The idea was simple: Two Irish drift fanatics would fly from Ireland, following an Irish drift car over to Japan and document it competing in the home of drifting. What actually happened: The car got stuck at the port, and, uh, now what?

Legendary engine builder Cosworth’s job was to design the Aston Martin Valkyrie’s 1,000 horsepower V12, which had to be naturally-aspirated and emissions compliant. But designing a big V12 takes a while, so to get things going it made a three-cylinder test engine, and that ended up making 250 HP with no turbo.

A nearly-stock Volvo 740 isn’t the fastest rally car. It’s not the most nimble. But it’s cheap, it’s tough, and it’s probably not financially smart for me to think much more about them.

This car crossed my Instagram feed the other day and I didn’t think much of it. Oh, cool, I thought, another 2JZ swap. Whatever. Oh, but I was wrong. No JZs here. This is a 1FZ, a giant 4.5-liter iron-block truck motor that few Americans think about.

At least, it’s as good a time as any to sit down and see how the great world rally cars of the early 1990s drove on the rough forest roads of Rally GB. At least, it’s as good a time as any to hear them.

Lexus didn’t show the world the wonderful IS-F until 2007, a classic muscle car with a large car’s V8 crammed into the smallest car in Lexus’ lineup. But before it there was another. I mean it. There was just one.

It’s time to wake up and appreciate the cool, smooth lines of the 2000 Lexus Sport Coupe Concept. Pretty wild for a concept, right?

This is the Cadillac Sixteen. It was made in 2003. It had a sixteen-cylinder engine, and was like a beacon of light shining out, a righteous declaration of Cadillac quality at the top of the world. Only one was made. Weird!

Last night we got to hear the race version of the upcoming mid-engine ’Vette, the Corvette C8.R, pounding around Sebring in testing. It sounds like any number of flat plane crank V8 race cars, from Ferrari and on. Meanwhile, Toyota went testing in its new Prius race car with its own new V8 that thunders like the…

Jeep calls it “the ultimate test in straight-line speed,” to show off the Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk’s peerless acceleration. It’s a test the 707-horsepower Jeep wins. Just for some reason I can’t work out, the competition is a 1991 TVR and an Audi Quattro.

The bellowing thunder of past Corvette racers is gone, replaced with a more modern roar. This is the Chevrolet Corvette C8.R unexpectedly caught during testing in Florida.

The way Škoda works is that Volkswagen tosses the brand some small car platform and the Czech arm of the greater VW Group empire returns it better, nicer and often cheaper than VW ever would. That’s no different with the new 2019 Škoda Scala.

One of the coolest builds of recent years is Yoichi Imamura’s Lexus LFA drift car with a Toyota NASCAR V8 under the hood. We saw it test and run a few events back in 2015 and 2016, though it never became the guy’s main car. Now we have a better idea of why: This thing was as expensive as you’d think and a pain to get…

It’s only a BMW 3 Series Compact. It only puts down 322 horsepower at the wheels. But none of that is important, because it howls like an F1 car.

Apparently there’s some debate over whether or not it is ok to skip over gears on a stickshift car. Uh. Ok? Yeah, no, it’s fine.

This week on Carspotting we went looking for the famous 1950s Studebaker that still parks on the street on the Upper West Side. We didn’t find it. But we did come up on this pre-facelift Pontiac Fiero, one of the more interesting cars that never gets its proper due.

General Motors hyped the original Chevrolet Volt as a world-beating car. Its development took years and was rumored to cost about $1 billion. We were told to expect an all-electric family car that would leapfrog the competition. Instead we got a four-seater hybrid that... didn’t. So what happened?

What happens when you put 914 horsepower to all four tires? Lots and lots of all-wheel-drive burnouts.

Trump’s tweeting into the void, General Motors is pulling new words out of a hat, and a mainstream automaker just dissed Tesla again. All that and more in The Morning Shift of Monday, Dec. 3, 2018.

Amazingly, the Toyota Camry was offered with a manual in America up until the end of 2011.