ramp #61 Love Is in the Air

Blue skies, the scent of fresh grass, the warmth of the moment – but above all: sunshine. The light of the sun’s rays, scientists say, is the decisive factor at the beginning of the warm season that triggers the merry mix of happiness hormones which energetically drive us headlong into the summer. 

And at times even gleefully beyond that.

Into the future, for example.

Spring has sprung, April showers bring May flowers, making merry in the merry month of May. You get the picture. The perfect ingredients for an optimistic mood. Finally, a chance to get out there again. And break out of rigid mindsets.

For a truly fantastic experience of out-of-the-box thinking, we recommend getting the car out of the garage as well.

That’s because driving a car is a wonderful catalyst for creative thinking. So says Dr. Shelley Carson, a researcher and lecturer at Harvard University and the author of Your Creative Brain. As soon as you get on the open road, she says, you switch to an automatic state that tunes out the conscious part of the brain so the imagination network can take over. Time to let the mind do some wandering. With insights, bright ideas and flashes of inspiration as the stimulating and exhilarating result. Loosely inspired by Paul Klee, we recognize a line as a dot that went for a drive. With us behind the wheel.

With our imagination inspired, and butterflies in the stomach.

And if it hasn’t happened already, spring is also when our secret (or not so secret) love of the automobile can blossom into a real amour fou.

Chasing the Passion: on the Road with Lamborghini CTO Rouven Mohr

It was almost exactly sixty years ago that Ferruccio Lamborghini became convinced there had to be a better solution for the clutch in his Ferrari. He also had some very specific ideas about the sorts of technical standards that should be demanded of a sports car if it is to be a lasting object of desire, capable of arousing our passions through more than just extreme design. So he went and built his own sports cars. And because the brand remains as avant-garde and ingenious as ever, we asked Lamborghini CTO Rouven Mohr to tell us all about it. In the process, he also revealed a great deal more.

Love Is in the Air: in the “Ferrari of the sky”

More than a few people fallen in love with flying. One of them is Alistair Mackinnon. We visited him in Norfolk, England, and went for a spin through the skies. In not just any aircraft, but in an MD 500D from McDonnell Douglas, built in 1982. It’s also called the “Ferrari of the sky” – which of course made us particularly curious. That and the fact that this is the same model from the TV series Magnum P.I. Of course, we also spotted a few cars while landing ...

All Summer Long: a Portrait of the Photographer Markus Henttonen

Sun, sand, the murmur of lapping ocean waves, the salt of the sea in the air and on our skin, the blue tint of the sky that will leave an indelible mark on our memories and our imagination. The longing for freedom and a simple, carefree existence, living for the moment on a warm summer day . . . That describes quite well what goes through our minds when we look at Markus Henttonen’s photographs. With Chris Rea’s “All Summer Long” playing in the background, we have a wonderful setting to talk to the photographer about – and look at – his work.

Timeshift, or: the Electrifying Power of Lamborghini

Did you know that the Revuelto is the first front-wheel drive Lamborghini? Well, in electric-only mode at least. Lamborghini has rewritten the future. And to make everything perfectly clear, it has also ushered in a new era: four power units on board, three of them electric, over a thousand horses of combined power, all-wheel drive, full carbon fiber monocoque, and the highest class of drivetrain this side of the racetrack. The bottom line: a few well-dosed jolts of electricity make the combustion engine car extra hot, not to mention totally responsive in fast curves.