Stories, page 4
Buying guides, build advice and opinion from TUNERS: Japanese icons, modern BMW M, drift, Porsche, trucks, bikes and the people who build them.
Before You Buy That Skyline: Inspect the Car Behind the Photos
The touge died and drifting got better without it
The manual swap is the most honest mod in BMW culture
It makes the car slower, nobody can see it in a parking lot, and it costs thousands. That is exactly why it is the best thing this scene currently does.
Why the engine sits behind the rear axle and still works
Putting the heaviest part of the car behind the rear wheels should be a disaster. Porsche has spent sixty years proving otherwise. Here is the physics.
The cafe racer trap, and how to build something you ride
Bare tank, welded seat hoop, pod filters, untouched suspension. It photographs beautifully and gets ridden twenty minutes a month.
Mini-truckin' never died, it just stopped posting
The magazines folded and everyone assumed the scene went with them. Body drops, bed dancers and four-links quietly became the backbone of every bagged build you like.
Baja does not care about your build thread
A thousand miles of peninsula, stock Beetles racing Trophy Trucks, and a DNF rate that makes finishing the real prize. Desert racing grades on preparation.
When everything runs a ten, the quarter mile stops mattering
A ten-second car used to be a receipt for years of work. Now it is a credit check, and drag culture has quietly moved its goalposts somewhere else.
Everyone lies about what their build cost, including you
The number people quote is the price of the last big part they remember buying. The real total is roughly double, and it arrives $80 at a time.
Nobody who calls oval racing easy has looked closely enough
Traffic, tires, lines and the demands that make oval racing more complex than its outline suggests.
What a cheap C5 Corvette is hiding underneath
Rear transaxle, near-even weight split, an aluminum V8 that outlives its owners, and a price the internet still laughs at. The catch list is short but specific.
The Countach was never the best car. It didn't need to be.
The clutch is a leg press, you reverse sitting on the door sill, and none of it ever mattered. Grading the Countach on lap times misses the entire point.
FD RX-7: Plan the Car Around the Rotary
Identify the FD, interpret a rotary compression report and separate inspection, repair and build budgets.
Budget for the Drift Season, Not Just the Car
Build a season budget around actual events, tire use, transport and a reserve, with a clearly labeled six-day example.
Six BMWs the used market still hasn't figured out
The market pays for badges and ignores chassis, transmission and condition, which are the only three things that decide whether you actually enjoy the car.
The Cayman was always the better car and Porsche knew it
The mid-engine car with less power and a lower price was the better-driving Porsche, and the showroom pricing structure was a quiet admission of it.
Ten minutes with a used bike tells you almost everything
It just needs a battery. Never dropped, only laid down. Every ad runs on the same four sentences and none of them survive a cold start.
Bed upgrades ranked by how often you'll actually use them
Drop-in liners rust your bed from underneath and half the toolboxes sold are carrying one bungee cord. What earns bed space and what just photographs well.
Build a recovery kit that will not kill your friends
A kinetic rope stores energy like a drawn bow. Hook it to the wrong thing and the failure comes back through the glass. Buy the gear in this order.
How to buy a used EV without inheriting a dead battery
Depreciation made used EVs the best value in the classifieds. It also made them the worst place to skip your homework on the one expensive component.
How to buy coilovers without wasting $1,200
Coilovers are the most regretted purchase in this hobby. Ask six questions before you pay and you will never be the guy defending a bad set.
From track days to a race license: build the budget around the series
Choose the series first, then price its actual licensing, preparation and event requirements.
Which hybrid hypercar aged best? Not the one you think.
Three cars, three completely different arguments about what an electric motor is for. The trinity label flattened all of it, and one of them called the future.
Buying an Evo or an STI on a normal person's budget
Two rally homologation sedans, one shrinking pool of unmodified examples. What each generation costs, what breaks, and which one survives daily use.
Spend your first three grand in this exact order
Diff, seat, tires, suspension, angle, hydro. Build it in that sequence and you will be quicker than the guy who bought the angle kit first.
An E30 buyer's guide for everyone priced out of the M3
The homologation car became an asset class. The 325i sitting next to it in the classifieds is still a car, and it does most of the same magic for a tenth of it.
Nobody wants the front-engine Porsches. Their loss.
The 924, 944 and 928 get treated as the Porsches that do not count. That reading is wrong, and it is the last genuinely cheap corner of the brand.
Riding gear, from bare minimum to the stuff that lasts
A $90 jacket and a $250 jacket look identical on the hanger. They stop looking identical at 40mph, about one second into a slide.
Buying an OBS Chevy before the clean ones are gone
The single-cab shortbed premium is already brutal and still climbing. Where these trucks rot, which drivetrain to ignore, and why the boring one is the smart buy.
How much used 4x4 does $12,000 actually buy?
Enough for a solid axle and a locker, or enough for somebody's abandoned project with fresh paint over a rotten frame. Ten minutes decides which.