If you haven’t been following Stephan Papadakis’ 1,000-horsepower 2020 Supra Formula Drift build on YouTube, now’s a great time to tune in. Seeing the car completely stripped down is neat, but watching it be rebuilt with custom-made parts is as satisfying as it is fascinating.
Papadakis has been documenting most of this build process on the PapadakisRacing YouTube channel, which is a refreshingly straightforward and educational source of automotive entertainment. Here’s his clip on computer-scanning the stripped Supra body and fitting it with a custom roll cage:
If you stay tuned through the whole thing, you’ll also see how competition-spec performance parts are being made for this car.
Can you imagine breaking a car down this completely, only to have to put it all back together again, in a way that’s never been done before? Just looking at all those holes and empty retainer clips makes me anxious. (I guess that’s why I’m blogging and not working crew for a Formula D team.)
The process of uploading the car’s skeleton to a computer is incredibly cool to watch, and it’s really neat to see how Papadakis’ team has to guess-and-check fitment on parts that are being custom made for this car for the first time.
If you’re further intrigued, check out the teardown too:
There are even more details of the build on Papadakis’ channel and we’ve blogged a few of them in the last few months here as well. It’s pretty cool of this team to share their work online, since it’s pretty clear they’re “race team” first and “YouTubers” a distant second. Maybe that’s what makes these videos so easy and informative to watch.