Road & Track

LIKE “EXTREME” AND “ULTIMATE,” the term “edge” is typically applied to products or occurrences that are anything but. As a sage once said, you advertise what you are most insecure about. And so, we have Edge shaving cream. Okay, it turns from gel to foam before your very eyes, but shaving cream—any shaving cream—is literally the opposite of edgy. Its sole purpose is to blunt the effects of an edge. Ford’s bun-shaped mid-size crossover was inexplicably called Edge, despite not having a single one. And the guitarist for U2, the little-known Irish rock band, persists with his nom de guerre The Edge even though his reverb-soaked ringing hasn’t been thought of as edgy for at least 40 years. I suppose the same applies for this Edge edition of Road & Track. It’s…

THE AUTOMOTIVE LEADING EDGE has been home to geniuses from Carl Benz (born in 1844) to Mate Rimac (born in 1988). It’s also crowded with misfits, malcontents, eccentrics, charlatans, and troublemakers. Legends such as Soichiro Honda, Ferdinand Porsche, Carroll Shelby, and Enzo Ferrari were not exactly known for their sociable and easygoing style. The edge, at least the metaphorical edge, is a mindset. And it’s often an antisocial one, obsessive and impatient. It’s about asking questions no one has asked before and coming up with answers that change everything. The people who put themselves out there on that edge are atypical, not rankand-file folks. “Engineers are not thrilled about taking risks,” explains Kevin Hoag, who recently retired from the Southwest Research Institute and University of Wisconsin, where he researched internal combustion. Most…

THERE ISN’T MUCH that money can’t buy these days. Colossal wealth can purchase experiences unimaginable a few generations ago. Sign a large-enough check, and you can fly your own former military jet, be shepherded to the top of the Himalayas by oxygen-lugging Sherpas, or even travel into space. Yet one frontier has remained out of reach: experiencing the performance of a contemporary Formula 1 car. At least for anyone who hasn’t actually bought one. The top one percent of the one percent could do that, of course, but they’d also need to develop the skills to drive it and tolerate the costs and inconvenience of a vehicle that requires a team of mechanics. Some components last only hours between rebuilds. Red Bull aims to change that with the RB17. Limited to just…

THERE YOU ARE in the driver’s seat of your dedicated canyon carver, rushing through a warp-speed blur of Mesozoic granitic rock and fir trees. Eyes up, sweaty palms gripping at 10 and 2, right foot mashed halfway (or all the way) to the firewall. You’re inching closer and closer to your buddy’s bumper. Brake lights flash on. A decreasing-radius left-hander rushes at you. You drop your speed, dial in for the turn. But your front tires don’t grab. Understeer takes over. Next you’re over the edge, falling, crashing, then trapped upside down in a mess of mangled metal and shattered glass, dangling by your seatbelt. If you’re lucky, you come to. Either way, here on California’s State Route 2—better known as Angeles Crest Highway—chances are it’s the Montrose Search & Rescue…

BUT FOR A TWIST OF FATE, the Gurney flap might well be known to racing fans as a Zap flap. The aerodynamic feature immortalized on track by racing great Dan Gurney in the Seventies was originally patented four decades earlier by Edward Zaparka of the Zap Development Company as a means of boosting aircraft wings’ lifting power. Airplanes had been using hinged flaps at the back of their primary flight surfaces, but Zaparka’s design swapped out the complexity of a moving version for a fixed lip protruding at a sharp angle. “With my invention,” Zaparka wrote, “the aircraft has, therefore, greater ability and is more easily controlled.” Zaparka’s version differed from the one that the massively successful racing champ would popularize in one significant way: It was attached to the bottom of the…

FORTY YEARS AGO, BMW introduced the M5. If the people who conceived and engineered the first one are still around, they retired long ago. The customers who bought it must be in their sunset years too. No one on the current Road & Track staff was writing about cars professionally in 1985. We were either living with our parents or not yet born. The new seventh-generation M5 isn’t a throwback product built for misty-eyed nostalgia. It’s made for rowdy professionals born well after BMW established itself as an aspirational brand. With a 717-hp twin-turbocharged V-8 and all-wheel drive, this is a $146,225 gas-electric hybrid sedan built to fully modern expectations. Everything is bigger these days. Too big. And kind of shameless. This particular M5 is painted the same shade of blue…