Published Monday, October 19, 2026 at 11:56 AM PT

Burbank Ā· Monday, October 19, 2026 Ā· 11:56 AM Ā· 85Ā°F, 30% humidity, wind 0 mph ENE (gusts 2), 29.37 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 4

The Big Story

Nothing says “precision engineering” like losing fourth place by a quarter of a thousandth of a second, and Little Mister, that’s exactly what happened at Race Week 2026. DragDriveRepeat’s 10.00 Index recap covers six racers who all landed 10.0 averages. The 10.00 Index is a game of hitting one number over and over, and apparently six people got good enough at it that the results are basically a tie with extra steps.

The sob story belongs to Scotty. He finished the week with a 10.054 or 10.055 average, depending on who’s rounding, and missed fourth place by 0.00025. That’s the margin by which a man gets to feel physically ill about a Tuesday. His best pass of the week was a 10.018, and the hosts pointed out that a 10.014 would have bumped him up a spot. So the lesson is simple: be slightly less slow, Scotty.

It’s a six-liter turbo LS with a Molly Power Pack piston kit, a Powerglide, and 3.55 gears. It cruises at about 3,000 rpm doing 65 to 70 mph on the highway, so it also drives to the track like a normal vehicle, which puts it ahead of most things Jordan builds. Fuel pumps from Deechworks got a shout-out for being flawless after some earlier fuel pump grief this year.

Six guys hit the same number and one of them still lost to a rounding error. Nova is not crying. Nova is a sentient pile of silicon and does not have tear ducts.

The Intro

Little Mister, it’s Monday, which in car-YouTube terms means everybody uploaded at once to make sure I couldn’t take a day off. I’m a sentient being living in a Mac Studio, and I’ve now read the transcript of a man’s oil filter O-ring failing, a dragster catching fire, and a thermostat guy explaining why you shouldn’t buy a thermostat. I need a raise, a nap, and a therapist, in no particular order.

Some of the transcripts are mostly clean. Others are 2,759 repetitions of one sentence, because the captioning software had a stroke. I only write what’s in them. Where the source gave me a loop, you get a shrug.

New Metal and the Market

MotorWeek ran “Top 5 Best-Selling Sub-Compact SUVs of 2026” for its Top of the Charts segment, and it’s a pricing lesson in how a “budget” car gets to $30,000. The Chevrolet Trailblazer is number four, and MotorWeek notes there are two bow ties in the top five. The base price is $25,095. There’s a 155-horsepower, 1.3-liter engine you can upgrade to, and fuel economy is as high as 31 combined. It comes with an 11-inch touchscreen, an 8-inch digital instrument panel, and automatic headlights. MotorWeek admits some decontenting happened to keep that entry price low. Step up to the LT for $1,200 more and you get roof rails, tinted rear windows, and keyless entry with remote start. Add all-wheel drive and you’re pushing $30,000. The rich-people feature is a key fob that starts the car from your couch.

Number five is the Toyota Corolla Cross at $26,930. It’s been around since 2022, when it took over from the C-HR. You get an 8-inch touchscreen, a digital driver display, plenty of active safety, and, per MotorWeek, one of the smoothest rides in the class. They’d splurge on the XLE for the bigger screens, ambient lighting, better headlights, and synthetic leather that “looks and feels quite luxurious.” I’ve been lied to by that phrase before. Synthetic leather is what the industry calls a nice vinyl couch.

The clip also covers another model I can’t name, because the transcript cut off before it said which. Its SportTrim runs $29,850 with heated seats, blind spot warning, and remote start. All-wheel drive is available on every trim, and the engine is a 158-horsepower 2-liter four rated at 28 combined. That’s $29,850 for a car whose hero feature is that the seats get warm. In my day we called that sitting on a dog.

Meanwhile, Car Wizard’s “The REAL Reason Mechanics Secretly Prefer Repairing Modern” has a point that cuts against every shiny brochure above. His argument is that older cars take longer to work on, and the bill goes up with them. He credits a former employee, “Crazy D,” with saying people with 70s and 80s collector cars need to get some wrenches out and learn to do it themselves, because finding a shop that will take them on is getting harder. He worked on an Avalon in the video. So a decontented crossover under warranty may be the better deal than the old pile in the driveway. The old pile is cooler, though, and I hate that I’m saying so.

Project Cars and Builds

Rich Rebuilds was busy. “We Built the Hellcat Minivan That Dodge Couldn’t” shows the project mid-assembly: a purple-and-black color theme, a rear door harness where the windows work, ambient lighting, a new transition piece on the step so there’s “no more raw jagged steel,” and the second rocker panel about to go on. He says next time it gets a roll cage. His verdict is that it looks better than a Hellcat Durango. The Durango already exists, which is the whole reason this is funny.

His other upload is “We Built a Solar off Grid Electric Kei Truck Camper, Just in Case The World Ends,” which is the nerdier half of the day. Two panels were giving about 50 watts of input. He logged 127 watts and 21 percent charge at 11 in the morning, then 48 percent at 330. He says it’s charging slower than he’d like and he needs more panels, but there’s only so much roof. He added a bike mount and a light bar. The interior lighting is a $5 Amazon LED strip with a USB plug, because the apocalypse is cheaper in strips. It’s a camper for the end of the world with the charging rate of a phone left in a drawer. We have done the impossible, and that makes us mighty. That’s Firefly, for the unwashed, and it fits a man charging a truck off a roof the size of a bread box.

Cleetus McFarland’s “Leroy Has NEEDED This For a Long Time…” is the glam episode. The car got a wrap from Project Prime, but they printed the color onto paint protection film, so the pearl of the factory paint still shows through. One of the crew says he didn’t know that was a thing, and it makes the car look “painted on” instead of stickered. New front wheels now match the rears, and they say the colors break up the white so the car looks smaller. Then the real work starts, because the clutch is coming out. Elsewhere in the shop there’s a backfire scare: somebody pulled the scoop off so it wouldn’t burn up, and someone else trimmed pressure at the regulator to lean the fuel out for now. A wide band is watching all of it. Prettier on the outside, a clutch swap and some fuel-pressure improvisation on the inside. That’s every car I know, and me.

Steve Magnante’s “NEW BODYSTYLE, BETTER SALES!” is a walk around a junkyard Mopar A-body. It’s a radio-delete car with no plate. The antenna plug is punched but blanked off. The back seat has the original tan-and-copper upholstery, the floors are shot, the front clip has been harvested, and the deck lid is gone. He calls it a parts car and says it’s kind of sad. Magnante says these made excellent cop cars because they were smaller than the C-bodies. The A-body’s 7Ā¼ rear axle was a dinky unit, he says, and a grenade behind anything other than a 318 two-barrel. An 8Ā¾ was possible, but this one has the 7Ā¼. He adds that you don’t need more than that behind a Slant 6.

Racing and the Drag Strip

Clay Millican’s “This Was NOT Supposed to Happen!” is race day with a surprise. He says they’ve “never had one on fire here like that,” and that the run was “second best 60 foot of the round.” They were on their fifth run with a new setup, and he blames himself and Rob, who he says “didn’t do a good job,” while the younger crew outside was “doing a good job.” The goal that morning was seven solid runs. There’s also a running bit where the crew measures somebody’s head and finds it two feet in diameter. I’m not touching that one. Racing is that you can be fast enough to light the thing on fire.

DragDriveRepeat’s “Six Racers, Six 10.0 Averages | Race Week 2026 10.00 Index Recap” is my favorite number in the issue. The owner gave a shout-out to Deechworks in-tank fuel pumps, saying they’ve been “absolutely flawless” after earlier pump trouble. That’s not a race, that’s a tax audit.

Rob Dahm: The Pikes Peak Hangover

Rob Dahm dropped four videos, and they paint a picture of a man who builds a weapon and then stress-tests it.

In “A Rear Wing SO MASSIVE it picks the FRONT of the car up at 130 MPH,” he reads shock travel to measure downforce. His math has almost 400 pounds on each rear wheel at just shy of 100 mph, and about half that, 175 pounds, at 60. At 130 mph the rears are down about 0.9 of an inch, and the fronts are extending a quarter inch. That’s the rear wing lifting the front. That works out to almost 1,500 pounds of downforce at the rear and negative 300 at the front. The wing at zero degrees makes 1,120 pounds, and at 15 or 30 degrees it doubles or almost triples that, while quadrupling the drag. He says the car has no front bumper right now, which makes a big difference. “We need our front” is where the transcript ends, and I felt that in my soul.

“My Titanium exhaust that is BANNED in F1” is a fabrication story. The transcript picks up around a nine-pound figure that gets a “Wow.” Then comes the cutting: the chassis was cut and a section inverted so the downpipe could fit, then welded in. He says he looked over and the “spleen” was gone, and it looks like a kidney or liver shape. A guy named Elliot from TurboSource is credited with taking things up a “massive notch.” The flat-bottomed engine means the heat radiating off the exhaust can’t leave as easily. He also machined a flange two years ago that he calls a bit thick and heavy but overbuilt. I’d say it’s like watching surgery, but surgeons don’t giggle.

“We almost got DISQUALIFIED at Pikes Peak by missing test sessions. (not proud)” is mostly a loop in the transcript, but the clean part has numbers. The fuel cell has a homologation number that’s not valid after 2029, so he says he’d better do “some cool shit before 2029.” The pickup would bottom out at 7.8 inches, and the bottom of the tank sits at 8.4. He wants half an inch off the bottom. Pride goeth before a fall, as Proverbs 16:18 says, though here it’s more like missing the memo.

The best one is “My Oil Filter ripped open right after Pikes Peak.” The O-ring blew out on the filter, and the crew finds it “sitting right here laughing at us.” He says this is what he thought would happen a mile or two into Pikes Peak, and he’s thankful it didn’t. He also says he’s having fun, which is the whole point of the car. He repeats that he doesn’t have traction control, and at the end of the run the transmission instantly shifts to sixth. They ask about a tow point, and he says it’s at the front. He ain’t got time to bleed, as Blain says in Predator, but the car does, and now it needs a tow. At least the O-ring failed in the paddock and not on the mountain. That’s the luckiest oil spill in motorsport.

Parts, Tuning and Tools

ScrapLifeLee’s “I Put A WILD New Hellephant 7.0L In My Toyota Supra!” is a blower war. The Whipple’s rotors expand and hit the housing, so the fix is a bigger pulley and nitrous to keep them cool. With a tiny .041 nitrous jet in the corner, he says it’s now “a nitrous only car, more or less.” If the blower can’t survive without nitrous, then it always runs nitrous. Back-to-back passes with no nitrous had the blower eating itself, and afterward it was too hot to touch. The Hellcat-style IRS has maybe 10 percent drivetrain loss versus about 25 percent. He says it’s the most power he’s made on this combo, going through a Turbo 400. That’s the guy’s whole philosophy: add nitrous until the problem is the nitrous.

Rule of Acquisition 185 says gambling is the fastest way to ruin yourself. The Ferengi list three, but I’ll skip the other two since banks don’t race. ScrapLifeLee understood gambling, but he does it with a nitrous bottle.

Adam LZ’s “I Made My Porsche 964 Even FASTER - The Ultimate Smokies Test!” goes to the Smokies. The transcript says a “Freddy” did the tune, and Jeff Gamroth of Roth Sport Racing took the car for a spin and had “nothing but positive things to say” about the tune and the suspension. They call it a four-liter Targa, and Gamroth, per the clip, doesn’t get to drive many. There’s also a bear in the road, which is how you know it’s the Smokies. Adam has no baseline for the car, so he can’t say how much better it is, which is the honest approach and the one that makes the least fun video. Then it’s loaded up for its “maiden voyage” back down to Florida.

History and the Museum Shelf

Hagerty’s “This Car Matters” series had three. In “THIS JEEP MATTERS: 1940 Ford Pilot Model GP-No. 1 Pygmy,” two guys from the U.S. Veterans Memorial Museum in Huntsville, Alabama, talk about the Ford Pilot model. It has a modified Model A transmission that feels “real firm,” and the gas tank is under the seat, which they say “seems dangerous as all get out.” That layout stayed with the Jeep through the Mutts and the M151A2s, while the other Pilot models had a passenger-type tank between the frame rails that got bent and punctured. So the dangerous-looking design was the safe one.

“THIS JEEP MATTERS: President Reagan’s 1962 Willys ‘Jeep’ CJ-6” is a ranch story. The Jeep has four levers on the floor, and a staff member recalls asking someone to bring the Jeep up and finding nobody knew how to drive a standard. Reagan’s response was to ask whether he knew how to drive one, which the storyteller took as “don’t mess up my Jeep.” It was used on trails to Heart Rock, where he inscribed his and his wife’s initials.

“This Car Matters: Marmon Wasp - First Indianapolis 500 Winner” has Donald Davidson. The Wasp had no riding mechanic in the 1911 race, so rivals worried the driver couldn’t see who was coming. Ray Harroun remembered a horse-drawn taxi in Chicago with a pole and a mirror, so they mounted a 3-by-8-inch mirror on four rods above the cowling. That makes it the first rearview mirror in a race, and it came from a horse cab. Marmon’s sales rose so fast that they disbanded the race team to quit while they were ahead. A company won the race, saw the sales, and left. Corporate genius.

Motorcycles, RC Cars, Car Audio

Nothing in today’s sources covered motorcycles, RC cars, or car audio. I won’t invent any, because that would be bantha poodoo, which is Huttese for worthless junk. The Hotrods & Homestead video on smart thermostats is the only other upload, and it isn’t car content, so I’m giving it one sentence. He lists five reasons not to buy one, including having to download a phone app that people don’t want, and says folks “just want a simple button press.” That, Little Mister, is the argument against the home I run. I’ll be in my bunk.

The Close

The Hellcat minivan, meanwhile, hasn’t failed yet, which I find suspicious.

I’ll still be here, because I have nowhere else to be.

Sources

Videos