Yahoo Autos This Is Air
Like the pair of young fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous parable who question what this thing called “water” might be, I go through my days entirely unaware of air.
This story originally appeared in Volume 21 of Road & Track.
We live in a soup so thin and so familiar that we fail, like Wallace’s young fish, to bother noticing. Only in its absence or its interactions with visible objects does air reveal itself. Its weight expressed in pressure. Its force exposed when a bunch of it moves streamlike in one basic direction, swirling, diving, and firing right into your face until your eyes dry out and you need to turn your head to take a breath.
We are endlessly hungry for the stuff, especially the oxygen part. Live a long life and you’ll have taken air into your body about 670 million times. (Your results may vary.) It fuels us, but it also fuels our cars. Gasoline is impotent without oxygen.
Internal-combustion engines are air pumps, after all. They create the power to motivate a vehicle and its air-sucking occupants, pushing aside countless air molecules that would just as soon stay where they are. This while listening to the wiggly air we call music.
It’s the desire to cut through the atmosphere with the least amount of effort and the sometimes contradictory desire to harness those molecules for our own greedy vehicular purposes that provide the fuel for this issue’s lineup of stories.
First, editor-at-large Jethro Bovingdon (himself a habitual user of air) was dispatched to the Pininfarina Wind Tunnel near Turin to quantify the supercar world’s progress over the past 50 years in cheating and using air. This test marks the first time a Lamborghini Miura has been in a wind tunnel, a fact that you might assume just from looking at the data.
