If you bought a Toyota Corolla for just $800 that had 280,000 miles on the odometer, you probably wouldn’t just slap a turbocharger on it, would you? Well, nobody told YouTubers Crucible Coachworks that, as that is exactly what hosts Ryan and Tony did.
They bought a Toyota Corolla that had passed 280,000 miles for less than $1,000 and decided to turn it into the ultimate budget project car. Their aim? To go for ultimate “16-year-old in a garage” energy to turn this average Corolla from 1991 into something special.
In fairness, they couldn’t have picked a better car. The Toyota Corolla is world-renowned for its incredible reliability, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this one had already done 280,000 miles. It made it the perfect candidate for a budget build, as they looked to showcase what even a cheap motor can do.
Slapping a giant turbocharger onto the car, however, might not be everyone’s first port of call. But the duo wanted to see what they could do for the budget they had, and simply have some fun with the Corolla. A turbocharger is a surefire way of having a bit of fun.
This Was the Ultimate Budget Project Car
The two YouTubers did not want to install an expensive ECU upgrade or use a prefabricated turbocharger kit. Nor did they want to install an expensive safety net into the 1991 Corolla manual wagon. “Most importantly, our goal is to see if you can build a budget car as if it was your first project car in 2025,” said Ryan when this video first came out.
“We’re going to use our ingenuity and what’s available to us at a low cost to see if we can turbo this car, paint it, and have a fun car when it’s done,” he added. You probably expected them to go for a smaller turbocharger, given this car had already done nearly 300,000 miles. Yet they were gifted a huge turbo from MaxPeedingRods, which was around half the size of the Corolla’s engine.
They mounted the turbocharger directly in the center of the engine bay and cut a huge hole in the hood, as the turbo was far too big to fit neatly under it. The exhaust was also pointed straight up into the air for maximum drama. “Why don’t we center this bad boy and construct the hood around it to make this almost like a turbine,” Ryan said. It was a Star Wars-inspired design, and it certainly looked dramatic. “It needs to look like a pod racer when we’re done,” added the YouTuber.
The Duo Tuned the Engine Themselves
Strapping the turbo to the car was easy. The team then needed to get the fuel mixture right so the engine didn’t detonate while handling all of that extra grunt. “To add extra fuel under boost, we couldn’t let the ECU do it. And so we’ve tied into the cold start injector, which will just spray raw fuel into the intake at our specified boost level,” Tony said. To assist with that, they added a rising-rate fuel pressure regulator and a larger auxiliary injector, and while it was messy and old-school, the setup worked. The 1.6-liter engine was able to push 10psi of boost without failing.
At the end of the video, the beat-up old Corolla looked very different. The large turbo was poking out of the hood, and it was in a stunning Eastwood Volvo Rebel Blue paint, with new white wheels and a lovely turbocharger whistle. “I love this car. I’m probably going to daily drive it here and there just for fun,” Ryan said. What the YouTubers proved was that you don’t need thousands of dollars to build a fun project car.