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Making more power is always the goal of modified cars, right? Well, if you think that, then it sounds like you haven't watched Marty's epic episode where he made his Levorg a better car with a smaller turbo [CLICK HERE]!  The pursuit of power is intoxicating and driving an overpowered car is definitely a lot of fun... but why are you better off moderating your turbo sizing (and making a bit less power) for a car that lives most of its life driving on the street? And why do "street cars" need such special treatment? As Marty laid out in his...

  People tend to think of cars from the '60s as being muscle cars, English sports runabouts, or exotic supercars. But, for people who love mid-size performance cars like the Mitsubishi Evo, BMW M3, Ford Sierra RS, or Subaru WRX, the car which came before all of them is the mighty Lotus Cortina.  Launched shortly after Ford's revolutionary new Cortina model hit the showrooms, legendary race car manufacturer Lotus cast a keen eye over the small Ford's bones and realised it could be a Very Good Thing to use in motorsport.    Colin Chapman and his Lotus employees came up with a DOHC head...

If you've watched the episodes where MOOG discovers the ECU is fried (CLICK HERE) and then when Marty and VAG Commander Myles fix it in secret (CLICK HERE) through a long process of electronic shenanigans. A lot of followers asked why we didn't just rip the stock ECU out and bash a Haltech in to get the car running straight away. Well, the answer isn't that simple and getting the Up! GTI swap to run and function as a car almost involved more work on laptops than physical spanner-twirling and bolt-threading.    Long-time followers of the show know we have had...

In the 1970s vehicle manufacturers cottoned onto the idea of large-scale platform-sharing to minimise development and tooling costs. Companies like General Motors had a mind-boggling number of brands (GM alone had more than 15 car brands in the '70s) under their one corporate umbrella, so it really didn't make sense to the people in charge of dollars and cents to have every brand spending the time and money to develop their own cars.  Enter the T-car platform.  Aussies, Indonesians, Japanese and Kiwis know this model as the Gemini, sold by both Isuzu and Holden since the mid-1970s. But did you know...

JDM fans and Euro-tuners typically don't have much crossover, and in each of their respective scenes they have their own front-wheel-drive King. For fans of Japanese cars it is the Honda Civic, while Euro car fans hold the Volkswagen Golf aloft. Interestingly both cars have viable claim to the FWD King crown, but who really sits atop the pantheon of legendary bum-draggers? The Civic beat the Golf to market by two years, launching in 1972 versus 1974. Japanese car fans laud the CIvic as the progenator of the modern front-drive hatch, but that ignores the BMC Mini which launched in 1959 and revolutionised how...