This time on Roadkill, we give the ultimate middle finger
to the guys who stole our mini truck.
That's right. The Mazdarati is back, version 2.0,
and this time it's no rip off.
[engine backfiring]
[tires screeching]
[theme music playing]
[engine revving]
To answer one of the most common questions I get from fans,
no, the Mazdarati never came back after being stolen.
So we're gonna right that wrong with a new Mazda
and a Hot Rod Garage project car
in the Super Street garage.
[Mike] I know. This is perfect, right?
[David] This is gonna be so good,
but I think we need to start with sort of the story.
There's a lot of background here.
Season four, I surprised you
by buying a 1974 Mazda Rotary pickup truck.
This thing is awesome.
[David laughs]
[Mike] This is the greatest truck ever, isn't it?
And I'll never forget the seller who told us
he got thrown out of the drag strip
-because it wheelied and ran tens. - [tires screech]
-Neither of which it ever did, even when we had it. - [David] Exactly.
And the reason he thought that that might be true
is that that truck had an Oldsmobile 455
on an early Toronado transaxle in the bed.
And so we drove the thing around.
Remember it overheated, absolutely brutally?
[Mike] Yeah, we made our own ducts for the roof
to duct down to the radiator, which totally worked.
-[David] It did. -[Mike] It stopped overheating.
-[David] Yeah. -[Mike] We autocrossed it.
Come on, baby.
[David] We drove it to the drag strip at Chandler, Arizona.
We put a 180 shot of nitrous in it.
Even with the 180 shot, it wouldn't go tens.
It went 11.20.
-Yeah. -At kind of a big mile an hour.
I think it ran like 120 something.
Yeah, and it leaked out of every orifice on that pass,
the transaxle, the engine, everything all over the drag strip.
And then it got stolen.
[David] Actually, our crew guys had it on a trailer
in Blythe, California,
and security cam footage shows the thing getting stolen off the trailer
-and it never came home. -No.
[David] Years later, I bought a '39 Ford, two-door Sedan
and we road tripped the thing through New Orleans, which was a lot of fun
and ended up in Texas where we found this,
the replacement Mazdarati.
It is another, I think, '74.
Maybe it's an earlier one. I'm not sure.
There's something about the cab size difference
in the different model years of these things.
-[Mike] The last year of it had a longer cab. - [David] Is bigger.
[Mike] Right, which I would have loved to have had
because I never fit in the Mazdarati very well.
[David] But we sat around and bench raced in that episode
about what kind of engine we wanted to put in the thing.
And then the answer came actually from a leftover project car
from the other Motortrend show called Hot Rod Garage.
Now, this vehicle is actually kind of genius.
It's a 2006 Impala SS.
And those things are factory with a 5.3 liter V8
that is sort of based on an LS motor.
They've got some differences
like generally there's no starter motor on it,
the bellhousing mold pattern is different, stuff like that.
[Mike] It's mounted sideways in the front of the car.
-[David] All of that. -[Mike] It's very weird.
But what it means is that you can get another
another one of those complete engine and transaxle packages
and throw it in the trunk,
which is what Tony and Lucky did
on a couple of episodes of Hot Rod Garage.
And the whole goal was to make the thing run in the nines.
But like the Mazdarati, not running in the tens,
they never got it into the nines.
It went 10:16, and it was so sketchy
that not even Tony Angelo would drive it down the track again.
The build is amazing.
-I'm thrilled about it. -[David] It's clever.
[Mike] He was not thrilled about driving it down a drag strip,
and I totally understand.
So why not do our own version of that and get equally scared?
[David] The reason we're able to part out the Hot Rod Garage car,
which, honestly, kind of hurts us,
is that I heard that Motortrend was going to scrap it.
And we're like, we can't let that happen.
So we figure that the Impala is the perfect donor
to put an LS engine on a transaxle
in the bed of this Mazdarati just like the original.
I think the first thing that we're gonna do is get the Impala
and actually hack the engine and transaxle out of the back of it.
I'm... I can't cut that car.
-I'd feel bad. -[David] We can make Lucky watch.
I'm gonna cut the roof off. It'll help. Ready?
-[Mike] Really? -[David] Yep.
Both of us feel really bad about taking apart
our buddy's project car, but its destiny is sealed.
It's going to the junkyard.
There we go.
[David] Now you can get a better look at what they've done here.
I think the engine that's in the front is from a GXP.
This one's actually from another Impala.
This is the original engine those guys installed.
The front ones been blown up, I think three times.
So hacking.
-That actually works. [chuckles] -Nice.
There we go.
[Mike] I won't say it looks better, but it's easier to work on.
[David] I bet it's faster.
I don't think I mentioned to you
that both of these engines are turbo charged.
See the inner coolers?
It made 940 or 980 horsepower on a four wheel dyno,
which means each engine is making less than 500 hp under boost,
and they run on E85.
They hopped them up a little bit.
You can see it's got a Holley Sniper EFI intake manifold on it.
Factory 90 millimeter throttle body, which is bigger than
what the LS4 stock engine would have had.
So you're telling me that you could have made
the same power with heads and a cam on this motor
-as you did with turbo? -[David] Yes.
The Mazdarati could aim to be quicker with one motor
than the Twinpala was with two.
Ouch.
-I didn't say that. -[David] That would mean it would run nines
'cause this around 10.16.
The great thing about this is if it blows up, it's not our fault.
-Right. -This was used when we got it.
Yeah, we can explain that off.
-It could already be broken. Who knows? -[David] Yeah.
Yeah, but you know what?Hot Rod Garage never blows up LS engines, so...
-All right. Ready? -Yep.
[sawblade whirring]
Slaughtering all this actually gave us
crystal clear vision on what to do.
We decided that we're going to cut this thing
right ahead of this main hoop of the roll bar
and cut through the rocker panels,
and then pull the bed off the Mazda
and figure out how to attach this whole thing to the back of the truck.
And we may change our minds later.
But I think we're like, trying to cut the least
to begin with and save the most.
-I love this plan. -Yep, I think it's pretty good.
Here comes the last one.
-[loud clang] -[both laughing]
-You just bisected an Impala, bro. -Uh-huh.
Last time we tried to break a car in half, we used a lift
and it was really violent and unsafe.
-[metal creaking] -I hear stuff.
[Mike] Nice creaking.
[loud crash]
This is much better.
[chuckles] It's starting to go now.
Oh wait, the air inlet tube is holding it together.
Okay, that's loose.
[metallic groaning]
[loud pop]
Oh those tubes.
-[Mike] Was that brake line or a fuel line? -[David] Brake.
Hey, look at it roll.
[laughing]
It's a lot easier to take them apart.
What is that? 1,000 bucks worth of gauges in that thing?
We should take them out.
-[Mike] A couple grand worth of EFI sitting there, too. -[David] Uh-huh.
Yeah, we'll save all that.
[Mike] This is great because like the ECU plugs in. It's a few wires.
The fuel system's still sitting there.
-[David] Yeah. -[Mike] Wow.
HRG did all the work for us.
Thanks, HRG. [laughing]
[David] All right. Tomorrow I think we get this garbage out of the way.
We'll strip all the good parts off of it
so it doesn't go to waste.
And then we've got the Mazda on the lift
where we will pick the bed up
and figure out how to take this and [claps] slam it together.
Clearly we're not gonna waste anything.
[David] Nah, we're gonna be done early.
Yeah. You want to, like, go to the beach on Wednesday or something?
I was gonna say, let's get a beer,
-but okay. -Oh, that's a good idea.
Mental warming led to a lot of brainstorming last night.
-Did you see what I did? -[gasps] Poet.
I guess we figured out how we want to do this.
We're gonna put it up in the air and pull the bed off.
And then think about it from there.
A lot of measuring, done a lot of butchery.
This truck's actually pretty rare.
When did they make them? '72-'74? Something like that.
Three to five.
Three to five, that sounds right.
Somewhere in that neighborhood.
But it's a Mazda pickup that came with rotary engine,
and not all of them were that way.
And the body style is actually different with the rotary.
It's got the little fender flares.
[Mike] Yeah, Ford Courier guys are bummed
'cause they don't have the flared bedside.
I don't think they had the battery box either.
[David] This one didn't have an engine in it when we got it.
Hit it just a little so I can...
There, it's out.
-Great. -I think this is the last one.
Yeah.
We think all the fasteners are off the bed.
So we're gonna put it down on the ground and list some manpower.
We're gonna have producer Taylor
and apprentice Mason come in.
-Okay. Great. -Ready?
[groaning] All right.
And down.
Wow, this is crusty.
Now the fun part.
We have the bed off, obviously, and we're going to roll the back half
of the Twinpala next to our not really rotary powered truck anymore
and eyeball how do we make this to that.
We rolled this over just to sort of eyeball everything.
I've got it lined up on the centerline of the axle.
It looks like it fits perfectly.
We're going to measure a bunch.
Our plan is going to be to just weld that right to here
after we cut this frame off,
and obviously it's going to need
a lot of triangulation to work.
This is-- Basically outside of the tube to outside the tube is 56.
-Yeah. -And outside of this frame is like 44.
Yeah. The roll bar just barely fits in the bed, right?
Yeah, it's just inside of the bed rail
-by like, three quarters of an inch. -[David] Okay.
How are we going to weld it all in
and triangulate it and make it stay there?
[surfer rock music playing]
[David] We just spent a very depressing hour
of conversation and convoluting
and conversating.
And we're not going to be able to attach
the back half of the Twinpala
to the back half of the Mazdarati.
-How come? -Gravity.
[both laughing]
There's no way to attach it and triangulate it
and make this thing actually good.
So what we're going to end up doing
is parting that whole thing out
and installing the engine and transaxle
on the factory cradle in this frame,
which means we're going to have to redo...
-Everything? -[chuckling] Everything.
We can reuse everything, but we'll be remounting everything.
We really thought we were just gonna be able
to roll this up to the back of the truck.
Cut. Cut. Weld, weld.
[blows raspberry] Let's do burnouts.
It looked promising, but instead, I think we're about to embark
on the biggest fabrication project
you've ever seen on Roadkill.
I'm standing here cutting out everything that doesn't need to be here.
So I'm gonna remove this cross member.
I'm gonna leave that one so that the frame hangs together a little bit.
These brackets are going to be in our way,
obviously the gas tank's got to go out.
I'm doing the dirty work.
He's doing the unbolting organizational work.
[saw whirring]
Cool.
That's off.
Okay. All this good, fab work gone.
It is a nice piece,
and we have liberated the parts that we actually need.
This is an LS4.
It's a 5.3 aluminum head engine,
and those guys left the stock cam in it.
Sniper intake, 90 millimeter throttle body, headers and stuff.
The transmission is actually transaxle and brand new Gearstar unit.
But now we have to figure out how to get all of this
under the Mazda.
-[Mike] We're revolutionaries. -Speed it.
Look at that. Buh-bye.
Now all we gotta do is slide that under this. Car'll build itself.
See? And now that it has no camber control,
they're just gonna flop everywhere.
-[David groans] -[Mike] You ready?
Yes. Let's go.
It's working.
-Oh, this is exciting. -[chuckles]
-How's that? -Let's lower it down.
-It's probably fine where it is. Just tack it. -[Mike chuckles]
We freed the whole engine and transaxle
and factory Impala cradle out of the Twinpala roll cage.
And now we've got it actually underneath the Mazda
and, you know, it's that moment
where you have hope because it looks kind of cool.
[Mike] Well, this is our lose the shot moment.
Here's where we're at.
The truck isn't at ride height.
In fact, it's pretty far above where ride height should be.
Although the tires are touching the ground, there's no engine,
there's no weight on the front end of this.
Ideally, this truck should sit probably another two inches lower.
[David] Um, we're at a "you can't get there from here" moment.
The front mount for the cradle needs to move up so much
that we basically have to cut the entire frame off,
which puts us right back to the point that we were at
when we were considering to put the entire back half
of the Twinpala up against the back of the truck,
which we can't do because we can't build a roll cage
and triangulate the suspension
because of bunch of rust and the frame's too narrow.
You can't get in and out of the cab.
So for all of those reasons, this might not happen.
Oh no, I just fixed it.
Hey, Mike, just fixed it.
[Mike] Let's just cut the mounts off and make new ones.
[David] And-- On the aluminum cradle?
[Mike] Yeah. These don't have to be where they're at.
Now we're talking about modifying the aluminum cradle.
Stay tuned.
[Mike] It's a new day, which means we have new opportunities
for solutions to our problems.
The truck is a mini truck.
The drivetrain came out of a mid-sized car.
Essentially, we couldn't get a ride height that we wanted for this truck
because our cradle was already sitting against the frame.
Without the front wheels touching the ground, really,
without weight in it, without the thing loaded, without it even lowered
it was not gonna work.
So while we stared at this, we had two options.
It was either cut the cast aluminum mounts off the cradle,
relocate them, weld them back together.
Not exciting because it's cast aluminum.
That's tricky to weld.
Or we treat the mini truck like a mini truck,
and we step notch the frame.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna weld
a piece of box tubing on top of the original frame 360 degrees.
Then we're going to cut out this section of frame under it.
Plate it, box it.
That gives us room to move this all the way up here
about four and a half inches, which will level our cradle.
Now is it ideal? No.
These wheels stick outside the bedsides anyway,
so we really can't lower the truck too much right now.
So for us, this is an excellent solution to the problem,
and it allows us to move forward
because once this is mounted,
then we can mount the back of the cradle.
Then we can start figuring out how to make it run again and hopefully do burnouts.
Step one, take this, transfer it to metal,
cut the metal, put the metal here weld it together.
[rock music playing]
Finnegan is making, like, the support braces in here for the frame.
And I've cleaned up and removed
all of the brackets and everything.
Now I've got to pick the truck up,
roll the engine out,
clean up the inside of the frame,
and then we'll be able to come back in and light weld the hole.
[Mike] Okay, these are our framed gussets.
We are about to MIG weld these
to the top of the original frame section,
and once this is fully welded and capped,
we'll go back underneath and cut out all the material we need to remove,
so that we can then mount our cradle level.
[welder crackling]
[Mike] Victory!
[David] We're done with our, like, weapons grade reinforcement here.
And next we had to figure out where we're going to hack
so that we can take this engine cradle
and move it as high as we can in the frame
so we can get the truck as low as we can.
And so Mike just measured it out
and drew these cut lines right here.
And I think we're going to pick it up,
roll the engine back out,
and then I will hack that.
Yeah, buddy.
Wow, this is a big moment right here.
We have notched our frame,
and before we box it all in and reinforce it,
we're going to roll the whole setup underneath it,
lower the truck down to what I think is ride height,
and get our first good look at how this is going to fit in here.
We just step notched our mini truck.
This is gonna be the first time we see the actual ride height
because now that engine cradle is gonna sit up into those notches.
Okay, Go back just a little bit.
-[exclaims] -[Mike] So this needs to go down.
[David] Okay, I'm gonna go down.
-[Mike] Yep. Mm-hmm. -[David] Ready?
-It's about there. -Okay.
-Bring it down more. -Now we lower the truck more.
Yep.
Yes! That's what we need.
-[Mike] Much happier. -[David] Yep.
We got it much lower in the back with that notch.
This is actually starting to be something.
-This is exciting. -Yeah.
-This worked. -It's way better.
Man, like, make sure we have the wheels
centered on the chassis where it's supposed to be.
Yep, we could just draw a line here,
weld the tube in, and then bolt it.
Right now, I think we could measure
from the-- Some reference point on the frame
back to the center of the bolt hole
and make sure it's the same on both sides.
Yeah.
[hammering]
[David] Oh man, it's been some long days,
but this is a moment of victory.
We finally got these notches in the frame, boxed them in.
We've got our ride height where we want.
We're going to split. I think we're mounting the engine tomorrow.
This is going to be cool because it's gonna be under the bed rail.
Like no one's going to want to steal our truck
because you're not going to see headers sticking out, you know.
Unless we lose our mind and mount the turbos up here someday,
nobody will know.
-In tribute to the original Mazdarati. -Yeah.
I love that you suggest it.
Now I don't have to talk you into it.
That's great.
-[groans] -I'm gonna go home and sleep.
[both laugh]
[David] This morning we've got the engine back out of the truck.
We've got to make this whole thing square
in the truck this way and even side to side.
So it's essentially a 40-inch bolt spread from front to back.
And then the centerline of our lower ball joint is 13 and five-eighths.
I already marked the centerline of our wheel wells.
-Yep. -And go forward 20...
-[David] Six and three-eighths. -26 and three-eighths.
That's where we put our holes, and then we just have to measure the width here
between those two front lines.
-Okay. You're on the dot? -I am on the dot.
So that's 42 and five-eighths.
It's close. It's within an eighth.
-Okay. -That's good enough for who it's for.
All right.
You know, there's no chance this is gonna be perfectly square, right?
They'll never know.
What? Are you gonna get a ruler out on your TV? No, you're not.
-No. It's gonna be great. -That's right.
So we know about where our cradle needs to go.
We even have marked the holes in our frame.
Now this is box tubing, and if I put a hole in here
and I put a nut through here and a bolt
and I just start cranking on it,
it's actually going to crush this.
So what we're gonna do is drill
an even bigger hole than we need for our bolts,
slide this tubing through it,
have some of the tubing stick out on each end,
and then we're going to weld it precision around there.
So now when we tighten our bolt
that's going through this tube,
it's trying to crush this tube, not this tube.
And this tube, that's not getting crushed.
It's gonna be sturdy. You know why?
Because we care, right.
We cut these notches for that cradle large enough
that we decided we could go back in there
and triangulate this and make it all stronger.
[Mike] And we are close.
We can now put our bolts in to guide us.
Okay, now you can jack it up.
There you go. Keep going.
Oh, yeah, plenty of all-thread.
Okay, we're there. We can do nuts and washers on this side.
[David] We're attaching this with all-thread right now,
just sort of temporarily.
And we've got grade 8 bolts on order.
[Mike] Yeah. Now we can go down and then figure out
where we want to make the rear crossmember.
Pallet jack gone for the last time.
-[Mike] Mm-hmm. -Great!
All right, I'm gonna go cut up the Twinpala cage
and bring it in here and see if it's actually gonna work.
If it does, it's gonna save us a ton of time.
Yeah.
Sawzall.
This is the structure out of the back of the Twinpala.
Here's my thought process.
If we can take advantage of the fabrication
that they've already done,
then it establishes the pickup points here
for that engine cradle
and also, maybe more importantly,
where the struts attach.
Now, if they had the struts attached in the wrong place,
and that's why they had really bad handling problems,
then we will also have really bad handling problems.
But don't tell Finnegan that right now.
Ready?
Dude, if this works, this is gonna be so cool.
It's gonna save a lot of time.
-Oh-ho-ho-ho! -[Mike] Oh, dude.
[David laughing] It's gonna work.
We have to shorten this bar,
which we can then weld to this angle right there,
and then it's gonna attach.
Eh... the only problem with that
is this is real close to the angle it needs to be at.
Well, even if this down bar doesn't work,
all of that works.
Yeah. And this gives us whatever, you know,
crazy alignment they had in the back of their car.
-Right. -Which either works or doesn't.
So I say we slowly trim this until that matches.
I'm all about doing things slowly.
What we're gonna attempt to do is land these original bars
on the top of our frame and weld it up.
In the back right now,
we've got a little bit of angle going on to the mount.
So we need to set that down.
And that will happen if this bar moves down.
So I'm gonna try and trim it right here on both sides.
Nailed it.
Nice.
[David] Wow.
I got a huge gap on this side.
The whole cradle can roll forward.
Okay, so just the inside of this needs to be trimmed.
We did it. This was a huge time-save.
We made this back of the Twinpala work.
So Mike's going to zap it on
and then we can bolt struts on.
We can bolt struts in now.
I got a nut on mine. We just got to tighten it.
And we need a nut in your donut on yours.
[David] Yeah.
More.
And down slowly.
Down slow.
Yep.
Okay.
The weight of the vehicle is now on the struts
-if you keep going. -Yep.
[David] Whoo, that's on the ground.
Yeah. Oh, this is gonna ride good, dude.
Great.
We still need to make some supports
so that the back half of it is attached to the Mazda.
-I'm gonna sleep way better tonight. -Me too.
Knowing this is like in there, you know?
Yep.
[Mike] I don't know what day it is,
but yesterday went really good.
We got our drivetrain pretty well locked in place,
except for some critical bracing.
Right now, I'm gonna make tubes
that will be fish mouth on both ends
to connect this factory crossmember
down to the one that the guys at Hot Rod Garage made.
We're gonna use a technique called fish mouthing,
which is cutting and contouring the tubing
so that when it meets another piece of round tubing,
it fits...
like this.
The easiest way to make that opening is with a hole saw
that's the same size as the tube diameter.
I don't have that. So we can't use that.
But what I can do is I can set my tubing up,
I can look at it right there,
and I can use the tube to mark this other tube like that.
Once I've marked it like that,
then all I got to do is grind the contour.
And once you've ground the contour,
which is what I did here,
these two things fit together like butter.
I made a couple of fish plates.
They'll go vertically like this.
Mike's welding one on right now.
Basically, they're overlapping
where a bunch of joints of metal come together
to add some rigidity to that frame.
The Impala has a factory motor mount
that goes right here and attaches to the firewall,
or something like that.
And Hot Rod Garage had made one,
but it was too short for our application.
So I took theirs,
cut it in half, and then we got a sleeve,
a piece of tubing that fits fairly nicely over their unit right there.
And we're going to use that to extend this piece.
When you do that,
it's a good idea to drill holes in it like that
so that you can do what's called rosette welds in there.
And you'll notice that I put one end here
and then the other end is 90 degrees out.
I don't know why. It just seems like the strong thing to do.
So I will slide that over there,
slide this over that,
land that right there on the frame.
That's ready to tack.
[Mike] Here we go.
I'm pretty much burned out on cutting, grinding, welding,
anything that involves throwing sparks at my furry body.
I don't know why I haven't caught fire
or spontaneously combusted.
That's how much work we've done
to fortify the chassis of our mini truck
to accept the drivetrain of the Twinpala.
It is gusseted, front to back, side to side.
It's fixed, man. It ain't falling apart.
All right, let's get all this in there.
I don't know why after ten hours,
it feels like I did way more
than I can cross off on this list.
And maybe it's because somebody else
already crossed some of things off.
I'm gonna cross them again.
Yay, us.
I'm gonna go outside and fart.
Hi there.
Day 6.
He's finally got the bracing done.
So then when it's torque-steering really badly,
at least the engine's not flopping around.
Not gonna fall out.
Yeah.
[David] I'm gonna fiddle around with stuff out here
-and you're gonna do the... -Shifter.
Drift handle and shifter.
-Yeah. -Perfect.
I win. This is not the right way to do this.
But it's done.
Mmm, eh...
Like it never happened.
Boom, and it moved it away so we can put our cable through
probably right about here,
gaining us a few precious inches.
[David] You've got to be flexible and creative.
Our Mazda has a braking system
that, apparently, you can't buy any parts for.
We found Duralast brake pads,
but everything else is nothing.
And we want to drive this thing fast.
So here was the solution.
Finnegan came up with this. It was great.
We're gonna put a drift handle in it,
and for the time being,
all we're going to have is rear brakes.
So I have to mount this thing in here,
put this master cylinder on there,
we're gonna plummet with soft line the whole way,
which you're not really supposed to do.
All right, let me put this together.
I'm doing this and the shifter
because I went as far as I could on the EFI wiring
and Finnegan snipped most of it out of the other vehicle.
So he knows what wires go where and I don't.
[exhales]
[imitating engine revving]
[imitating brakes squealing]
We have a shifter.
-Done. -[David] Yay!
Mike is working on hanging the ECU in the cab
and dealing with some other little wiring.
And so I'm gonna jump in and do a radiator.
We had planned on putting the radiator up front,
but we're gonna save a lot of time right now
by hanging it back here,
because it already has the pipes all lined up.
So I just need to get some angle iron
and weld it across here,
just make ourselves sort of a quick-and-dirty deal.
All right, this is a Holley Terminator X ECU.
It's a pretty cool unit.
This is our ignition system because we are coil on plug.
This is our transmission controller.
This is also our electronic fuel injection.
Now, a couple of things you need to know when you install one of these.
Obviously, you don't want it wet.
You don't want it to get really, really hot.
You don't want to just lay it on the floor
underneath the front seat, either.
So I bent this panel up
out of some random aluminum I found laying around.
And we're gonna bolt it right here to the rear cab wall.
It will fit behind the seat.
The wires will route nicely right up there.
There's J1A.
B goes here.
This is power and ground,
which goes directly to the battery,
not the starter, not the alternator,
nowhere else. Directly to the battery.
[David] We've resorted to butchery
as if that isn't what we've been doing all along.
I just like scabbed in a couple of pieces of angle iron right here.
And if you think that's cheesy,
wait for the next step.
You know, a ratchet strap is really just a glorified zip tie.
Oh, man, this is gonna be good.
[Mike] Two straps.
That's how you know you care.
Yeah.
[David] Day 7. And if you thought my radiator installation was butchery,
wait until you see what happens today
as we take a flamethrower to even our standards.
Our goal was just to do a burnout,
and there's a lot of things we could do better.
But that doesn't equal burnout.
So ratchet straps, everything now. [laughing]
Whatever it takes to get it out that door and spin the tires.
That's pretty much what's gonna happen.
I am going to somehow install the old fuel system,
which-- what is that?
Like a 3-gallon cell, maybe 5.
-That's 3. -3?
It's only gonna get us through a burnout.
I think you do need to put the weights
on the front cross-member,
because we know from the original Mazdarati
that it won't even steer inside the shop
without weight on the nose.
It's pushing.
Aaah!
Whoa! [laughing]
So, yeah, I'll start on the weights.
You do the fuel system.
Then that just leaves the gas pedal.
-Yeah. -And the battery.
This is the key to having steering
in your rear-engined mini truck.
What I'm gonna do is take the bar
that these would go on normally,
sink it through the front crossmember,
where normally there'd be a motor,
weld it in place and stack... I don't know,
three or four of these,
and cross my fingers that's the exact right amount of weight
to allow us to steer and stop.
Someday, we'll have front brakes.
Not today.
Let's see, 95, 140, 190.
Done.
I wonder if it lowered the truck.
That's still gonna need a little something something.
[makes swooshing sound] Ratchet strap.
Security.
Are you ready for the magic?
Yes.
All right. We're gonna zip-tie this over here.
[Mike] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
What I like about this is not only is it SFI approved,
but it really takes the focus off the ratchet straps
and puts it on the zip ties where it belongs.
Wow, that's butch.
Meanwhile, I'm running brakes.
Look how sturdy it is, though.
I'm shaking the whole car.
-Yeah. -I'm calling it good...
enough for who it's for.
[David] Do not do this at home.
We're making progress.
Finnegan just spent a while making sure
that our tune-up was okay in the Holley computer.
The last element of the EFI that I need to deal with
is the fly-by-wire pedal.
There's no cable from the throttle pedal on this deal.
It actually just is controlled from the ECU. And back there,
the throttle will open and close based on this.
It's interesting that they've got this doubled up from the Twinpala
when they had two engines in it.
So it was actually reading two different sensors
to open two different throttles.
That's kind of a handy gas pedal.
[Mike] Dave's putting the gas pedal in.
I'm putting the coolant in.
Gettin' close.
Okay, that's probably really uncomfortable,
but it's in.
Bolted it to the stock location.
All right. Season 13, we finally learned
that vehicles need gasoline to run.
[Mike] Is this really gonna happen?
I've never heard it run.
We may have gone through all this trouble only to find out...
you know, the motor's junk or the trans doesn't shift.
-Hey. -[laughs]
Which would be really funny.
Who are you accusing of what?
We're gonna try to fire it up.
Yes.
[engine struggling]
Okay, leave the ignition on for me.
[David] Ignition's still on.
Finnegan's gonna check the computer
and see if we can see what's going on.
There must be a link so we can see it live.
Try it again.
[engine struggling]
-[Mike] Oh. -Does it show fuel pressure?
It's telling me we don't have fuel pressure.
Well, yeah, the pump's not running.
Oh, wait.
It helps when you ground it.
Oh, I thought you did.
I thought I did, too.
I think we're cool.
Yep, go for it.
All right. Back on and cranking.
[engine cranking]
-[engine starts] -That wants to run.
[David] It runs!
Hup, something didn't like it.
Right to the wood, Dulcich.
-[David] Of course. -Okay.
Fire it up again. Got to let it warm up.
[engine starts]
[David] We made it run.
This thing was on an E85 tune-up.
And E85 requires a lot more fuel than gas.
So...
Uh, we took like 50% of the fuel
out of the base fuel map.
[David] Bingo, and it runs way better.
We think it's actually good enough to drive at this point.
We're going to bleed the brakes.
I think tomorrow...
Burnouts.
[David] Drink.
Drink.
Okay. Up. Now open it.
[Mike] It's opened.
-And down and holding. -Ooh, there we go.
-[Mike] Closed. -And up.
Open.
Hey, yesterday, I promised everybody
that it would run late today.
-You did? Oh, high five. -Yeah! Yeah.
Nice. First time ever.
-[Mike] All right. Yeah. -Lived up.
We're not necessarily proud, but we're done.
[Mike]When you say it out loud, I mean, you're right. Yeah.
[David] We'll make it way better next time.
Ready to go do burnouts?
[Mike] Yeah.
[David] All right. We're gonna do burnouts.
[Mike] Oh, we gotta check the brakes first.
[David] Oh, yeah. Let's do that.
All right, just roll a little.
-Oh, that works. -Oh, we got brakes.
Yeah, that's Finnegan style right there.
Yep.
-Oh. -[David] Ooh, spunky!
Let's see if it steers.
Oh, it steers.
It's not skidding around.
All right, I'm gonna chock the front wheels
and we'll try a burnout.
So far, the brake works, the steering works,
and it seems really peppy
in just the tiny bit that we hit it.
It's gonna push it.
[Mike] I think it just ran it over.
[David] Are you willing to do just a... mash it and go?
-[Mike] Yeah. -Okay.
-[Mike] I don't know if it'll do anything, but. -Let's do that.
[engine starts]
[David] Wheel chocks didn't work.
We're just gonna mash it.
I can't tell what happened there.
It didn't squat.
-Yeah, it actually-- it hooks really well. -Right.
[Mike] All right. Try it again?
[David] Yep.
Yeah, it just hooks. It doesn't wanna do a burnout.
If it would run right...
it would be fast.
This thing seems to just wanna boogie.
We're matting it, and it's barely hazing the tires.
It's mostly just accelerating.
It makes no power.
While we feel vindicated that it runs
and drives and hooks up
and it's ready for the next episode,
where we turbo it and put a bed and everything,
uh, we still need a burnout.
We need a burnout.
I've got water on the rear end,
and I'm gonna throw a wheel block in here.
I've already got one on the other side.
We're going to see if we can improve the tire smoke situation.
I think you're good.
[Mike] Okay.
[engine starts]
[David laughing]
Well, there was a little tire smoke.
Still a lot of traction.
This thing's going to run 10s no problem.
It's got way too much traction.
It does. This thing hooks.
Now we've got desperation going on.
We have the Mazdarati 2.0.
We have a yank strap.
We have camera. Alex's Jeep XJ.
Now it should smoke the tires.
Let's try this again.
Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!
Now we got tire smoke, baby.
[laughing]
Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!
[coughs] That might bring the fire department.
Mazdarati 2.0!
We had to go to great lengths to smoke the tires.
[laughing]
[David] That was great.
Rubber on the roof, on the ground,
not on the tires, all over the engine.
We made slicks.
-Yes. -This is great.
It really is good.
Wow.
Who knew we just needed a Jeep in our lives?
I might be a Jeep guy now.
We should leave.
Yeah, probably.
[laughing] Yeah.
Let's disconnect this and get out of here.