle on the
Rust Belt might be known as the home of The Detroit Three (or The Detroit 2.5
if you want to be snarky), but it should be known for its vast recreational
opportunities nestled by four Great Lakes.
The enduring image of a Bus on California’s West Coast beaches might be favored in the collective consciousness, but this Bus felt just at home on Michigan’s coast, when it stood out like a Dreamsicle lighthouse amid a sea of trucks and RVs. The comments kept coming, and I kept fielding them.
Now, as then, this timepiece on
wheels universally recognized from the counterculture era of the ‘60s, when a
country divided took to the road as an expression of freedom, was a gateway to
conversation; it was a way to connect with people at a time when disconnect is
the prevailing order.
Later, at my fire, as I let my happy thoughts stew around beneath a sky so rich with stars the stardust would blanket my eyes better than the Sandman, I reassessed my situation. I could sleep to those stars, and if the bugs got too buggy, or if the Gypsy moth poop raining down from the oak tree beside me got to be too poopy, I could curl up on a bench seat on the Bus.
Then a pickup truck rumbled to
a stop. It was the ranger. He pulled a 10-person tent out of the bed and handed
it to me.
“Jeanette said you didn’t have a tent,” he said.
I blushed. I had mentioned it
in passing when describing to Jeanette how it wasn’t a camper Bus, how I’d come
from Chicago, how she was going back to the office for the first time in three
months on Monday and was anxious, how we were all anxious.
I couldn’t turn it down. These
were people helping people. This was an act of kindness. I slept that much
better in the shadow of the Bus knowing that kindness is not of another era.
This article by Robert Duffer was originally published by Motor Authority, an editorial partner of ClassicCars.com.
Ferrari F1 racer Charles Leclerc will drive a Ferrari SF90 Stradale through the streets of Monte Carlo for a short film in the style of ‘Rendevous’ | Ferrari photo
The Monaco Grand Prix race won’t take place May 24, but the circuit will be in use for the shooting of a short film by Ferrari and Charles Lelouch, the latter responsible for C’etait Un Rendez-Vous, the famed 1976 early-morning high-speed romp through Paris.
Also likely providing inspiration was the recent shooting of a similar film through the streets of Rome.
This time, a SF90 Stradale, Ferrari’s first series-production hybrid sports car, will be the camera mount for Le Grand Rendez-Vous, to be shot by Lelouch with Monegaseue F1 racing driver Charles Leclerc at control of the steering wheel.
“The new short evokes both the atmosphere of the beloved Grand Prix and the roar of the Ferrari 275 GTB that provided the instantly recognizable soundtrack to the 1976 film shot in Paris,” Ferrari said in its news release.
“This first post lockdown French shoot symbolically will also mark the start of a gradual return to the ‘new normal’ after the pandemic and the restart for the film industry, impacted significantly by recent restrictions.”
Ferrari said it welcomed partnership in the production “as a way of demonstrating support for its tifosi, clients and supporters as an expression of hope that the world will gradually be able to absorb the painful and complex health crisis which has affected everyone, allowing us to begin to look positively towards the future, also in anticipation of the expected restart of the F1 season in July.”
