Have you ever wondered how much faster F1 cars really are? How’s this for a new perspective?
Tag: Cars
1,200 Hot Wheels Circulating Around a Track
This amazing track, built by Chris Burden with Erector Sets, Legos, and Lincoln Logs, is called Metropolis II and can carry 1,200 cars at a time along with 13 toy trains.
The California artist Chris Burden may be in his 60s, but he is still playing with toys. The thing is, the older he gets the more outrageously complicated the toys become.
Two years ago he created a 65-foot Erector Set skyscraper that stood in Rockefeller Center, and in 2004 he made “Metropolis I,” composed of 80 Hot Wheels toy cars zooming around two single-lane highways along with monorail trains chugging on tracks of their own. The piece was snapped up by the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.
“I was happy with ‘Metropolis I,’ but it kind of disappeared once it went to western Japan,” Mr. Burden said in a telephone interview from his studio in Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles County. So in 2006 he and a team of eight studio assistants, including an engineer, began “Metropolis II,” a far more ambitious version. It includes 1,200 custom-designed cars and 18 lanes; 13 toy trains and tracks; and, dotting the landscape, buildings made of wood block, tiles, Legos and Lincoln Logs. The crew is still at work on the installation.
In “Metropolis II,” by his calculation, “every hour 100,000 cars circulate through the city,” Mr. Burden said. “It has an audio quality to it. When you have 1,200 cars circulating it mimics a real freeway. It’s quite intense.”
Repaving the 31 Degree Banking at Daytona International Speedway
Crews destroyed, hauled away, and repaved the 1.4-million square feet of racing surface at Daytona International Speedway in just 19 weeks. It took 100 million pounds of asphalt and a ton of engineering know-how. Here’s how they did it.
Built in 1958, Florida’s 2.5-mile Daytona International Speedway tri-oval’s one of the most famous locations in American racing. It’s home to the eponymous Daytona 500, normally one of the most exciting races on the NASCAR calendar. But this year the “Great American Race” was stopped twice due to a great American infrastructure problem: potholes.
This left the operators of the Daytona International Speedway with just a few months before the start of the 2011 racing season to tear the track down, transport it, and build it back up. Construction engineers quickly laid out the plan for recreating the famous racing surface.
Starting in July of this year, crews began to haul away the existing 50-year-old track surface. A lot of it. By the second week they’d removed 57 light poles, 5,000 feet of safety barrier, and 17 million pounds of asphalt and lime rock. (Ever the marketers, NASCAR will sell you part of the original track.)
And that was the easy part. Unlike repaving a street in your neighborhood, Daytona’s a banked surface designed to allow cars to reach speeds as high as 210 mph. This means crews have to carefully mill and grade each turn for the appropriate angle.
Once the appropriate angle is set, a large dump truck carrying asphalt transfers the crushed rock to a small buggy, which then transports the asphalt to the hydraulic crane. So far this process isn’t much different from how it’s normally done, but the next step involves a lot of engineering.
The asphalt is transferred from the crane to an ABG Titan 525 Paver, which lays it along the surface of the track. In order to achieve the angle the paver’s suspended from the track at a 31-degree angle by a Caterpillar D9 Bulldozer at the top of the track. This is followed by a Hamm DV-8 Double Steel Drum Roller, also suspended by a bulldozer. The Drum Roller uses its immense 40,000 pounds of weight to crush the material into a smooth surface. This is repeated numerous times until the surface is dense enough to support racing.
Last week, the finish line was paved and the barriers and catch fences started going back up along the track. Detail work continues as the crew prepares for a tire test on December 15th. It’ll be the first time cars will howl around the new surface.
Speed Racer Mach 5
Gotham Garage’s Speed Racer Mach 5 replica built by the famous Mark Towle is the only licensed full size replica available in the world today. No one else can offer you a full sized driving Speed Racer Mach 5 but us. Peter Fernandez, largely responsible for the American transformation of a moderately successful Japanese cartoon called Mach Go Go Go into a massive hit on these shores, had a full-sized version of Speed Racer’s legendary Mach 5 built a few years back, and now Gotham Garage is offering for the first time ever these Towle built replicas to the public. The cars feature billet wheels custom-made for the car, a driver’s side rollbar, a pushbutton steering wheel and up to 435hp via a Chevy LT1. No word on if the trunk is big enough to hold both Spritle and Chim-Chim.
Be forewarned that if you are gullible enough to purchase an illegally molded copy of Mark Towle’s Mach 5, you are certain to experience legal entanglement with the Mach 5 franchise and experience the total loss of your investment! Our Speed Racer Mach 5 turnkey is fully drivable and one of our replicas recently made a U.S. trek 3000 miles from coast to coast. Copy that gentlemen!.
Our Speed Racer Mach 5 has it all, from the rotating front saw blades and push button chrome steering wheel to the custom M5 logo and red leather interior. Our Mach 5 is built for SHOW & GO implementing a California RUST FREE CORVETTE C-4 chassis to provide sports enthusiasts with the proformance, and handling only an American Made Corvette can deliver. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO YOU? The highest quality, accurate, fully drivable and FUN Mach 5 replica available anywhere can be yours for the taking. This is as close as you will ever get to the original without winning the Nascar Cup.
Added features that swear accuracy to the original cartoon car are a detailed Mach 5 interior, aluminum pop down leap feet , authentic Mach 5 emblems, custom Chromed out M5 wheels, sweeping convertible aircraft grade front windscreen, a custom replica dash with full racing instrumentation, working climate controls for heat and A/C, functional front and rear turn signals, headlights and tail lights, leather deep red upholstered interior, an authentic center console and a custom installed per order sound system.
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