My bad, I haven’t been reading my Kevin Cameron articles lately. I thought the engineered flex had added a bit of weight here and there.

Right. Which is why they should do the AMG S Coupe as the $260,000 alternative to the Conti GT at close to $400k. Obese, ludicrously fast luxo-coupe.

It’s a flying boat. Flying boats use the main fuselage as a hull. Floatplanes/seaplanes use floats mounted under the fuselage, usually on the landing gear hardware.

There’s no application I can really think of where we, or anyone really, needs large amphibious aircraft anymore. Naval aviation tanking works well with the buddy system for immediate concerns like post-takeoff or pre-landing, or from land-based tankers out of Diego Garcia/Kadena/wherever for ranged missions; SAR is a…

Uhhh. The Saunders-Roe Princess is the largest non-Spruce Goose flying boat. 148' long, 219’6" wingspan, 55'9" tall. There’s a reason it failed and nobody built any other huge flying boats - we don’t need them. This is just a dumb technical flex by China.

Shit, and even then you need to look at two-three year old closeouts. I paid $700 for a 2016, in 2019. Got a fair bit for my buck, but 2-300 won’t get you as much bike as it used to.

Chromoly isn’t “heavy by today’s standards”; my aluminum Marin Rock Springs 1 is 35.5 pounds by my bathroom scale, the CrMo Marin Pine Mountain is 34 pounds from a quick Google. Granted, the Pine has better/lighter components (at $2100 for a steel hardtail it fuckin better!), but you’re not going to make up much more…

For which he needed his PIN number!

“Iconic”? SL 300.

The SL isn’t really their flagship anymore, hell, it doesn’t even have an AMG flavor. I’d give that nod to the S65 AMG coupe: it’s more powerful, quicker, faster, far more luxurious - and clocks in at about $90k more with all the boxes checked (for both models). Granted it’s more of a Continental GT competitor, but…

IIRC it was the only car Clarkson, May, and Hammond all agreed they unequivocally adored.

You don’t *need* one, my first car, 85 Ranger, didn’t have one and I learned fine. It also had a busted shift lever with no gates, but that’s besides the point. I shifted by sound, never blew it up and very rarely lugged it.

F1 cars reputedly do 0-100-0 in somewhere under 6 seconds, IIRC. Then again, carbon-carbon brakes that cost as much as the entire Mustang. Going fast is easy, slowing down is the hard part.

It’s really the ideal metric - how fast you can accelerate out of a corner combined with how hard you can slow down for the next one. I’d like to see it for more cars.

Weight has a literal ton of impact for braking; a car that weighs half again as much has half again as much energy to dissipate to slow down, ke=1/2mv^2 vs 1/2(1.5m)v^2. As you said, they can both lock up the tires, so it’s as simple as the math.

From what I understand, the Macca far exceeded all crash tests back then and would probably do fine right now - it’s amazing what $1M in 1995, plus all carbon fiber, does.

I like a brown chicken stock myself...it’s a little more work, but is better than white stock in every way and can sub for veal just fine.

Yeah, and if you opened it up a little with an intake/header/exhaust, cams, and an ECU it put ~200hp to the road and still pulled like, well, a truck. I had a ‘95 and that’s all I did to the motor (suspension mods baby); racing from 65-95mph on I-80 across PA was the shit. Drop it into 3rd, push at at 80, hit 4th and…