'A Second In The Life Of A Merlin' by Tom Fey.
The Unlimiteds go flashing through the racecourse, engines howling, air shearing, heat waves streaming. Four hundred and eighty miles an hour is 8 miles a minute, and the elite racers take about 70 seconds to cover the 9.1 mile Reno course. If you could take a souped P-51 racer flying the circuit at Reno, slow time down, and examine just one second, what would you find?
In that one second, the V-12 Rolls-Royce Merlin engine would have gone through 60 revolutions, with each of the 48 valves slamming open and closed 30 times. The twenty-four spark plugs have fired 720 times. Each piston has traveled a total of 60 feet in linear distance at an average speed of 41 miles per hour, with the direction of movement reversing 180
