Professor Amos Winter had a number of PKG Fellowships working on wheelchair design with partners in developing countries and his team was an IDEAS Awardee for the Leveraged Freedom Chair (which is now sold by the B-Corp they formed, GRIT).
The day is brutally hot by Boston standards, 95 degrees with suffocating humidity, but I am feeling as cool as can be, hurtling down I-95 in the passenger seat of a rebuilt 1983 Porsche 911 — a racecar in which MIT Professor Amos Winter won his class in this year’s One Lap of America event.
We are going fast enough that when he asks how I am doing, I can do nothing but smile. I believe the Germans call this state berauschende freude – an intoxicating joy – but I would simply describe it as sublime. Either way, this experience is an exercise in the value of empirical evidence — because after this short ride, I now understand the feelings of freedom and exhilaration that Winter describes when he is behind the wheel.
Full disclosure: Amos Winter is a friend and colleague of mine with whom I’ve had the good fortune to teach alongside for several years. He is the Germeshausen Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering Research Center (aka GEAR Lab) at MIT, and while I knew he loved cars — until working on this assignment, I had no idea quite how much.
I now realize there had been signs all around. In a picture that hangs in Winter’s office, he holds his then-infant son; both are kitted out in Team Ferrari jerseys.
On the surface, the image is a concrete visual testament to Winter’s interest in motorsports and his favorite Formula 1 team. He is a self-proclaimed super tifosi, a special class of Ferrari fanatic, after all. But if you know the backstory – that the jerseys were a gift sent to Winter in celebration of his son’s birth from his friend Mirko Boccalatte, former COO of Scuderia Ferrari, well, then you know that his interest in cars and Formula 1 is deeper than superfandom.
Winter has been hard at work rebuilding the engine of a vintage Porsche 911 among other projects, a process which he documents on his YouTube site, The MITchanic. Even the wedding ring he spent two years custom-designing and fabricating for his mechanical engineer wife, Liz (who he refers to as “the coolest”), features a piece of a connecting rod from Ferrari’s 2013 Formula 1 race car.
Fast forward 15 years to when Winter was preparing to study abroad in New Zealand his junior year of college. Thinking it might be a good opportunity to see the continent, Winter bought a motorcycle online – sight unseen. Over the course of the next several months he used that to travel around the country.
“I loved the freedom it gave me,” he said. “I probably gave my mother a lot of gray hairs back in the states, but that bike gave me the ability to see so much of the country that I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.”
At the end of his international experience, he returned stateside – this time with a motorcycle in tow. Knowing he was on a lean student budget, he decided to school himself in the art of DIY motorcycle mechanics in case anything came up. He learned maintenance, how to improve engine performance, and more.
His American Easy Rider experience was short-lived, however. Everything changed after Winter found himself in a rear-end collision, which left him severely injured with a head injury that had lasting effects.
After more than a year of recovery, he knew his motorcycle riding days were over, so he found the next best thing: a convertible. Soon, he transferred the repair skills he learned on the motorcycle to his new ride. And as he advanced in his studies – earning a BA and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Tufts University and MIT, respectively – and entered the engineering profession, his avocational interests eventually informed the design focus that would guide his professional career.