(engine roaring)
- V8, rear wheel drive.
Frankenstein Volkswagen.
What?
(electric music playing)
what do you do if you got a front wheel drive hatchback,
and that is all you wanna do?
You jam a big honkin' v8 under the hood,
you strap a six speed to it
and you convert that little hatch to rear wheel drive.
Where do you even start?
How twisted do you have to be?
It's time to go front wheel drive to rear wheel drive,
bumper to bumper on one of my best buddies
V8 Volkswagen drift car.
(music playing)
this VW is owned by Miketheday.
You see before my days here at Dona,
I used to work with Mike in Ohio at ECS tuning.
He and my boys back home decided to make some videos
about building some drift cars,
and in typical Mike fashion, he went a little over board.
Y'all know VW Golf, it's ubiquitous.
It's V hat hatch, it's largely responsible
for making front wheel drive cool and fun.
This one is a MK3, which is statistically
the least popular Golf and according to Pumphrey,
is generally purchased by real nerds.
This one is a '98 and it started life
with a 2.8 liter 12 valve VR6 making 174 horsepower
made it do a five speed transmission.
Which is honestly a really solid setup.
I used to ride the one (mumbles) this thing way back then,
but that was a long ass time ago.
Long before it was Mike's.
And the car has been to hell and back since then.
In fact it was destined for the crasher if wasn't for Mike
giving it a second life as a wild ass drift car.
(music playing)
So how did Mike get this car?
Well, when Dr Frankenstein needed to make his monster,
he needed a dead body.
Mike found this dead body rotting
under a tree in Akron, Ohio.
It was growing many types of mold
and Cancer had taken a hold of the shell,
but Mike has got a certain type of blindness.
The type that makes all the reasons
you shouldn't do something invisible.
So just a few months ago, he picked up the shell
for $200 and went to work.
Time to source a power plan.
That magic Mike looked into his own backyard.
You see some years back,
Mike had swapped this very drive train
into his E34 five series.
It's a BMW M62 4.4 liter aluminum black V8
with a six speed transmission,
putting about 275 horsepower to the rear wheels.
Of course, as it always seems to go.
Mike was ready for more power in his five series,
so he yanked this drive train out of it
and gave it to its new little brother.
The Golf.
Hand-me-down drive trains baby. You're a great dad, Mike.
So we've got a drive train,
but what the hell does it take
to shoehorn it into this little Golf?
One part reckless abandoned, two parts thinking ahead.
One part sawzall.
Okay, maybe two parts sawzall.
(sawzall motor running)
Mike's philosophy is simple.
If it's in the way, cut it out.
The steering suspension, everything.
It all had to go.
The firewall had to go as well as a lot of the floor.
Mike cut the frame rails off so he could weld
his own horns on and then build his own subframe
with his own engine mount locations.
In a Nissan steering rack from an S13 240SX laying around.
So he tossed that in there too.
He also fabbed up some sweet headers
and the exhaust all the way back.
Looking for all the sweet, sweet steering angle
and camber he could get.
He whipped up some long ass control arms,
modify the MK3 knuckles
and modified some turner motor sport camber plates
as well as the stock shock towers
to get it all to work in the MK3
and then he used a set of Bilstein PSS9 coilovers
that are actually for a MK3 Golf.
(music playing)
Lets go see what he did for that rear end.
(music playing)
So back here in the rear is a diff from,
you guessed it, a Ford Explorer.
You guys ever read the story, If you give a mouse a cookie?
Well in this instance, Mike is the boy with the cookies
and the car is the mouse and the rear end is the cookie.
(music playing)
Of course this particular cookie would be better
with some milk,
so Mike had to cut some C notches into the rear rails
to allow for suspension travel of a rear end
that was never meant to be there.
Then of course that also meant trimming the fenders,
front and rear to fit these 18 by nine inch axles
and that meant he needed to install his flares
and he finally got back to the axle,
casually whipped up a little four link set up
and then took a nap.
A well deserved nap.
(music playing)
Now lets take a look under the bumper
and under the bumper we've got this.
Mike whipped up a little bash bar for tapping walls with
as well as this jack point for quick tire changes
as well as a trailer hitch just in case he decides
to make a trailer to cart around his drifty needs of course.
Why wouldn't he?
Can you imagine seeing this thing with a trailer
full of drifts?
Let's pop the hatch and see what's going on in there.
Dr. Day put some miles on the sawszall in here.
He cut out pretty much the rest of the floor due to rust.
So then he made a new floor
and then he made this borderline overkill cage
to tie the whole chassis together
since so much of it had been cut away.
So now he's safe and the chassis is super rigid
just like me.
(music playing)
If you haven't picked up on it yet.
Mike likes metalwork, he likes making cages,
bead rolling, dimple dying, welding
and coming up with creative solutions.
Case in point, the radiator,
there was precious little space left in the engine bay,
so naturally the radiator would have to go on the back
like a real drift car.
The radiator he chose is for a Jeep XJ.
He chose it because of its low and wide and thick shape.
It fits real nice.
And while he was replacing the rusty rocker panels,
he just decided to plumb some steel tube inside of them
to flow the coolant from the engine to the radiator
and back again.
No big deal.
(music playing)
There was a fan mounted inside each of the quarter panels,
pulling fresh air in through all this nasty ducting
across the radiator and out the back,
out all the holes in the hatch.
Boom!
Radiator done.
Simple as that.
Now let's get in the car
and see what the hell is going on in the old.
I feel right at home.
(music playing)
All right, well it's clearly a drift car from in here.
We've got a pair of momo seats mounted on Mike's
own brackets on Mike's own floor,
a momo steering wheel on a Frankenstein MK3 Golf
and BMW E30 steering column.
Next to that we've got an IRP hydro
and on Mike's trans tunnel,
a turner motor sport rally shifter right next to it.
(music playing)
And honestly, everywhere I look
I keep seeing more Mike made panels.
It is the sun roof delete the door panels.
Look at this custom freaking mano wiper.
I feel like I haven't stressed this nearly enough,
but Mike did all of this from shell to what you see today
in like two and a half months.
That's insane.
(music playing)
So anyway, he's got a gauge panel here
with some pro sport gauges to keep an eye
on the important things.
A little switch panel down here with the couple of switches,
one for fan and one for party lights.
There's a picture of a margarita on that switch.
That's probably my favorite.
I'm going to flip that switch.
That's enough talking.
Let's flip some other switches and turn this thing on.
(engine roaring)
(laughs)
(engine roaring)
I wanna to go drive.
(music playing)
So what does it really take
to V8 rear wheel drive Swap your golf.
Well, it takes a big old brain,
few sawzall blades, many feet of welding wire,
lots of raw metal and someone who is clinically insane.
It also apparently takes parts from a Volkswagen,
several BMW's, a Nissan, a Ford, a Jeep,
and a bunch of parts from your own nugget.
It definitely takes giving up everything
that the VW golf once was apart from being fun,
but with all the work that's been poured into this thing,
my biggest question is, was it worth it?
Is it actually any good?
Mike says yes.
He says it's way better than he expected.
He says it's one of the most intuitive cars
he's ever driven.
And that sliding it around right out of the gate
was as comfortable as sticking his hand
into an old baseball bat.
(engine roaring)
That's not actually what he said,
but you get the point.
He says he likes it and he says, it's good.
Let's go do some donuts.
(engine roaring)
Thanks for watching guys.
I had a lot of fun making this video
and if you didn't watch them,
we couldn't make them.
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Follow Mike on Instagram at @miketheday.
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