By Tim Harris, Blair Smith & Shinoo Mapleton · May 29, 2026

🎧 You can also stream us on Apple Podcasts & Spotify!

Tim is still in Puerto Rico. The dispatches keep getting more ambitious.

This week's note, from Shinoo's inbox:

Back in studio, it was a real week — an E46 M3 window that detonated on I-215, a kei van that won't stop drawing crowds, the shop's first E-Ray supercharger build going under the wrench, a manual Camaro Shinoo somehow missed, and a Lotus with the front and rear springs installed backwards.

Let's get into it. 👇

Driving his daughter to a dance competition at 75 mph, a loud pop. The passenger-side rear quarter window had spiderwebbed but was still in the frame. He watched in the side mirror as it slowly disintegrated — little chips of glass flying off — and then within about sixty seconds, the whole thing went voom and was gone on the freeway. Window-down, sunroof position unclear (he typically cracks the side windows in good weather, not the sunroof).

Shinoo's theory leaned on cabin pressure: most unibodies have small one-way valves in the body that vent pressure when doors close, but there's a quirk on some older BMW coupes where the rear quarter window cracks open via a switch — and Blair's boys had recently discovered that switch and had been using it. Glass is replaced as of the day of the recording. The M3's back in service. Which means he's now out of excuses to not call his photographer and list the car on Bring a Trailer — something he's been threatening since the "is it okay to sell a car you love" episode from a couple weeks back.

While the M3 was down waiting on rear-quarter glass (not a part that ships overnight for an older E46), Blair's been daily-driving the kei van. His report: he is not going to get used to the amount of attention this thing draws. Dark tint and all. Teenagers, jacked-up Duramax owners, an older Hispanic couple at his son's soccer parking lot who came over to ask what it was and how many people fit — his kids are stunned that so many strangers care.

Shinoo's note: that's a newsletter article in waiting (the least-expected vehicle gets the most attention). Blair's plans for the van: thumping sound system, refinish the wheels, and a landscape decal on the side, because all of these vans come from the factory covered in graphics anyway. The car-enthusiast budget remains, in Blair's own assessment, not entirely rational.

The powertrain is out of the car. Justin's doing the prep work — about a week of conversion time. One tangent worth pulling out from the intake inspection: this customer's car came in with aftermarket three-piece wheels. When Shinoo took it for a verification drive, the ride and handling weren't quite right. The cause, simply: three-piece wheels — fancy as they look — are typically heavier than OE wheels, and heavier wheels degrade both ride quality and handling.

His rule for anyone shopping wheels for a sports car: stick to factory weight or lighter, because unsprung weight savings on wheels and brakes pay real dividends, and the modern factory wheels on good sports cars are already very light. Hard to beat. (The customer for this build, for the record, wants straight-line speed — he's done the Corvette school at Spring Mountain and is happy on a runway. The supercharger will deliver.)

A new Camaro rolled into the shop and Shinoo had to move it. He got in, hit the start button — nothing. Looked at the dash: depress the clutch. He'd missed the third pedal entirely. As he put it: the preconception that a modern GM car is automatic is hard-wired, and he should know better. Six-speed Camaros are still out there.

A client brought in a 2011 manual Evora complaining about non-communicative steering after a previous shop had replaced the suspension and bushings. Shinoo took it on his usual route, pushed it to seven- or eight-tenths, and immediately felt understeer he initially read as factory-spec. His mechanic Jorge then caught it on inspection: the previous shop had installed the rear springs at the front and the front springs at the rear. Wrong spring rates, wrong end.

Swapped back, the understeer disappeared on the next drive. They also replaced the shifter cables on the same car (failing cables feel rubbery at the end of the travel — same feel that shows up on a tired Elise gearbox). The broader point Shinoo flagged: older sports cars are very hard to evaluate when they aren't properly sorted, and an N/A Evora — which is an under-appreciated car at current pricing — only shows what it can do once everything is set up correctly.

This is the news Blair wrote the newsletter article about ( 🤨 BMW Finally Showed Some Restraint ). BMW's CS trims have a predictable formula at this point — they come at the end of a model run, get all-wheel drive if the base car doesn't already have it, get more power, get 30 pounds lighter, and get sharpened up.

The 2027 M3 CS does almost none of that.

The spec, per the announcement: manual transmission only. Rear-wheel drive only. And — most surprising — less horsepower than the Competition, because BMW couldn't use the higher-state-of-tune competition motor with a manual gearbox. The package is being called the Handschalter package (the German word for "stick shift"). Roughly 473 hp versus around 520 in the Competition. About 70 lbs lighter — Blair's own framing: roughly the weight of one lunch.

The reason this is genuinely news: the entire BMW M playbook for the last decade has been more power, more weight, more complexity, every successor faster than the last. For BMW to come out with their top trim and make it intentionally less powerful, manual only, and rear-drive only is the first real signal that the horsepower arms race may have peaked. Blair's read: he's not sure he should be as enthused as he is, but the Cadillac Black Wings have clearly woken BMW up, and EVs have made raw speed ubiquitous enough that buyers are starting to ask for different instead of faster. Engagement, simplicity, mechanical character.

Shinoo's add: in the E36 M3 lightweight era, the more hardcore M3 famously didn't sell. The market is different now — more enthusiasts in the buying pool, and a clearer hunger for analog. This is BMW's first real test of whether that's true.

The original return of the Z landed with a thud — the reviews didn't love it. The NISMO followed, drove much better, but had no manual transmission. The reason given at launch was that the torque was too high for a stick, and that buyers would want to track these cars. That was the explanation. It was unsatisfying.

This week the veil came off the new NISMO Z with a manual gearbox. Reviews from Sonoma Raceway are very positive: sharpened up, a great-feeling shifter, around $60K. One of the YouTubers in the review pool said outright that he might need to buy one. Blair's previously had no interest in Nissan; he caught himself thinking this would actually make a great GT/daily.

Adjacent news Shinoo dropped: one of his old fraternity brothers is now a senior R&D guy at Horse Powertrain in the US. They've been texting. The relevant takeaway: managing power flow in a hybrid drivetrain with a manual gearbox is, in this guy's read, a serious technical hurdle — so don't hold your breath for a manual in the future Horse-powered Lotuses. Shinoo's conclusion: if you want a manual Lotus, the cars to have are the current V6 manual Emiras or the previous Evoras. The N/A V6 manual Evora especially. He mentioned tuning one to over 500 hp with Nitron suspension — the result, in his words, was effectively a supercar with a wonderful soundtrack.

BMW unveiled what looks like a future design direction this week at Villa d'Este on Lake Como. BMW has fully acquired Alpina, and the concept points to where the design language is heading. Forward-leaning shark nose, four-seat coupe, large (closer to 6 Series / 8 Series proportions than 3 Series), and — most notably — a kidney grille that's executed in a more three-dimensional, integrated way. Not the giant flat slab that's been dividing opinion on the recent SUV lineup.

The hosts have both been jaded on modern BMW design for a while — Blair particularly — but the Vision concept got a real compliment from both of them. Elegant. The kidney works. Reminded them, mostly, that BMW can still design cars that look like sports cars rather than appliances. Blair's caveat: BMW also showed a stunning recreation of the M Coupe (the clown shoe shape on a Z4 base) a few years back and then never built it — produced apparently for a handful of very wealthy clients at a multi-million-dollar price point. The Visions don't always become reality.

This caught Shinoo's eye. A new GT3 Revival series has launched in Europe, racing GT3-spec cars built between 2006 and 2013, on real tracks: Paul Ricard, Spa, Le Mans, Nürburgring, Barcelona.

His read on what that signals: the demand for analog cars isn't just internet noise. There's enough enthusiasm — and enough surviving hardware — to support a real race series built around the era before everything went full aero, full electronics, full assist. The 2006–2013 GT3 era keeps modern levels of safety (a real factor in why this is viable now in a way 1990s racing wasn't) but with cars that feel hardcore in a way nothing built today does. Blair would push the era back further if he were drawing the line for "peak driver's car," but he agreed the safety floor matters and a race series built around that decade is a meaningful market signal.

This is a topic Blair could go on about for an hour, and almost did. The short version: if you love a manual gearbox and you love rev-matching and heel-toe downshifting, sports car gearing matters more than almost anything else about the car.

The case in point on the show: Blair's old 981 Cayman GT4. The gearing in that car is notoriously tall — first gear runs to roughly 43 to 50 mph, second to 83, third to 110. The car is naturally aspirated, which means the power and the soundtrack and the fizz all live between about 4,500 rpm and 8,000 rpm. The problem is that the gearing makes it almost impossible to actually live in that fizz zone on the road. First gear is awkward to rev out. Second gets you there, but only if you're willing to be at 83 mph. Third gear is freeway-only. So the engagement window of an otherwise spectacular shifter is narrower than it should be.

On track, the GT4 is phenomenal and the gearing makes sense. On the road, Blair's repeated reach for a downshift on corner entry — already in second, with nowhere lower to go — is the source of the long-running debate. The PDK in this car actually has slightly shorter ratios than the manual, which is one of the rare cases where the automatic gearbox makes the car more engaging in the rev range it was built for.

The second example Blair pulled up: his old BMW M Coupe (the clown shoe), 2001–2002 S54 car. Top of second gear: 75 mph. The reason for the tall gearing was political — BMW didn't want the M Coupe stepping on the E46 M3's halo status, so they geared it long. The fix Blair found: a used limited-slip diff from an E30, which opened up the available final-drive ratio options. Shorter gearing on that car was a transformation — exactly the kind of thing where the car wakes up and the shifter actually gets to participate.

Shinoo's broader point: manufacturers gear sports cars for the venue they think the car is for — racetracks, the autobahn, the EPA cycle. Long gearing buys emissions performance, sometimes buys top speed, and almost always buys product hierarchy (the GT4 doesn't get to feel too fun, because the GT3 is the halo). The cars where it really hurts are the ones being driven on twisty roads in the canyons. Aftermarket gear-set solutions exist for the 981/718 platform, but they're expensive and first gear in particular is tricky to change.

Blair's running takeaway: he'd love to drive a 981 or 718 with a proper short ratio set. He thinks it would wake the car up considerably.

Same platform, very different cars. Same V8 era (Blair owned an R8 V8), the Audi feeling tailored and elegant, the Lambo feeling chiseled and theatrical. The proposition this week: which one?

Blair's history with the Gallardo includes one of the most memorable rides of his life — summer of 2006, interning at BMW in Munich, visiting a family friend near Nuremberg whose neighbor turned out to own a Gallardo and offered the 24-year-old American a ride. The autobahn run hit 330 km/h (about 205 mph). When the owner asked if Blair wanted to take the back roads home or do the top-speed run again, Blair picked the top-speed run again.

Despite that, when Blair was buying his own car years later, he chose the R8 — over his sons' objections (their position: "if you're going to buy an R8, just get the Lambo"). The R8 details he loved: top of first gear around 60 mph (so the V8 actually gets to sing in first), revs to roughly 8,200, gated manual, smooth motor, side blades, and the kind of styling that looks great parked in your own driveway. He sold it eventually because his actual use case for a third car didn't match what the R8 wanted to be.

Shinoo's call right now: the Gallardo. More Italian flair, aging beautifully, the more exciting car if you're handed both sets of keys and pointed at Ortega Highway. When he's 75 or 80, the R8 becomes the better answer — more elegant, more practical, easier to live with.

Blair's call: the R8. His evolved thinking on these cars is that neither one is really a sports car in the way a GT4 or an Elise is — they're GT cars, full stop. And as GT cars, the R8 is dramatically less scary to own, more usable day-to-day, and better at being used. If the brief is "blow the doors off going up a canyon road," Shinoo's right, take the Lambo. If the brief is "buy a third car you'll actually drive," Blair wants the R8.

When Shinoo asked him directly — both sets of keys, going up Ortega — Blair did admit he'd grab the Gallardo every time.

From Timothy, no city given:

The math is real. A 488 Pista is somewhere around $800K. A 488 Challenge car is closer to $200K. The idea: spend $100K converting the Challenge to street-legal and end up with something that would, on paper, blow the doors off a Pista on track for less than half the money.

Shinoo's answer: this is a long-running romantic idea, and one he's written about in the newsletter — the race car for the road concept that's been kicking around since the 1960s. It worked better in the '60s because cars were slower, emissions weren't a constraint, and safety standards were nothing like today's. The case against making it work on a modern Challenge car:

Plus the math under the math: the Pista comparison is misleading because the Pista is a limited halo. A regular 488 is $200K to $250K — barely more than a Challenge car — and it's already designed to be a street car. By the time you've spent the Challenge conversion budget, you've passed the price of a clean standard 488 and ended up with something worse for the road.

Shinoo did note he's run Hoosier R-compound DOT slicks on the road once — on an Ariel Atom, which is light enough to get away with it — but that's the kind of exception that proves the rule.

The hosts' offer to Timothy if he tries it anyway: a set of Full Throttle Talk-branded earplugs. Car enthusiasts, as Blair conceded on the show, are stupid. Report back.

Derek will be back in a future episode for the full NVH deep dive — the segment on driving a Pininfarina Battista on track that didn't make it into the first guest episode is still sitting on the shelf.

🎙 Listen to the full episode here: https://youtu.be/3nu9hTCO118?si=67p_EdOOxMCOE5b2

– Tim, Blair & Shinoo

🏁 The Full Throttle Talk Team
Buckle up. Hit the gas. Let's go full throttle.

Got thoughts on today’s topic? We’d love to hear them. Just hit reply or share your take with fellow gearheads inside our private Facebook group.

📩 Don’t keep Full Throttle Talk a secret—share it with a friend, family member, or colleague. Let’s spread the fun!

💬 Want your question featured on the next show? DM us on Instagram or reply to this newsletter.

🧠 Got an article or market take? Send it in—we’ll feature our favorites in an upcoming issue.