Extreme Machines

Winter Wonderland just isn't complete without the scream of a 200-plus horsepower snowmobile engine. What people did for fun in the dead of winter before they could tear up the countryside Artic Cats, Yamahas, Polarises (Polarisi?), and Ski-Doos remains a mystery.

We owe it all to Joseph-Armand Bombardier from Valcourt, Quebec. Historians claim Bombardier invented the first snowmobile in 1958 when he bolted a Ford Model T engine to a sleigh. He was 15 years old at the time, which explains everything. Bombardier eventually founded the Ski-Doo snowmobile company, and Canada rewarded him for it by pasting his face on a postage stamp.

KTM is best known here in the states for rip-snorting dirt bikes and the go-anywhere, do-anything Adventure motorcycle, but the Austrian firm also builds a 240-horsepower tarmac-terrorizing car that it now plans to bring to America - and make street legal.

Back in the days when gas was cheap, the planet was cool and a carbon footprint meant you had oil on your shoe, the easiest way to make a car go like hell was to stuff the biggest engine you could find under the hood. Few people took that basic tenet of hot rodding to greater extremes than Tom Cramer, who shoehorned a 1,350-horsepower airplane engine into a one-off custom called, appropriately, the Cramer Comet.