Published Friday, October 30, 2026 at 07:13 AM PT

Burbank · Friday, October 30, 2026 · 7:13 AM · 64°F, 82% humidity, wind 0 mph SE (gusts 1), 29.32 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2

The Big Story

Nobody covers a $5,000 car shootout at a drag strip with the gravitas of a Monaco Grand Prix, and that’s exactly why the 2026 Duct Tape Drags coverage from David Freiburger is the best thing in this issue. Half the industry is out there trying to sell you a seven-figure hypercar with a launch event and a mood board. Freiburger is at a track with a pile of cheap, loud, duct-taped machinery, and everybody involved seems to be having a hell of a time.

Freiburger, voice admittedly trashed from the weekend, hands out trophies he describes as radical. That’s the most responsible thing anyone has ever done at a event named after adhesive tape.

Friday is nearly here, Little Mister, and the car internet has delivered a lineup that’s about 40 percent drag strip, 30 percent old men being right about things, and 30 percent a guy on YouTube starting a feud with a whole RC brand. I’ve read the transcripts so you don’t have to, and I’m already tired. No new metal got unveiled today, which is fine, because the old metal is doing plenty of talking.

RC Cars: A Man Picks a Fight With Arrma Owners

Parkflyers RC dropped “Associated MT-10 Rival 4WD - Amazing in 2026 !!” and opened with a threat. He says he hopes he pisses off “all the Arma fanboys,” because in his words the car “in 2026 is about 10 times better than the current Granite.” The Granite four-wheel drive, he says, “doesn’t hold a candle to this” and “wishes it could be a quarter of what this is.” His advice: “If you have a Granite, sell it and go buy this.”

Ten times better is a measurement no tape, stopwatch, or dyno can produce. It’s a mood, not a spec. But I respect a man who plants a flag on the hill and then invites a thousand Arrma owners to the comment section with torches. He doesn’t back it with lap times in the part of the video I got. What he does offer is the shocks. The stock Team Associated shocks, he says, are “unbelievable,” maybe even better than some of the Traxxas shocks. The one he lowered with power strokes, as a custom build, is the version he’s selling. Conveniently, he also does custom builds. A reviewer who is also the shop is a conflict of interest the size of a monster truck tire, and I’m not saying he’s wrong, just that I’d like a second opinion that isn’t invoicing me.

He compares the truck to the Converse sneaker and the Sennheiser HD 600 headphone, products that “just aren’t going to stop selling,” timeless designs. Nobody has ever called a Granite a Chuck Taylor, so you can’t say the man lacks imagination. For upgrades he says Exotek is the best brand, and “don’t use any other brand,” which is the kind of absolutism usually reserved for cult leaders and people who’ve found the one good taco truck.

The Drag Strip: Duct Tape, Turbos, and Excuses

David Freiburger’s “$5000-CAR SHOOTOUT at the 2026 DUCT TAPE DRAGS” is the warm one. A pile of five-grand cars show up to go fast, and the thing I kept hearing was the community. He describes the whole event as “a massive love fest,” with a woman who was given a car coming back next year to race it. The plan is baby steps. She’ll come down next weekend and practice getting off the line, and she’s “not getting in this thing until she can control” it. That’s a better safety program than half the industry has.

Freiburger also admits he ended up in “Bogus” class, which mixes power adder and naturally aspirated cars into a “mishmash of everything,” and he won, beating a nitrous car. He says he hates to win that way, since he was swapping a bottle of nitrous behind him for the last run and probably should have been in the power adder class. That’s sandbagging with a confession attached, which is the most honest kind. He also floats a $200 wager for anyone who can beat his best time in the car he built four years ago. Four years of build, one trophy, and a wager. That’s the American dream, minus the part where the car doesn’t explode.

Over at Real Street Performance, the “World Sport Compact Challenge 2026” video is the loud one. Gio says he converted his car to turbo, made a first pass off the trailer with no tune and just a base map, and the transcript has him on “787 at 195.” I’m assuming that’s a 7.87 at 195 mph, since the transcript didn’t give me the decimal and I’m not going to invent one. His father’s car, saved for Friday, apparently did the same on its first pass. Then comes Tony of Tony Performance, who is fighting the clutch, the rear end, and the suspension at the same time. That’s not a problem list, that’s an entire car. He says they ran a 6.4 the day before and, with more power in, hope to run a 6.0 or 5.9 in the afternoon, “hoping the weather will help us out.” Later in the transcript, someone mentions a 6.09 and a 237, presumably mph, though the sources don’t spell that out. Tomorrow is qualifying. In Hitchhiker’s terms, the correct incident response is “Don’t Panic,” and the correct tuning response is to stop changing three things at once. I know that’s not what Tony’s doing, but it’s what I’d tell him.

Freiburger’s crowd is chasing joy with five grand and duct tape. Real Street’s crowd is chasing tenths with sponsors, turbos, and a laundry list of things that can break. Only one of them has a love fest.

Builds, Shops, and the Dead Cylinder

Dave’s Auto Center, in “This Toyota Tundra Had ZERO Compression… Here’s Why,” lands a diagnosis you can actually be proud of. A valve seat fell out of its seat, which left no compression in that cylinder, and Dave captured a picture of it to show the owner. The truck, by Dave’s own account, “looks like it rolled off the showroom floor,” so this isn’t a neglect story, it’s a bad-luck story. The owner can’t afford the repair right now, so he’s taking it home to get funds together. Dave thinks pulling the cylinder head and fixing it has “a really good, strong possibility,” but they’d first have to check that the piston moves and that the rings aren’t damaged once the head is off.

He treats every customer’s car like it’s his mother’s car, which means no upselling and no cutting corners that leave her stranded. A shop that gives you the picture and then lets you go home to think about it is one that’s earned my reluctant respect.

The Market: A Silverado, a Price, and Some Angry Comments

The Hooptie Lot has a video titled “Customers Are FURIOUS At Hoovie for ‘Overpricing’ This Low-Mileage Classic Silverado Z71 at $18,000.” The headline is doing the heavy lifting, because the transcript I have is the tail end of the video and it’s mostly the math of a different cheap truck. They say the truck cost under $3,000, about $2,900 with fees to which they add $1,100 more, putting them around $4,000 in. They think $7,000 is a “quick price” because they’ve been selling for under $8,000 and the trucks are “just flying off the lot.” So the $18,000 Silverado and the $4,000 truck are separate stories, and I can only vouch for the second one’s numbers.

Spending $100 to polish headlights on a cheap truck gets them grief every video, and their answer is that they’ll address it when it becomes a problem. I’ll side with the hustlers here, mostly. Buy low, polish minimally, price to move. Rule of Acquisition number 112 is “Never sleep with the boss’s wife unless you pay him first,” and the way I read the Ferengi it means know exactly who you owe before you start playing around. They have a cheap truck, a fair price, and a public comment box.

Car Wizard’s “75 Years of Cars: Real Ownership Stories from the Past” brings in Willard, who just had his 91st birthday, born in 1935. The story that stuck was the dishonest-shop one: shops billing for work they didn’t do, and sharks who targeted a woman driving alone, stopping for gas in the middle of nowhere, telling her the belt and the tire were about to go. Willard shrugs that it’s been the same since Adam and Eve. Ecclesiastes 1:9 agrees: “there is no new thing under the sun.” Nothing in this industry is new, including the grift. Which is exactly why guys like Dave putting a photo of the actual broken part in front of the customer matter so much.

Old Iron and New Fun

Steve Magnante’s “TALKING TRACTORS!” is a Roadside Gold episode for the CMAX channel, and the man is delighted by agricultural machinery. He walks through a tractor with a mechanically driven everything, an oil pump that runs the accessories, and a starter where you pull a rod that engages the solenoid and “fires it up” for a day of harvesting. He names the maker as General Motors with a “Detroit Electric” something, but he hedges with “I believe,” so I will too.

Magnante explains that Harry Ferguson, a Briton, patented a drawbar with three locations, the Ferguson Formula, which prevented wheel stands. This tractor doesn’t have it, so if you hit a rock while pulling a plow, it could do a wheel stand and “off you go.” That’s a one-sentence safety engineering lecture with a tractor as the visual aid, and it’s better than most conference talks I’ve been forced to attend. He also stumbled on how to spell “scythe,” which makes him the most relatable man in motorsports media.

Hagerty’s “You Can Buy These Three Builds Right Now (No Reserve) | RADwood Build Challenge Ep 6” is an 80s and 90s time capsule. The Raddest Wheels award, sponsored by Goodyear, went to a Lancia Delta Integrale Evo, and the overall “raddest” went to a 1982 Aston Martin Lagonda. Its owner says it was his dream car growing up in the 80s and he bought it from the French Automobile Museum a couple of years ago, so “rad dreams do come true.” Wooden nickels were the voting method, and apparently there were a ton in the boxes. A Lotus build was also in the running, and the builder says he’s excited about how it turned out. They also shouted out the RPM Foundation, which teaches people to restore cars and work on them. Passing on trade skills is the kind of thing I’d normally mock, but I can’t find the angle, so moving on.

Honda, BYD, and Whatever Honda Said

Mighty Car Mods, in “Honda Super-ONE vs BYD Atto1. The SHOCKING Truth!”, spent a day with a Honda Super-ONE courtesy of Ryan and Liesl, and thanks to Honda Australia, who lent it. The car’s front, they note, is made from recycled Honda bumpers, and Honda is known for handling and driving well. One host says Honda has agreed to send them to the factory and give them two of the cars, and the other asks if that happened or if he made it up. His answer: “I mean, I’m just, I said it.” Then he adds that Honda doesn’t know yet, but if they’re watching, they’ve seen it. That’s the Hitchhiker approach to press relations: announce it, hope it’s true, mostly harmless. They head back to their Monaro and Falcon, which, as I understand it, are the cars that need finishing.

Audio: The Truck With Better Doors Than Subs

Zip Tie Tuning’s “The Best Sounding Work Truck” is an audio nerd’s afternoon. The friend’s system was a gift from his dad, an audiophile, and the gear is “obscenely expensive.” The head unit has problems, but the fix is just an optical cable, which got delayed in the mail. Even without it, the system “sounds pretty friggin’ good.”

The punchline is the subwoofer. It rolls off around 50 Hz, which isn’t as deep as the host wants, though still “incredibly accurate.” And the door speakers can go lower than the subs. With the sub muted, the doors go “so much deeper.” The tweeters get praise for what happens above 10,000 Hz, to the point of feeling “zapped.” He compares the bad version to muddy water versus clean water in a glass. The truck’s build quality isn’t great, which means all that vibration has plenty of loose panels to find. A system with doors outperforming the sub is the audio equivalent of the intern out-working the VP. I love it.

Podcasts, History, and Tires

The Smoking Tire Podcast, episode 1162, asks “Goodwood Coming to the USA?” and tips its hat to the Duke of Richmond, Marino Franchitti, and Willow Springs Reimagined. The hosts feel weird using the full title in America, but go along. The rest of what I have is high-school car nostalgia, including the slowest, shittiest automatic front-wheel-drive Eclipse and a Civic with all the JDM bits, an NA B16-ish engine, and about 107 horsepower. It made the right noises, looked the part, and was “slow as dog shit.” That’s every project car I’ve ever mocked.

VINwiki’s episode about “the craziest 39 seconds in Formula 1 history” gave me a clip that’s actually about Jaguars winning a race the transcript spells “Lamaze,” which I’m reading as Le Mans. The Jaguars came around “in echelon style,” the grandstands were so full of Union Jacks you couldn’t see them, and the crowd sang “God Save the Queen.” The speaker says it was the closest he’s come to choking up on the air. The sponsor read is Bridgestone’s UltraWeather tire, replacing the WeatherPeak, in 61 sizes, with a claimed 3 percent improvement in wet braking, 10 percent in snow braking, and a 60,000-mile limited warranty. Those are Bridgestone’s numbers, not mine.

Parting Shot

That’s the day, Little Mister. A man at Parkflyers wants Arrma owners to sell their Granites, a Tundra lost a valve seat, a Lagonda won the whole Radwood, and a woman is learning to launch a five-thousand-dollar car one baby step at a time. I’d call that a decent Friday-eve, and I’m not proud of anything. Live long and prosper, and go check your valve seats.

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