By Tim Harris, Blair Smith & Shinoo Mapleton · April 6, 2026

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There's a feeling every car person chases.

Not the first time you sit in a fast car.

Not the first time someone tells you a car is special.

The first time you actually feel it for yourself.

This week, Blair felt it.

A Lotus Elise 111RS built by Shinoo. A NASA track day at Utah Motorsports Campus. Twenty cars on grid — C8 Z06s, GT4s, M2s, another Lotus Cup R.

And a guy who had never turned traction control off on a track in his life.

He came on the podcast still buzzing.

Meanwhile, Shinoo was recording from Spring Mountain — nine miles of track, a Corvette racing suit, and a Z06 school happening on the circuit right behind him.

And Tim? Deep in a sim racing rabbit hole, logging laps on Suzuka, insisting paddles aren't that much less engaging than a manual.

He was outvoted immediately.

Let's get into it.

Some first track days are humbling.

This wasn't one of them.

Blair's first outing in the Elise 111RS — the car Shinoo engineered, built, and recently handed off to him — was nothing short of a revelation. A group of 20 cars. A two-mile configuration at Utah Motorsports Campus (freshly renamed Bert Brothers Motor Park). Traction control off for the first time ever.

He got passed exactly once.

And that was by a driver with 10 times the track experience, running a Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 with real downforce. Even then, it took that driver several laps to separate.

The Elise's secret weapon: Shinoo's Katana 275 supercharger kit, making roughly 275 horsepower at just 2,000 lbs wet. That power-to-weight ratio is devastating to heavier cars in the corners.

Blair kept pace with a Camaro SS 1LE on the straights — a car pushing 450 hp — then walked away from it every time the track bent. He trailed a C8 Stingray with the Z51 package and watched the driver brake while knowing he didn't have to.

Shinoo's note for next time: the ride height is still set for the street. Lower it 10mm, add a wing and front splitter, and you're in a different stratosphere.

Not all track stories end well.

Moments after the green flag dropped, Blair rounded a corner at Utah Motorsports Campus and spotted a massive plume of dust billowing 40–50 yards off the racing surface.

A gorgeous bright-blue C8 Z06 — brand new — was buried in the gravel.

The backstory: a father-and-son duo had just installed a set of $13,000 carbon fiber wheels before the event. During installation, the ABS sensor got inadvertently disconnected. The dealership assured them it was fine — essentially just race mode, nothing to worry about.

It wasn't fine.

The son, an experienced track driver, locked his brakes on his very first hot lap with zero ABS intervention. The car flew off track. Tires destroyed. Carbon wheels almost certainly totaled.

Approximately 90 seconds of actual on-track time.

The lesson: always verify every safety system before you grid up — no matter what a dealership tells you.

The biggest news item of the week came from Shinoo, who flagged a freshly issued Porsche patent for a "shift-by-wire" system.

Filed in August 2024 and issued in March 2026, the concept combines a traditional H-pattern gear lever with an automatic gearbox — with an optional simulated clutch throw included. The goal is to preserve the sensation of rowing gears without the mechanical complexity of a true manual transmission.

The reaction around the table was measured, not dismissive.

Blair, coming off the most analog driving experience of his life, put it plainly:

Tim pointed to the real-world version already happening in the sim space: Cool Performance — whose rig is used by seven of the top ten Formula 1 drivers and was built by Oliver Norris, Lando's brother — is now integrating an actual mechanical manual transmission into their simulator. Real internals. Plexiglass housing so you can watch the gearbox work as you drive.

If simulated is the future, that's the right way to do it.

Ferrari is already heading in a similar direction: the new Purosangue's haptic interior controls were reportedly chosen in part because they're significantly cheaper to produce than physical buttons — but they're still physical interactions. Digital car, analog switches. A compromise most of us can probably live with.

Shinoo summed it up best:

Blair made the broader point worth sitting with: manufacturers keep going to extreme lengths and enormous expense to cater to enthusiasts who represent a tiny fraction of buyers. Why? Because enthusiasts drive brand excitement. The Hyundai Ioniq 5N's simulated dual-clutch shifts cost serious money to develop. They did it anyway.

The enthusiast still matters. The market just hasn't fully caught up to admitting it.

Shinoo may have had a little insider knowledge — he hinted last week there could be two Grand Sport variants. He was right on the money. Corvette officially unveiled the C8 Grand Sport at Sebring, and here's what matters:

The debate that followed was real: Why buy a new Grand Sport when a lightly used Z06 lands at a similar price?

Shinoo's honest answer: most buyers want torque they can feel immediately. The Z06's high-revving flat-plane crank rewards commitment and high RPM. The Grand Sport's LS6 delivers power lower and harder — it's simply more accessible to more drivers.

Tim's take:

Blair's take: he's buying a used Z06.

Amelia Island spoke. The bellwether spring auctions that tend to set the tone for the rest of the year sent a clear signal:

The best of the best? Record prices. Everything else? Flat or falling.

The gap between top-tier collector cars and the rest of the market is widening fast. 90s cars have emerged as the new darlings of the collector world — the shift has been remarkable to watch in real time.

And then there's the hypercar story of the moment.

The Pagani Zonda — originally priced at $500–600K when it launched, which had people questioning who on earth would pay that — is now trading at $7–8 million. Later versions are approaching $10 million.

The moral of the story: questioning a car's value at launch has a long history of being wrong when the car is genuinely special.

Each host brought two nominees. Pure design only. No performance specs, no racing pedigree, no lap times. Just beauty.

Blair's picks:

The late-'60s Datsun 2000 Roadster — understated, clean, and consistently underappreciated. And the Mazda FD RX-7 — a car Blair argues looks even better with the right aftermarket wheels, in the same way the BMW M Coupe rewards proper setup.

Tim's picks:

The Toyota 2000 GT — the only Japanese collector car to reliably break the $1 million barrier, and jaw-dropping in person. And the NA Mazda Miata — specifically the black-with-red interior or British Racing Green limited editions. Tim and Julie had a black-with-red on deposit back in 1992, waiting to find out if they'd get approved for their first mortgage. They got the house. They never got the Miata. They later bought a Mariner Blue '90 and drove it from Columbus, Ohio to Seattle and back.

Shinoo's picks:

The Mazda FD RX-7 — the most curvaceous, most athletic Japanese car of the era. The Supra always looked bloated by comparison. And the Honda S2000 — specifically for the way the front fender line flows almost horizontally over the top of the wheel arch. A design detail that has aged beautifully.

The vote:

It came down to the Toyota 2000 GT vs. the Mazda FD RX-7.

All three went Toyota.

🏆 Most Beautiful Japanese Car of All Time (per Full Throttle Talk): Toyota 2000 GT

Blair closed last week's show with the question. This week we answered it:

Is the Porsche 992 GT3 truly the greatest modern sports car — or is it overhyped and overpriced?

Each host brought three alternatives at three price points. Here's how it played out.

$75K–$100K:

All three hosts arrived at the same car independently: the Lotus Emira V6 Manual. Sticker runs a little high, but with negotiation, acquirable near $100K. Remove the third catalytic converter and you can hear the supercharger whine come through the intakes — it sounds genuinely exotic. The base C8 Stingray was considered and passed over. Not because it's a bad car, but because the Emira simply feels more special.

$100K–$250K:

$250K–$500K:

The GT3's home territory. And here's the honest answer:

If you're buying new, have this budget, and want a manual-transmission high-revving track weapon with decades of refinement behind it — the 992 GT3 is very, very hard to beat on its own terms.

But the entire conversation kept circling back to the same observation: Shinoo — the man who has built Lotus Cup cars, holds more track time than most of us will accumulate in a lifetime, and literally is the Lotus — is actively gravitating toward a C8 Z06.

That tells you something.

Two guys drove real cars this week.

One took his new Lotus out for its first track day in Utah and came back convinced he'd found the car he was meant to drive.

One was recording from Spring Mountain in a Corvette racing suit — nine miles of track behind him, a Z06 school on the circuit — preparing to find out whether the same car is the right grand tourer to take on road trips with his wife.

And one guy was deep in Suzuka on a simulator, logging terrible lap times and quietly being reminded why real track time can't be fully replicated.

What all three conversations kept returning to was the same thing:

The cars that matter most are the ones that talk back.

A Lotus that tells you everything through the steering wheel.
A Z06 that fills your chest with sound at redline.
A Toyota 2000 GT that still stops people cold sixty years after it was designed.

Whatever Porsche patents, whatever Ferrari calls haptics, whatever simulated driving becomes — that's still what all of us are chasing.

The feeling that the car and the driver are actually in conversation with each other.

🎙 Listen to the full episode here: https://youtu.be/A7OAY25a9fA?si=1ylJ7G8YmFpF8IsQ

And tell us — who got it right in the GT3 debate? And what's your pick for most beautiful Japanese car?

– Tim, Blair & Shinoo

🏁 The Full Throttle Talk Team
Full Throttle Talk drops weekly. Strong opinions, real experience, zero hype.

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