Amos Winter

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. 

As a professor, Winter teaches students to be resourceful innovators, while also stressing the need for them to be responsible community partners and user advocates. And as an educator, he resolutely dispels the adage, “those who can’t do, teach,” because his hands-on experience is what compels student buy-in.  

Global Engineering, one of the courses Winter designed at MIT, is a semester-long experience where students work in tandem with peers on product design teams, typically in partnership with regional stakeholders, to create or refine a product for a global market. These are products like the low-tech Bullkey tractor designed for rural villages in India, efficient fish feeding solutions with partner Innovasea that can be deployed in global markets with constrained economic resources, and recycling processes that can produce oil to be used in any new process requiring the substance.

While his students learn much about the process of product engineering design in the classroom and in the lab, they also learn what drives him, so to speak, which is finding elegant engineering solutions to perennial problems. As it turns out, many of those challenges have to do with transportation – both personal and commercial. 

In fact, one of his most noted projects – the Leveraged Freedom Chair (LFC) – is a perfect example of his approach to responsible design that addresses real world problems. On a trip to Tanzania, Winter was frustrated to see the ways in which mobility was limited for wheelchair users due to the lack of accessible pathways and curb cuts. He worked with numerous undergraduates and wheelchair organizations around the world to create a wheelchair designed for rough terrain. The personal vehicle incorporates bicycle technology, which makes it rugged and affordable, significantly improving personal transport for people with disabilities around the world. A company, GRIT, which sells a US-version of the chair called the GRIT Freedom Chair, also grew out of the project.

This low-cost innovation, developed with end users in mind, spurred a TED Talk that has garnered hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube alone. Winter is also the co-author of a forthcoming book Global by Design, which focuses on the need for high-value, low-cost solutions with global appeal. 

His work with MIT, and enthusiasm for Formula 1, has also put him on the radar of many big names in the motorsport world, leading to working on projects with McLaren, Tata, Mahindra and of course, Ferrari—which sponsored a student’s PhD research.

I ask how he was able to build a bridge between his work at MIT and his interest in Ferrari and he explains how stricter EU emissions standards compelled the iconic brand to enter the hybrid vehicle market. Ferrari envisioned a hybrid architecture where the electric motor could be housed within the transmission housing. That motor would then supplement power and torque, among other functions.

As Winter describes, this was a design exercise that was challenging for Ferrari because they had just come out with the LaFerrari, the company’s first hybrid vehicle. The LaFerrari added hybrid technology to the design, but it had not fully integrated it. That’s where members of GEAR came in.

The LaFerrari also retailed for a million euro, which was not feasible for a mass-consumer hybrid car, so GEAR Lab worked with Ferrari on how to integrate the electric motor into the transmission housing. The design collaboration began with student projects from the Global Engineering course, wherein they conceptualized transmission architectures capable of incorporating the electric motor, and removing the clutch between the gas engine, the wheels, and the transmission.

“The idea would be that when you launch from standstill in the car, you initially do it only under electric power” Winter explains. “[Ferrari's] response to that was like, wow, we would've never thought of a drivetrain without a clutch.”

This multi-year engagement yielded two patents for the lab, and the students working on the project were able to travel to Italy to present their work.

When I ask Winter if he has intentionally sought out projects that shared a common denominator of moving people and things from one place to another – from the LFC wheelchair to prosthetic feet (McLaren actually collaborated with Winter’s students on the design of the foot, helping with structural optimization) to designing agricultural vehicles with Mahindra for emerging economies, he expresses genuine surprise. “When you connect the dots like that, I guess there is a through line,” he says. “But I never set out to do that in a deliberate way. I just always chased my interests and curiosity.”

At home, his philosophy is no different. His two-story barn is a tinkerer’s paradise, featuring a professional garage lift that enables him to do his own maintenance, repair, and restoration. Despite the fact one might see errant parts and obscure mechanical ephemera (like the 19th century clock tower that Winter is working to restore or the World War II bomber engine that he plans to put in the family room when his son outgrows his jungle gym), there is one unmistakable clue as to the order that only an engineer’s mind can bring: the wall-mounted white board that itemizes upcoming to-dos for Winter’s various projects. Many of the items on his list are maintenance and upgrades he plans for the cars he and his wife have acquired through the years, some through fortuitous happenstance, others passed down from family.

One of those cars is a bright red Ferrari Testarossa that Winter bought nearly three years ago after a two year search from a seller located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to commemorate his tenure at MIT.

After fixing the clutch and making it road ready, father and son are now able to enjoy taking it for drives. The only problem is that sometimes it takes the Winter boys a while to get to their destination.

Turns out, it's not that often that folks see a mint condition vintage Testarossa with a child seat in the front. So it’s only right that they need to ask for a photo.

“Yesterday [my son] brought two Ferrari Matchbox cars in the Ferrari with us and he kept saying ‘same, same, same, same.’ It was really cute,” he smiles.

The thing that really strikes me in talking to Winter about his cars and his annual participation in the One Lap of America race is how much his engagement in the community aligns with his personal and professional ethos of continuous improvement — or iteration — of both machine and self. Reflecting on his success in this year’s One Lap race, his enthusiasm comes through. “I'm still proud of that. It has no real professional value to me or societal value, but it is just very meaningful to me,” he says. “And I think it comes down to that person and machine connection and pushing each other.”

This year, Winter moved up 19 places in the overall finishing order compared to last year — and his 41-year-old car beat a lot of modern cars in the process.

He lights up when he shares a piece of positive feedback about his success in this year’s One Lap race he received from a racing colleague who also competes professionally throughout Europe. “She said, you really drove the wheels off that 911 this year,” he says.

“It feels good to be acknowledged by your peers for your efforts—especially since my car is only modified in period ways. All the technology that I've used to make my car faster was available in the 1970s. My car is carbureted, not fuel injected. There's no traction control. No ABS. That’s awesome to me,” he laughs.

Winter is wearing a t-shirt printed with gear icons and the phrase “TEAM WINTER,” a gift to the family from his brother-in-law. When I ask him what’s next — his own racing team? — he thinks for a minute.

“In the next 20 years, I want to take on some ambitious building projects where I have to engineer things. I want to build a hybrid. I want to take a 1968 Dodge Charger and make it all-wheel drive and maybe run by a Ferrari engine, so it sounds like an old F1 car. I want to build a post-World War I hot rod,” he says. “There are so many things. It would be cool.” 

Next month Winter and son will fly to Germany, pick up an Audi RS2 that he just bought, and drive it to the UK to attend Goodwood Revival. Afterwards, they will pick up Liz and head to Switzerland, where he can’t wait to take the car around the Alps. The latest adventure for a self-proclaimed “gearhead.”

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