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It's an ultrafast killing machine with bleeding-edge aerodynamics. Not a pet. I built and for nine years flew an airplane called a Falco, which is Italian for hawk. But it [...]

Competitive karting is CART for the rest of us. And the kids can kick your butt. So I spend my life playing with fast cars, and the first time I'm [...]

You can buy a MiG if you have the jack, but a Czech trainer is the jet to love. thirty-six years ago, the talented Czech aeronautical engineer Jan Vlcek designed [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson Tom Sines has spent 27 years on his three-wheeled, battery-powered car (which can hit 60 mph and turn in place) just to prove that electric cars can [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson Thanks to an innovative turbocharger, the 911 Turbo flexes its muscle without any hesitation YOU FLOOR THE ACCELERATOR, and one potato, two potato . . . wham, [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson THE SHORT ANSWER: Why bother? The shorter answer: Why not? Toyota says the Prius is neat because you don't have to plug it in--it charges itself when [...]

Byline: Wilkinson, Stephan 3 More Road-Trip- Friendly Routes CALIFORNIA The Route Trade the all-too-obvious Pacific Coast Highway for a trip inland to Yosemite. This is convertible country, with every California [...]

Byline: Wilkinson, Stephan Romantic road trips Where to drive your lady wild By Stephan Wilkinson Imagine a week in a foreign land with the two most exciting things in the [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson SMALL STREETS and pricey fuel have shaped the European car market to favor smaller cars. In fact, what we call a compact car is a midsize on [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson Despite all the auto-tech brain-power in this world, fully electronic brakes--which would replace brake fluid with lighter, quicker wires and motors--have yet to arrive. The long-standing obstacle: [...]

Byline: Wilkinson, Stephan Best fuzz-buster Today, most radar detectors pick up every frequency the police use to nab speeders. What makes a great one, then, is the range it covers [...]

Byline: Eric Adams; Joe Brown; Matthew Phenix; Stephan Wilkinson JEEP HURRICANE BADDEST OFF-ROADER EVER With twin 5.7-liter Hemi V8 engines and a super-stiff carbon-fiber body, the Jeep Hurricane concept truck [...]

Byline: Wilkinson, Stephan Drive 180--legally At driver-education events, novice racers put their own cars to the test at Laguna Seca, Lime Rock, and other fabled tracks You've wanted to drive [...]

Byline: Eric Adams; Joe Brown; Preston Lerner; Michael Moyer; Matthew Phenix; Stephan Wilkinson Should you get a turbocharged four or a high-tech hybrid? A slick seven-speed automatic or a sequential [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson Claim: 'Your best protection against deadly animal related accidents...wave variance tuning combines reverberation...off the road surface, creating a virtual sonic echo effect.' Reality: New York's Hudson Highlands [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson People still call them 10-speeds, yet the serious skinny-tire, drop-bar, hard-seat road bike hasn't had a mere 10 speeds since John Kerry was in college. Now 20 [...]

Byline: Eric Adams; Stephan Wilkinson; Scott Mowbray; Michael Moyer Edited by Eric Hagerman; Suzanne Kantra Kirschner GRAND AWARD 2005: DODGE MAGNUM Big Daddy's talking to you. He's saying, 'Step aside' [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson If Washington ran procurement programs the way it did the Lockheed YO-3A project, the words 'billions' and 'dollars' would never again have to be used by the [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson It was a magnificent machine, a stunning glimpse of the future made manifest in Detroit steel. The Y-Job, an experimental Buick roadster that appeared in 1940, is [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson When the hot-rodders who rolled packs of Luckies in their sleeves wanted more power, they did stuff that took plain old wrenching: advancing the distributor's timing, installing [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson In 1998, the Volkswagen Group bought Rolls-Royce and its subsidiary marque Bentley for $750 million, after a fierce bidding war with BMW. Months later, it was revealed [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson They sit on a spur of test track outside General Electric's locomotive factory in Erie, Pennsylvania, panting and grumbling like two old lions half asleep. The ominous, [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson I need to find out, once and for all, how big it is. I need to see if I measure up to the other guys, if I [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson Movie buffs looking to build a home theater typically have four choices: traditional CRT sets, LCD displays, plasma screens and hulking rear-projection units. Some are five-digit expensive, [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson When Chrysler stylists put a basket-handle 'sport bar' atop the new PT Cruiser four-seat convertible, they intended no more serious duty for the hydroformed steel hoop than [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson Many modern powerboats, to my landlubberly eye, have all the style and grace of a Motel 6 plastic bath/shower unit, with which they have much in common [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson 1 SIT RIGHT. Never mind the straight-arm posture you see in action movies. With your shoulders against the seatback, you should be able to rest your wrists [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson When a yellow two-seater called Symmetry flew for the first time in California last April, a machine that is very likely the most finely crafted handmade artifact [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson If you live anywhere near water or watch old Miami Vice reruns, you've seen go-fasts--those garish, arrogant, pencil-hulled runabouts, with their big V8s bellowing through open pipes. [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson My first truly modern car was an '85 Saab 900. I know it was modern because it had a shift-up indicator light, presumably designed to help me [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson My first flight, at the age of 12, took me from New York's LaGuardia airport to Nantucket island, a 45-minute ride in a Convair 240 that I [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson Escape alive rather than die onboard: This is a relatively new idea. Historically, it was enough to build a fantastic new machine--a three-masted schooner, a Deperdussin monoplane--and [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson Somewhere out there is a kid in a red BMW 325 with a ski rack who thinks he spanked my well-modified '83 Porsche 911 the other day. [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson Troy Irving's 18-year-old Dodge Caravan has a hell of a sound system: 72 amplifiers--you got it, 72--and 36 big 16-volt batteries to put out the 130,000 watts [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson Among water people, there are planers and there are dis-placers. The planers are the ones whose boats are not of the water but on the water, bouncing [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson I'm about to do a brake job on my daughter's fun-racer, the 1983 911 SC Porsche coupe that I spent two years turning from somebody's sorry beater [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson The Steinway Model D concert grand, a combination of musical instrument, fine furniture and high-performance engineering that weighs almost half a ton and stretches a quarter-inch shy [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson The engine makes the airplane. An automobile, even a racecar, will run perfectly well with a variety of powerplants, configurations, horsepowers and displacements. But airplanes are different. [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson A couple of years ago, I flew a big ex-Vietnam Marine helicopter, a 1,525-horsepower, radial-engine UH-34D that in its day was the Escalade EXT of the air. [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson As I bend toward the sink of the Munich hotel bathroom to rinse my face, the arching swan-neck spigot smotes me square in the forehead. I'd already [...]

Byline: Stephan Wilkinson The most insulting thing you can call a paramedic or EMT is 'ambulance driver.' He or she despises the term, for drivers are the bottommost link on [...]

Formula 1 cars are the most technologically advanced racecars on the planet. There's a reason why most American racing fans don't much care. damon Runyon wrote that sailboat racing was [...]

What's it take to pilot a floating city? Our man reports from the (simulated) bridge. Ship-handling isn't what it used to be. When I was a seaman aboard already ancient [...]