No fresh air from me, sorry. Just a huge cloud of leaded fumes and probably the fastest car in the round as is my habit 
#The V-12’s Last Hurrah
In the period from WWI to WWII, the V12 was favoured in aviation. Giant V12s capable of up to 1000bhp featured in many planes that vied for dominance in the skies and transformed the landscape of warfare. But rapidly, the world changed again: the advent of the jet engine signalled the coming end of piston engines in planes. The post-WWII scarcity made V12s prohibitively expensive, and improving technology gave the kind of engines one would think to put in a car better efficiency and value in a V8. In an economy striving to rebuild around the world, a land of opportunity waiting to be capitalised upon, the car was a choice industry, but one that had to be accessible and practical. Or did it?
Truth was, humans thrive off frivolity. We derive great joy from freedom of expression, of seeking the extraordinary. Thus the option of the affordable sports car was a popular one among enthusiasts. And when there is variation, there are always extremes, and from those transcendental extremes, legends are born.
Enter the Icarus Quicksilver. A car that sought to redefine the boundaries of what was possible in the future, but also a car that yearned for the passing glory of those valiant warriors of the heavens. This was essentially a fighter plane, for the ground, using all the technologies of a plane, transformed into a car.
This was never designed to be a high volume car. It insisted on a labour intensive chassis fabrication process, and aluminium skin, a metal mostly consumed by the vast production of warplanes already. The suspension was fiercely independent, an almost unprecedented move. The engine sought to compensate for the smaller volume by incorporating a more efficient, powerful valvetrain design, which yielded 328bhp out of 6 liters flat. No expense was spared in the special compound tyres for extra grip, that gave it speed record rivalling acceleration out of the gates.
Most notably, this was a car for whom necessity was the mother of invention, necessity engendered by the insanity of its purpose. Icarus took an unprecedented scientific approach to the honing and perfection of his project. He noted that the Quicksilver became dangerously unstable at speed, so the body was reshaped and realigned. The suspension was tuned on good roads, bad roads, bumpy roads, to yield the sharpest response and greatest grip across the most conditions. The car pulled around corners so hard and so flat that the driver had to be held in his seat with a harness. He wanted it to be the absolute fastest car ever made to grace a road, and spent nearly four years slaving away at this purpose. With this single-mindedness, his efforts bore fruit:
No prizes for guessing the track, but just in case, this is Green Hell
But such perfection comes at a cost. In a market not prepared for such superlatives, and a world not prepared for the car that this was, barely a hundred were sold before Icarus went bankrupt and had to liquidate his assets. But all was not lost: the Quicksilver went on to become an overwhelmingly dominant force in races around the world, in the hands of drivers with as much skill as they had balls. It was a risky venture, and sadly, many of the original models met untimely ends. But those that survive remain stunning examples of the things people create, when they strive to the point they burn themselves upon the sun.
