(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. Subscribe to donut media and make sure you hit the
little notification bell so you get a notification
anytime we drop a new video. Follow Mike on Instagram at @miketheday. Follow me as @zachjobe. Follow donut @donutmedia
and follow my boys @nolanjaysykes and @jamespumphrey..