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Ferrari, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Koenigsegg, McLaren and countless other supercar and hypercar manufacturers have copied one basic design trend when building their mind-bogglingly fast cars: they stick the engine behind the driver. But, when most cars leave the engine up front, why would you move it?  Marty discovered how well mid-engined cars handle when he built up his Toyota MR2 for the $10,000 MR Battle. While the 90s JDM legend wasn't great to work on its handling was next-level, even for a bloke used to Subaru all-wheel-drive grip. The reason behind MR being used in gun go-fast cars is twofold: packaging and weight...

Turbo cars are maaaad, and that's a fact. MOOG has taken his slow-but-sporty BRZ and made it a beaut street car with the addition of the Gen2 Garrett GTX2864 turbocharger bolted to the SME kit he fitted IN THE LATEST EPISODE.  However, while turbos are everywhere today that wasn't the case in the Back In The Day Times of yesteryear. Settle in with a hot cup of Milo, kids, as Uncle Workshop Manuel takes you back to the scary days before turbochargers were everywhere and everyone knew how rad they are.  Turbochargers, or turbosuperchargers as they used to be known, were...

Have you ever been working on your car and gone to fit a part, only to discover you can't do up a bolt or a nut won't thread onto your car? You're probably trying to put the wrong format fastener into play, which is like trying to speak a foreign language to a deaf person at the Drive-Thru. Car-based fasteners are generally sized referring to the diameter of the thread, and the thread count (also referred to as “pitch”). The pitch is – roughly – the shape and spacing of the threads, which affects how they tighten down. But there are...

If your mad nugget has a manual transmission and you're planning on owning it for a while, then you're probably going to have to change the clutch at some point, just like Moog did in the latest episode HERE. But what is a clutch, how does it work, what upgrades can you do, and why does Moog put fish sauce on his ice cream? I'll aim to answer most of those questions below!  Basically a clutch is a mechanical linkage that transfers the power of your engine to the wheels, and is made up of three basic parts: the flywheel, the...

Winding a bolt in only to have it cross-thread is one of the most frustrating experiences you can have while working on your mad ride.  Fittings (bolts and nuts) are designed to have different size threads, and when trying to fit an incorrect bolt into the wrong threaded hole the mis-matched threads gall on each other and this is where the term "cross-threading" comes from. Sometimes, old bolts have been over-tightened, or get rusty and damaged, which stops the threads from cleanly meshing together as intended. Once a bolt or an internal thread is galled-up it needs to be re-cut (also known...