Articles
The Physics Of: Airbags – Feature – Car and Driver
Let’s call it “engineered violence.” Airbags may seem soft and cuddly as long as they’re packed away in your steering wheel, dashboard, seats, or pillars, but what makes them work is their ability to counteract the violence of a collision with a structured sort of violence of their own. Every airbag deployment is literally a contained and directed explosion.
“We don’t like to use the word ‘explosion’ around here,” claims Ken Zawisa, the global airbag engineering specialist responsible for frontal airbag strategies at GM. “But it is a very fast, well-controlled chemical reaction. Read the rest of this entry »
Roock RST 650 – Specialty File – Car and Driver
We got used. And now it’s the proverbial morning after. Yet somehow we don’t care that Roock North America used us—and our usual testing procedure—to lend credibility to its modified $207,355 Porsche 911 Turbo, the Roock RST 650.
"We’ve been tuning and developing Porsche engines for years and feel like we’ve achieved impressive power levels," said Roock’s project manager, Neil Orton. "It was time for the acid test, so we called you."
Flattery aside, Roock’s Porsche-tuning business has been running under the radar for years, attracting customers via word-of-mouth and from those aware of the firm’s previous endeavors in sports-car racing. Read the rest of this entry »