Are you there, God? It’s me, Stef. I don’t ask for much, but I just picked up a weird rare Volkswagen race car and its humble flat-four engine is woefully broken. All I need to do is find €10,000 and I can replace it with a Mugen-Honda MF-351 V10 from a Formula One car that’s up for sale on Race Cars Direct right…
I’m sure for our regular readers who spotted my byline here, this isn’t really a difficult question. Yes, under that 1980 Austin Allegro body beats the air-cooled heart of an old Volkswagen Beetle. Actually, it’s the whole chassis, not just the engine, so maybe it’s beats the heart and resides the, um, musculoskeletal…
Engine swaps are interesting: most engine swaps are done for a pretty specific, rational purpose, like gaining reliability or improving performance. Those reasons make sense. But I’d argue that the pinnacle of engine swapping as an art comes when there’s really no rational reasons for it to have happened at all, and…
Internet icon Hert ran one of the gnarliest turbo-LS swapped drift cars in the drifting world, and recently made the switch back to rotary power. Many asked why. This should be as good an answer as any.
There’s no greater joy than taking a race car out on normal roads. Your car has the power to instantly make someone’s day—well, except the person who calls the cops because it’s too loud. But hey, it’s street legal, right? Pro drifter Ryan Tuerck went out for the day in his hood-less Ferrari 458 V8-powered Toyota GT86…
The 1970s ‘Kenmeri’ Nissan Skyline holds a very dear place in my heart, nestled in between the first tree I ever had a crush on and the time [REDACTED] while the music played in the art studio. Here is one with a Mazda 13B rotary swap. Its sound brings me great joy.
I don’t know about you, but I spend a good chunk of my free time daydreaming about cars with rotary swaps. All kinds of cars: Camrys, M3s, Corvettes. And then these guys came along with the idea for a quad-rotor Lamborghini Gallardo, which essentially sounds like automotive perfection to me.
Thank goodness we live in modern times, where stuffing a much newer, much more powerful West German engine into an ultra-light cotton-composite East German car is a real thing that can happen. Meet the most perfect brown Trabant 601S of all time: the one with an engine from a 2001 Audi TT up front.
Normally, people hate on engine-swapped Mazda RX-7s, as changing out the stock rotary engine makes the car too normal, too simple. This guy went the opposite direction, with a homebrew turbocharged and supercharged Toyota 1JZ straight six.
The owner of this car made it out of the fire. He also returned to his flaming car to get a beer. I hope that gives you an idea about how truly special this burnout is.
Nothing is a crueler feeling than seeing your car engineless, forlorn. No wait, there is a crueler feeling: having all of your coworkers torment you about it.
As a junky old VW owner, I have about the easiest time of anybody in the car world when it comes to dropping an engine. There are four bolts to undo, a handful of wires and lines to unplug and the whole thing can come out. The rest of you have a tougher time, but it can be made easier.
The BMW M2 is one of the most capable road cars on sale today, with solid handling and a powerful turbo straight six. Here’s what happens when you take all that out and turn it into an all-kevlar-and-carbon drift car with a high-revving Chevy small block.
Did you need a screaming blurple BMW E30 M3 with a ridiculously boosted 2JZ-GTE engine from a Supra in your life? Well, you do now.
If you dream of building a drift car, so much of the joy is thinking up weird and wonderful high-horsepower engine swaps to cram into the front of your old four-cylinder car. An inline-six. A V8. Whatever. All these dreams are wrong.
This car started out as a right-hand-drive, front-wheel-drive, JDM Honda Integra and its owner David Richmond figured he would do (what seemed like) a simple parts swap to make it rear-wheel drive. Simple is not how things worked out.
Ryan Shaughnessy is a huge fan of both the Toyota RAV4 as well as the Toyota Caldina GT-T—a mad station wagon made for the Japanese market only. So he swapped a 256-horsepower Caldina GT-T 3S-GTE engine into his 1998 RAV4. The best of both worlds makes for some great snow-conquering hoonage.
Sometimes, you see a car and just know that the world is a better place because that car exists. Here is the most ridiculous and wonderful Fiat I’ve ever seen, complete with obviously home-built active aerodynamics and a Yamaha R1 engine swap. It is glorious.
It’s a problem when you can’t get the wheels to stick to the dyno itself.
A Chevy LS V8 is the ubiquitous choice for an engine swap nowadays. The obvious choice. The boring choice. Still, one can dress one of these things up to absolutely scream.
