When I was 10, I found a copy of Sylvia Wilkinson’s The Stainless Steel Carrot in a used-book shop in Louisville. The book chronicles the early career of racing driver John Morton, including most of his time on Peter Brock’s BRE Datsun Trans-Am team in the late 1960s and early 1970s. You can probably guess the rest: I read the book, Morton’s exploits scarred me for life, I suddenly wanted to drive a vintage Trans-Am car more than anything, blah blah blah. Instant hero stuff, not helped by the fact that I later reread the book roughly 4000 times.
And then, yesterday, I saw Morton climb out of a vintage Porsche at Laguna Seca. I was going to trump up some silly reason to talk to him—”John! Hopeless fanboy. How’s the car? How’s the day going? Will you autograph my face?”—and then I noticed the Porsche. And its… distinctly modern antennas and roof-mounted sensors and the giant box of computer gear in its footwell. And then I realized that I actually needed to talk to Morton, to find out what was going on here. My dorky little fanboy heart skipped a beat.
The car Morton was driving, a 1960 Porsche Carrera Abarth GTL, belongs to the Miles Collier collection. The sensors are part of a Stanford University research program that aims to monitor and analyze man-machine interaction. The program, dubbed Revs, is partly funded by Collier and was officially launched earlier this year. It incorporates the efforts of both Stanford graduate students and select faculty.
We spoke to two students involved with the program, as well as Morton (Ha! Morton!), to get a better idea of what’s going on. Here’s what they had to say:
What’s the goal here?
Jackie Liao, First-Year Master’s Student, Stanford: Right now, we’re really interested in human-machine interaction—what it means to be car and driver, so to speak. [The Abarth] has GPS antennas and radio links that can tell the position of the vehicle accurate up to one to two centimeters.
Christopher Lowman, Archaeology Graduate Applicant, Stanford: Basically, any time something moves in the car, we measure it. Throttle, brake, steering. Even the physiology of the driver—heart rate, brain waves, and skin conductivity.
Liao: We’re looking at how the car is doing, what it’s doing, what the driver is feeling. John is achieving things at the peak of performance and at the edge of control; what we’re trying to learn from this is how we can apply our findings and research to better active safety systems—to help average drivers achieve this kind of performance in emergency situations.
Why older race cars? Why Porsche? Why here?
Liao: Most importantly, Miles Collier is our main sponsor. He has a plethora of cars to choose from, and he’s very generously allowed us to use [the Abarth].
Lowman: Collier’s collection is almost entirely historic race cars. We’re researching the history of his specific cars; we started off with a 1933 Bentley that once belonged to racer Eddie Hall. By looking at a car’s story, we can put it into context and create, along with what the engineers are finding, a [full-fledged biography] of the car. One of the long-term goals is developing a digital museum—we’ll take the findings and the research and turn it into a package, kind of an online museum exhibit for each car.
Instrumented testing is commonplace on modern cars, but it hasn’t really been done on historics. As we do more and more cars, we’ll be able to do comparisons between them. The things that we’re learning about the cars become even more valuable the more cars we do like this.
Liao: We want to recreate the experience of driving the car in the museum. These cars are documented, but not in terms of what the driver feels.
Lowman: One of the aims of the program is to bring the study of automobiles into academics. It’s already being incorporated into courses at Stanford and will continue to be in the future.
John, this is the prototype Carrera Abarth—the first one built. What’s it like to drive, and how extensively are you wired up?
John Morton: The car, it’s very underpowered because it’s very authentic. It’s the first Carrera Abarth, it’s a 1960, it’s a 1600-cc engine. The other Abarth here and most of the ones that are running are 2.0-liter cars, with way more power. This is a nice, valuable, historic car, and it’s not very fast, but it’s still fun to drive.
They’re monitoring the car pretty elaborately. They did something like an EKG at the [Rolex Monterey Motorsports] Reunion in August. Today and yesterday, they started doing my brainwaves at the top of my head. I’m not sure what they’re gonna find up there [laughs], but that’s what they’re doing.
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