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"   &amp;quot;Let me tell you about the very rich,&amp;quot; wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, &amp;quot;they are different from you and me.&amp;quot;   &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; wrote Ernest Hemingway, &amp;quot;they have more money.&amp;quot;   And, these days, they have more carbon fiber as well.   Two fabulous machines, one automotive and the other aeromotive, are rich in this wondrous composite, and we recently had excellent opportunity to experience both. Mac McClellan, Editor-in-Chief of Flying magazine, and I drove a around a goodly portion of Arizona. Following this, I had the rare opportunity of flying second-seat in a Beechcraft Premier I business jet as we traveled from Sedona, Arizona, to Raytheon Aircraft&amp;#039;s home field in Wichita, Kansas.   What follows here includes background on carbon-fiber composites, together with our road test of the exotic SLR, my recounting of the exhilarating Premier, and Mac&amp;#039;s impressions of having piloted both.   The very rich? They have nothing on McClellan and me.   Super composites   I was writing under the freelance sobriquet D.J. Sims when I first touted the benefits of high-performance carbon fibers (&amp;quot;Materials: Automotive Fitness,&amp;quot; R&amp;amp;amp;T, May 1978). &amp;quot;The super stars of fiber reinforcements,&amp;quot; I called them back then, and they still are.   Composites of carbon fiber/epoxy offer the strength and stiffness of steel at one-fourth the weight. Even better are their fatigue characteristics: After extended cycling, such composites retain more than 80 percent of their initial strength (versus perhaps 50 percent for steels).   The tradeoff is cost, though what was once a 100:1 ratio has diminished with increased volume. These days, carbon-fiber composites show up in everything from golf clubs to tennis rackets \u2014 to the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren and Beechcraft Premier I.   Flying on the Road   The &amp;#039;s character is defined by more than its amazing performance or its $450,000 price. It&amp;#039;s a matter of heritage, innovation and personality.   The name &amp;quot;SLR&amp;quot; harks back to the mid-1950s when sports racing cars were all-conquering, piloted by the likes of Juan Manual Fangio and Stirling Moss, drivers under the tutelage of equally legendary team manager Alfred Neubauer.   The McLaren side of the house evokes modern Formula 1 expertise, not to say the genius of Gordon Murray. In fact, SLRs are built at McLaren&amp;#039;s ultra-modern facilities in Woking, south of Heathrow in the U.K. As a telling aside, this place is as surgically impressive as Beechcraft&amp;#039;s production clean-room area in Wichita.   So the SLR McLaren is doubly blessed with heritage. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-comparison-tests/reviews/a10964/2005-mercedes-benz-slr-mclaren-and-beechcraft-premier-i/>