By Tim Harris, Blair Smith & Shinoo Mapleton · June 4, 2026

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Tim's update this week is a real estate update. Which, for those keeping score, means his arc has now fully looped back to his actual day job.

This week's note:

The Rational Friend Effect

A buddy who's been on the show — owner of a 964 RS and a 992.2 manual GT3 — drove Blair's 111 RS, got back in his RS, and decided he was done with air-cooled. The RS sold immediately. Another car is now heading to Shinoo's shop for the 111 RS Pro treatment. The same buddy also traded his 992 GT3 for a Lotus Emira, making him officially all-Lotus.

Blair's take:

996 RR Drivetrain Rattle — Diagnosed and Fixed

The culprit was a non-OEM throwout bearing from a third-party parts package — it included OEM clutch and flywheel but used a German-made (not OEM) throwout bearing that cooked in three months. Swapped out, rattle gone. Shinoo's driving the car this weekend.

996 RR Baja Designs Lighting Upgrade

The 996 RR got DOT street-legal Baja Designs lights wired into the factory switch on its tubular front bumper. Marker lights come on with them, low beam transitions cleanly, all through the original switch. Shinoo's note: older cars are romantic, but modern lighting standards have left them behind — and at his eye age, more light matters.

E-Ray Callaway Supercharger Build — Nearly Done

Powertrain is back in the car. The owner sourced a Borla muffler with a crossover tube, which shaves significant weight over the stock Corvette muffler (Shinoo's words: it "weighs as much as a Lotus"). Once the ECU is reflashed, the car fires up — then heads straight to drag racing. A local YouTuber has challenged the owner to run the supercharged E-Ray against a ZR1. They're swapping to stock wheels for the run since the aftermarket three-piece wheels are likely heavier than OE, and reducing unsprung weight helps acceleration.

111 RS Spider — Center-Seat Conversion

The Spider that won Best of Show at the West Coast Lotus Meet and launched the entire RS Pro program is back in the shop. Next phase: center-seat conversion (driver seat moved to centerline, passenger seat removed), shifter and pedal box relocation, and a tubular rear subframe for more weight reduction. Target reveal: the Lotus Gathering in September — three to four months out.

Cerakote Testing for Florida Builds

Cars headed to Florida chew through nickel plating fast due to humidity and salt air. Shinoo is testing Cerakote on a 996 RR exhaust and on the wishbones of a 111 RS build for a Florida customer. Though primarily a temperature-resistance coating, its corrosion resistance outperforms nickel plating in harsh environments.

Ferrari unveiled its first all-electric car on Memorial Day Monday. The reaction — both from the press and, more damningly, from inside the Ferrari orbit — has been close to a disaster.

The most quoted reaction came from Luca di Montezemolo, the former Ferrari chairman who is widely credited with engineering the modern commercial Ferrari era. Confronted by a microphone, he reportedly said:

He then went further, saying (paraphrased from an Italian translation)

… And that he hoped Ferrari would at least remove the prancing horse from the car. The most cutting line was the parting shot:

The hosts' read on the car itself, with all the standard EV-vs-ICE caveats acknowledged:

On the price. The Luce lands somewhere around $750,000 as optioned — which, as Blair put it, takes it from "expensive EV Ferrari" to "three-quarters of a million dollars." The Pista comparison comes up immediately. So does the question of who buys this and why.

On the design. Both Shinoo and Blair acknowledge there's something interesting in there — the front and the side aren't offensive, the proportions have to live with an EV skateboard architecture (high belt line, thick midsection, black side detailing used to visually slim the flank, exactly the same trick the Mustang Mach-E and Polestars use). But the rear lights have drawn a comparison neither host can shake — they look like an early-2000s Chevy Impala. And the wheels are roughly 23 inches.

On the LoveFrom factor. The car was reportedly designed in collaboration with Jony Ive and Marc Newson's LoveFrom studio. Both hosts had a charitable read of the design intent and a less charitable read of the execution: this is what happens when a brand with an emotional identity falls for celebrity-designer aura. The car doesn't look like a Ferrari. It looks like an avant-garde sedan that happens to wear a prancing horse.

The one thing they gave Ferrari credit for: not making an EV sports car. The EV sports cars that have been shown to date — from Rimac to Pininfarina to the Lotus Evija — have not been commercial successes. By going sedan, Ferrari at least didn't compromise its sports car identity. They just made an expensive sedan that nobody knows what to do with.

The rumor floating around the comments: Ferrari may release a limited run of the V12 in a gated manual transmission, and the only way to get an allocation will be to buy a Luce first. If true, that's the actual product strategy. The Luce is a tax on the V12 manuals.

We'll see.

Lotus picked, intentionally or not, an excellent week to ship news. The day after the Ferrari reveal, Lotus officially announced the Emira 420 — the open-top, more-powerful turbo variant of the Emira that Shinoo flagged early last week.

The spec: an AMG four-cylinder turbo with bumped output, reduced weight, added aero, a target-style liftoff roof panel (not a sunroof — a removable panel that keeps the roof rails intact so the car keeps its rigidity), and paddle shift. Eight-speed automatic.

Shinoo's verdict from having driven both turbo and V6 manual Emiras last spring: the four-cylinder turbo car is fast and easy to drive quickly. But the steering is different — electric assist on the turbo cars, fully hydraulic on the V6 manuals — and he prefers the hydraulic. The 420 will sell. Lotus dealers are reporting strong interest.

The piece of news inside the news: the V6 manual Emira has not been formally discontinued. It's been rumored to be in its last year, but the 420 announcement doesn't kill it. Given Lotus's history of iterating an existing platform over many years (the Evora 400 → Evora GT progression as a recent template), there's reason to hope a hotter V6 manual variant is still in the pipeline. The Jim Clark Edition and the Sakura matte-black edition of the current V6 manual are already out as cosmetic iterations. The performance iteration would be the natural next step.

The stat Shinoo cited again, because it's worth re-stating: 80% of US Emira sales are V6 manuals. Lotus knows what we want. The question is whether the product plan acknowledges it.

Shinoo brought a real newspaper to the recording — the Wall Street Journal — with the headline "New car sales slump deepens" running across the top. The macro picture: US new car sales peaked over 17 million annually before COVID, and at the current trajectory the industry will be lucky to clear 16 million this year. A million cars of difference is real capacity, real consolidation pressure, and real demand-side change.

The driver underneath: the average new car now costs roughly $50,000. Buyers are noticing.

Shinoo's prediction is that this is how the Chinese manufacturers get into the US market — by buying underutilized US factories and possibly entire brands. Volvo (Geely-owned) already produces cars in the US. Some Polestars are built in China. The infrastructure for Chinese-owned production on US soil already exists; the next step would be acquisitions of underperforming legacy brands and capacity that nobody else wants. Watch that space.

Shinoo has been a guest on Jay Leno's Garage on two separate occasions, and the stories are worth the full segment.

The first visit: the BAC Mono. Back in 2011, Shinoo's shop became the exclusive US importer for BAC — a Liverpool-based outfit that builds a single-seat, F3-spec road car. At the time, body panels were being produced in Canada and engines came from Cosworth in LA, so Shinoo's team was building the cars from a bare chassis. The car was so unusual that Jay's car wrangler reached out. Jay fit in the car (which was the open question going in), they ran it through the canyons around Burbank, and the segment is still up on YouTube.

What Shinoo wasn't expecting: he'd actually met Jay before the shoot, at Monterey car week. Shinoo had spotted Jay walking through one of the memorabilia shows with an entourage and just yelled out, "Hey Jay, how's your Ariel Atom?" Jay stopped, turned around, and the whole entourage stopped with him. Jay looked over and said, "You know about the Ariel Atom?" — and walked over and started a conversation. Shinoo had an Atom at the time too. They just talked Atoms.

The garage itself. Burbank, an industrial building, totally nondescript from the outside. Inside: over 100 cars, over 100 motorcycles, a McLaren F1, one of Gordon Murray's rockets, a full machine shop and service team that keeps everything running. The detail Shinoo didn't expect — the art collection on the walls. Someone who isn't a car person could walk through the space and be enthralled by the art alone. Jay's favorite cars, when Shinoo asked: the steam cars.

The second visit: the Drakan Spider. Years later, Shinoo brought a Drakan Spider to the show. He started to reintroduce himself and Jay cut him off: "Shinoo, I know who you are. You don't have to tell me your name." It was 110 degrees in Burbank. Shinoo put on a long-sleeve white t-shirt and his usual bucket hat. Jay looked at him and said, "Shinoo, what are you doing?" — Shinoo's answer: "Jay, it's 110 degrees." Jay (in good humor): "Yeah, but you're Indian, man. It's okay." Shinoo's comeback: "Listen — my hair is black. Yours is white. The sun's reflecting off your hair and cooking me."

The other thing Shinoo noted from spending time with Jay: he asks deliberately basic questions on camera even when he obviously knows the answer. Not because he doesn't know. Because he doesn't want to come across as a know-it-all, and he understands his audience includes people who aren't deep in the hobby. It's hosting craft. The same craft, Shinoo noted, that contrasts with the Jeremy Clarkson playbook — arms out, theatrical, playing to the camera. Jay drives the way he drives. He's having fun. He just isn't selling it.

Blair's one complaint as a viewer: he wishes Jay would actually say what he thinks of these cars. Shinoo's read: that's not Jay's show. The format is closer to Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee than a review. Jay isn't there to critique. He's there to enjoy.

The premise is the obvious one. If you were considering a Luce, what would you buy instead?

Shinoo's trio:

Total: roughly $700K. Comfortably under the Luce's window sticker.

Blair's trio (with a different framing — what would the Luce buyer pick instead?):

Shinoo's reaction to the Model X:

(For the record, Shinoo owns a Model Y. The objection isn't to Tesla. It's to the Model X and Y silhouettes specifically.)

The conclusion both agreed on: take Shinoo's trio. Manual transmission represented, daily driver covered, Ferrari with actual Ferrari proportions. The 812 Superfast and the 458 are both excellent cars in their own right, but the Drakan + Cross Turismo + 296 trio does the job better.

Shinoo's own framing of the math: if you can actually afford the Luce, you can probably afford the and all six of the cars proposed here. The "this or that" framing doesn't apply to the buyer. The "this and that" framing does.

A listener question from Rick came in this week — we held it for next week so we can give it the full treatment. Apologies, Rick. Next episode.

– Tim, Blair & Shinoo

🏁 The Full Throttle Talk Team
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