By Tim Harris, Blair Smith & Shinoo Mapleton · April 16, 2026

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There's a version of the car hobby that looks like this:

A beautiful old machine sitting under a cover in a garage. Maybe a Jaguar XKE. Maybe a DeLorean. Maybe a classic 911. Bought with the best of intentions, driven twice a year on perfect weather days, and otherwise slowly becoming a monument to a mechanical era that's getting harder and harder to sustain.

The mechanics who knew these cars are retiring. Parts are sourced from halfway around the world. The window for keeping them alive and drivable is quietly closing.

Shinoo thinks there's a better way.

And this week, he proved it.

Most people know the DeLorean story. Stainless steel body. Gull-wing doors. A PRV V6 that made about 130 horsepower and turned a head-turning design into a deeply underwhelming driving experience. The car looked like the future and drove like an apology.

This week, after months of work, Shinoo finally took the shop's EV-converted DeLorean out for a proper drive.

The verdict: it just cruises. Smooth, quiet, effortless — and genuinely quick. Quicker, in fact, than the two EV-converted Jaguar XKEs the shop has already completed. Which surprised even him.

The conversion concept is simple in its logic: the DeLorean was always about the experience of the thing — the doors, the shape, the statement. The factory motor was never the point. Replacing it with an electric drivetrain doesn't diminish the car. It finally lets the rest of it deliver on what the design always promised.

And practically speaking: most people aren't taking their classic cars on road trips anymore. They're driving to dinner. To cars and coffee. Down a canyon on a Sunday morning. The EV drivetrain is perfect for exactly that — no warm-up ritual, no sourcing obscure parts, no white-knuckling it every time something starts making a new noise. Just get in and go.

The shop has now done two Jaguar XKE conversions, this DeLorean, and another XKE arriving next month. The pipeline is building.

For the skeptics who say you're killing the soul of the car: Blair has a friend whose XJS V12 has been in pieces in his garage for two years. He's trying to use the car. The soul doesn't mean much when the car never runs.

Then came the announcement that changes the trajectory of the shop entirely.

Shinoo signed a deal this week to become an authorized Callaway Cars performance center for the West Coast.

If the name Callaway doesn't immediately mean something to you — it should. Reeves Callaway started the company over 40 years ago, originally building turbo kits for BMWs. Steve Dinan — of Dinan Engineering, the name synonymous with BMW performance — came directly out of that early Callaway effort.

But Callaway's real legacy was built on Corvettes.

In 1988, Callaway built a modified C4 Corvette called the Sledgehammer and drove it to 254 miles per hour on a closed road. That number stood as the production car top speed record for 22 years — until Bugatti finally beat it in 2010. Think about that timeline. 1988 to 2010. A modified American muscle car held the world record longer than most people's careers.

Today, Callaway builds supercharged, fully integrated performance packages for Corvettes — sold through dealers, backed by factory warranty, shipped directly from Bowling Green with the work scheduled at authorized centers. Shinoo had already seen one arrive at the shop: a brand-new C8 fresh from the factory, waiting for a Callaway supercharger installation.

Now his shop is the official West Coast home for that work.

He flies out this week — family wedding first, then a detour to Old Lyme, Connecticut to sit down with the Callaway team at their headquarters. He's already asked about the C7 Shooting Brake kit. He wants one.

The timing is right. There are an estimated 100,000 Corvettes registered in Southern California alone — the same number Lotus has produced globally across 75 years of manufacturing. The addressable market isn't a niche. It's enormous. And the C8 platform is becoming the track-day car of choice for a whole new generation of performance drivers.

Shinoo had a client call him this week — a longtime Lotus Exige track driver who bought a C8 Stingray last year, took it to his first track day completely stock, and was within one second of his best Exige lap time. He's now moved up to a Z06.

Porsche and Corvette represent stability. The Callaway partnership opens the next chapter.

BMW's president declared manuals have no future at the company. Days later, M Division VP Silvia Neubauer promised a solution to keep them alive in select models.

The engineering tension is real: modern performance cars produce torque figures that conventional manual gearboxes simply can't handle reliably. That's the honest reason the whole industry has migrated to paddle-shift automatics — not preference, but physics.

The question is whether BMW will invest in transmissions capable of handling the power, or quietly detune manual-equipped cars to make the math work.

Shinoo keeps a BMW advertisement from the 1990s on his wall. It's a photo of a gear knob. Where the shift pattern should be, it just says: "yeha."

That used to be the whole brand identity. Now they're having boardroom debates about whether to keep the feature at all. Given that BMW was also one of the first manufacturers to pipe artificial engine sound into their cabins, enthusiasm for whatever solution they come up with is measured.

Chevrolet officially confirmed the Camaro returns as a 2028 model, built on a new rear-wheel-drive platform shared with the Cadillac CT5 and — apparently — a Buick. (Yes, Buick is still a thing.)

The good: rear-drive platform, new LS6 V8 almost certainly in the mix, proper performance credentials from the ground up.

The controversial: because the platform is shared with four-door sedan siblings, a four-door Camaro is reportedly on the table.

Sacrilegious on paper. But Shinoo made the case: rear-drive, LS6, manual transmission, four doors — that's actually a compelling package for a lot of buyers. It's the sleeper sedan formula that worked brilliantly for decades in Europe.

Mustang has been gaining sales every quarter since the Camaro went away. A practical, powerful, rear-drive alternative might be exactly what recaptures those buyers.

Porsche teased an upcoming reveal with a cloaked car, no wing, and GT3 RS-style front fender cutouts. The enthusiast internet reached its consensus immediately: GT3 Cabriolet.

Blair's reaction was a masterclass in conflicted emotion.

The GT3 has always been a track car in his mind. Adding a cabriolet body feels like a dilution — the same frustration he has with the GT3 Touring debate. But then: that engine. Manual gearbox. Roof off. 9,000 RPM in open air.

Shinoo had fewer reservations. He's a fan of the current 992 Cabriolet's proportions — the swoopy roofline that earlier generations couldn't pull off. And from a business standpoint, Porsche is doing what Porsche does: take their best engine, put it in a configuration that more of their customers will actually use, charge an eye-watering premium, and sell every single one. The GT3 motor is too good to keep exclusively for track day heroes.

The episode closed with a question Blair posed at the start: not your favorite car, not the fastest car you've driven — but the cars that made you an enthusiast. The ones that changed how you saw everything else.

A 1995 Porsche 993 C2 — his first real sports car after years of sporty cars. The flat-six behind the rear axle. The solidity of it over railroad tracks. The sensation of something carved from a single piece of steel. A revelation.

A Lotus Elise Series 2 — bought after years on the waiting list, driven off the lot and understood immediately. The lightness. The communication. The rabbit hole it opened into Aerial Atoms, BAC Monos, and a career built around these cars.

A BAC Mono — signed the deal to import them to the US on 11/11/11, assembled the first American example at the shop, drove it and emerged with blurred eyes and ringing ears. A single-seat, F3-specification road car. 100% focused. Nothing else like it. Somewhere in Death Valley, a cow skull named Charlie appeared in the Top Gear feature shoot. It now hangs above the alignment rack.

A 1974 BMW 2002 Turbo — lagy, non-linear, not what he expected to love. But he drove it one evening and didn't want to stop. 2,400 pounds. A turbo surge in the mid-range. Something about the simplicity of it that kept pulling him back.

A 992 GT3 RS — tossed the keys at the top of Johnson's Pass. Drove down. Got to the bottom and realized his friend had already left in the M3. Turned around. Went back up. The front-end precision. The rotation. The engine at 9,000 RPM. His M3 — a car he loved — suddenly felt like furniture.

A 1985 Porsche 911 Carrera 3.2 Eurospec — manual steering, communicative brakes, perfect weight transfer. Not too much power. Just a car that tells you everything in real time and rewards you for listening. The one that keeps calling him back every time something faster and more modern loses the thread.

🎙 Listen to the full episode here: https://youtu.be/lDORDmeEonM?si=v0gnAzxarbhp-KCR

– Tim, Blair & Shinoo

🏁 The Full Throttle Talk Team
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