In This Episode
- 0:01 Introduction to the project
- 1:12 Testing the car's performance
- 5:05 Identifying issues with the car
- 8:06 Planning the modifications
- 11:24 Beginning the modifications
- 13:01 Installing new suspension
- 14:08 Installing new brakes
- 16:00 Testing the new modifications
- 20:00 Planning future modifications
Video Transcript
[Brian] You are
watching Powernation.
[Brian] We've only got 48 hours to transform the look and feel of this average Lexus. That one's done. DUN, done! To see if we got the right car for anyone balling on a budget. [Jason] That was bad. [ Music ]
[ chalk scraping ]
[Brian] What is the right car? Is it the fastest car? Is it the cheapest car? Or is it the car that makes the most sense for your budget? [ Music ]
[ ding ] [Jason] This is our 2011 Lexus IS-250. We are going to do a budget build on this. We like to start out with a great base. It's a Lexus, so it's pretty much a Toyota with fancy badges on it. This one's only got 112,000 miles on it. You can expect this car to last 300,000 to 400,000 miles if you take care of it. This is already a V6 rear wheel drive car. It's an automatic. They're very lightweight, nimble. They're fun cars to drive. -Woo! -You can find these all over for $6,000 to $8,000 dollars. This car may look like it's from 2011 but we're going to build it to look like a newer IS-500, which you can get now for $50,000 to $60,000 dollars, and we're going to try to rival that with our budget build.
-This is the best part right here.
Welcome to Blacktop Speed Shop. I'm Brian, this is Jason, and we're here at Polecat Training Center in beautiful Fayetteville, Tennessee to beat on our 2011 IS-250 to see if we got a good deal. -Or to see if we overpaid. And in order to figure that out we're gonna have to pull it off the trailer. -I thought you was gonna get it while you was under there? -I couldn't reach it. -Gonna have to push the ramps out too. -Which way do they come out? You're end or mine? -You're way. -You gonna push them. -Yeah, gonna have to. -You're going to trust me to line this up? -Sure. -That'll be your first mistake. -You gonna back it off? -Oh yeah, leave it up to me. Make it the new guy's fault if it breaks. -I'll move the ramp for you. Hey "R", "R" stands for backwards. -I thought "R" was for race? -All right, straight back. -I'm watching you. -Straight back. You on the ground in the back. [ Music ] Oh yeah. -You want to know something sad. That parking brake was on the whole time. It don't do nothing. We can't slide it. -Now we're going to take a couple laps around the track. One of the main things we observe right off the bat visually looking at is the brakes. We could tell some rotor wear and some thin pads. So we're anticipating some braking problems. -It's got 100,000 miles on it and it's 15 years old. So you could probably take a good guess and say that suspension's worn out. Coilovers are a cheap and easy upgrade. We're going to load the car with cameras. We're going to have a drone in the air so you can get every single angle. Ready? -Ready, let's go. -How low it is and the angle is pointing at the wheel. It's perfect. It's pointing at the rear right now. We got to get the tires warm and everything. [ Music ] [ drone humming ]
-Why do I hit my head every time. [ tires screeching ] -I got one rule. Don't wreck. [ Music ]
Yeah, let her run. I smell brakes.
-Overall first impression, What do you think? -It's a solid car. It handles nice. -The brakes are worse than I thought. -Overall though, taking corners and diving. Now I know we're not pushing it hard as it'll go either yet? Still getting the feel of the track right. Still learning what we're doing at this particular place. But all in all man, great car. -Well you know what we've got to do now. Now we got to see how well it stops. Coming up, can we stop at 60 miles an hour on these 15 year old brakes? Did I hit something?
[Brian] So we've already drove the car around the track numerous laps. We knew the brakes were spongy and soft, but we want to show you how bad the brakes really are. So we set up some cones for a 60 to 0 mock brake test. Good brakes on this car should give you about 115 feet of stopping distance. So we've got this set up now. Jason's getting set up in the car.
And he's going to hit the brakes and we're gonna see what we can do, but there's no way this can work. All right Jason. Let her rip.
[ Music ] -The brakes were actually a little bit worse than what we really thought. Throwing it in the corners like we had been for hours on end today, and it's gonna prove to you what we've dealt with all day. [ Music ]
[ tires screeching ]
-What happen to blowing through the cones?
I would have bet the farm that no way this would have stopped. -Maybe I wasn't going 60. I don't know. When I looked down last I thought it said 60. I might have hit them early. Coming up to them cones right there. I felt like I was flying.
[ tires screeching ] [ Music ] -If 115 feet won't do it 140 for sure will get it. -Did I hit something? [ Music ] -No. Dude they were hot. -I know I was doing 60 that time. -So what'd it feel like? -Not great.
-Like a wet sponge? -Like it kept going. -That was crazy. -I slammed the pedal and the car didn't do nothing. -The brakes are even worse than what we really thought. You just drove it and proved that, right? That was pitiful. I hit the brakes, man. Nothing, it just kept floating. -You know what this means? -We can only get better. -It's true. It's time to load up so we can get to work. -Did we screw the bumper up? We gotta fix that? -So we just got back from the track with our IS250. So we're going to go over our takeaways or what we actually learned. Number one, suspension. We talked about that. So let's go over it. So I know obviously you had some concerns with the suspension. Looking at, age, control. What do you think? -It's not as bad as I thought. It could have been worse. It's a little sloppy, a little sloshy, but anything can be improved on. So we're going to improve on it with some coilovers. -So one of the main reasons for the coilover as well, we can adjust our ride height. We can make it sit the way we want to look. And we have adjustability depending on where we go to drive this vehicle. [ chalk scratching ] Brakes? -Brakes. -Lack of. [ tires screeching ] -You just hit the brakes and it keeps going. It vibrates bad enough that, a blender, shaking you up like a blender. It was not good. -Brakes are a must. This is one thing that you would have to do for sure with this vehicle is brakes. Number three is tires. Our tires still have tread life on them. We've seen some excessive dry rot on the tires. We were running on borrowed time. So these are definitely the three things that we have got to address.
And that we took away from our experience at the track?
Also, one thing that we're really trying to prove here is things that you could do over a weekend. As a working person, you're off work on Friday but you have to return on Monday. This may be your only mode of transportation. So if that's the case we start on Friday and we have to be back at work on Monday. That means we have 48 hours. [ chalk scratching ] What if we don't get done in 48 hours? How are we going to get to work? -You button it up until it runs. Until it's road worthy. -We finish what we can finish. And what's not finished you live with until the following Friday. We're going to do it. We've got 48 hours. -I know. [ Music ] -Up next, no way should it look like that. Can you completely transform your ride in under 48 hours? That was so much easier than what I thought.
[Brian] Keeping with our budget build theme and things that you would do at home in your own personal garage, we're only going to use non specialty hand tools that you can get at any big box store to prove to you it can be done. [Jason] And we're going to get it done in 48 hours because if this is your car and you're going to do this on the weekend you've got to be able to drive it to work Monday. So after 48 hours, whether we're done or not, wrenches will be down and we're going to take it for a drive. -Also, just like on a weekend, time doesn't stop. You've got 48 hours. The timer's going to run until we're done. -Are we supposed to hurry? -So when jacking the car up like this there is specified jack points from the manufacturer like for a trunk jack. Scissor jack most of the time. And that's where you're supposed to lift a pinch weld on a unibody car such as this but we've got to put our Jack stands underneath there as we want all four wheels off the ground at the same time. Fine, I got it. -I thought you did. [ impact driver humming ] Oh man, these were real hard to get off. -Is it cheating if it works? -Yes, yes it is. [ Music ] Also, we will be getting new wheels and tires. These ones have some battle scars on them, not from me. -See all this dry rotting right here. -It's not dry rot. It was just cracking from all the horsepower. -Oh it's scared. Did you get our universal hood prop? -I don't know, is the car going to yell at me again? -So everybody at home you've done this before. And if you have it, it's just when will you do it. It's not if. Universal hood prop for everybody. -Down here our rotors are a little shinier than they're supposed to be. The shiny is called glazing. Glazing is not good. We might have a bigger problem than just the pads and the rotors because it's pretty hard to turn this. I have a feeling that our pins here, something might be stuck. I'll spray the top over here. -Well thank you. -You're welcome. -Actually I'll miss it and I'll spray everything else instead. How's that sound? -So we went to our friends at Megan Racing to get these coilovers. These are complete struts. Look at this. Look at the difference already. It's not even adjusted. Good thing about these. We can adjust them on the car when we get them on there. -I'd say they're rough. It's not supposed to do that. Yeah, they're locked in. So I'll worry about it after we get it put in there. -Well that one's done. DUN, done. That was so much easier than what I thought. [ clock ticking sound ] Back here on day two of our Lexus budget build. Took the vehicle out, drove it, got the suspension settled in. Ride height looks great, performs, quiet, handles. So it's time to move on to the brakes. So we stopped off at AutoZone and got some Duralast brakes. And that's where we're going next. -We decided to do a little better than just regular Duralast. We got their Elite Series ceramics. They're made to last three times longer and be 100 percent noise free. That's why we went with Elite Series instead of regular. -Don't forget, make sure you have something to hang your brake caliper with. Whatever you got will work. Just don't let it hang by the hose. -They're pretty thin. They're really thin. Maybe my side is worse than yours but I really ain't got much to pry off from there. Can we go back to cars that were made of steel? You might have somewhere to hang my flashlight. -We're in the go faster era though. -Oh, yeah. -Feel this ridge right here. -Yeah, that's good. That's what you want. Speed secrets with Brian and Jason. -Correct. I don't believe it's supposed to feel like that. -It's not supposed to do that. [ Music ] That don't usually come off that easy. Usually it involves a lot of hammer. Hey I think I got you beat on the ridge. -That good? -Yeah, real good. -Drip, drip. -This is what I wanted to show you more than anything though. -Look, this looks like the Grand Canyon. What is all this packed in here? You see it? -That's the forbidden pepper. -Look at that. -Neither of my slide pins have any movement. -No way should it look like that. That's crazy. I think we should paint our brake calipers and brackets. -You're the paint guy. You gotta tell me how to do that, but I agree. -So any time you're spraying rattle can there's always a flash time and a dry time. You're probably looking at 30 minutes or so, and it should be tacky or dry enough to go ahead and reassemble and put back together. -I'm gonna spray some Deep Creep in there and see if it loosens it up. [ Music ] One down. Hopefully the other one comes out to. [ Music ] It's gonna have all the brakes now you know that. -Yeah. [ Music ] -Whoever designed these lug nuts, they need an evaluation by somebody. [ impact driver humming ] -You gotta stress test it. -You know that one time when we worked on these cars. We could tell what it looked like until it was on the ground. -I'm gonna take a nap. When I get back it better be on the ground. -Oh, boy. She squatted. Brakes on, got full suspension in, ride height. We've already settled the suspension before as well. Easily something you could do in a couple of days. Less than 48 hours, 100 percent. You can see our clock already. We still got around 19 hours remaining. Also, we fooled around a lot messing around. We went to eat lunch. We took breaks, and it was two of us doing this. So solo dolo at home by yourself still feasible in a weekend, no problem. -I think that's enough talking. We need to go drive it now. Coming up, did our upgrades make any difference? -Well hopefully this time it stops when it's supposed to.
[Brian] Well we're back out here at Polecat Training Center in beautiful Fayetteville, Tennessee, with our 2011 IS250. We're back to test our new suspension and our new brakes that we put on the car. You ready?
All right, let's go. [Jason] 10-4. -Well hopefully this time it stops when it's supposed to.
[ engine revving ] [ Music ]
[ tires screeching ] Woo! Dude, that's like eight foot, ten foot away. -How's that? -Phenomenal. [ Music ]
[ tires screeching ] Woo! Dude it looked like you was doing 100. -I set the cruise this time. I know I was doing 60. -We going again? Do it on the dry. See how good it is? -Yeah, let's go. So we simulated those 60 to 0, 115 foot test. Phenomenal performance. Now we're going to demonstrate 35 to 0 in a 60 foot mark. That seems like a pretty good distance for round town driving or normal driving at regular road speed. Now keep in mind these brakes and have been hot for this test that we're doing for 60 to 0. So we're still banking on performance. We're still banking it's gonna happen. Hope grandma Sue will be all right walking across the road. All right, let's roll. Pedestrian test take one. -10-4. [ Music ]
-Oh yeah. Dude that's 30 foot or less. What did that feel like? -Pretty good. -Not sticky or pulsy. Did the ABS kick in? -Yeah. -But no sliding of the tires. Nothing happened up here. [ Music ] -I'm probably stomping it a little hard. If I did a little less it'd probably stop better. But when you're panicking you don't think of that. -Panic stop you're supposed to stomp it? Well our brake test is complete and we proved that our brakes were that bad before. Outstanding performance today. Everything went well. We do have some other upgrades to come though. We're going to make this car look like a newer model Lexus. We're going to do some work under the hood. We're going to delete the exhaust, and we got a radio touch screen upgrade to get to yet. But until then what do you say we go rip around the track. -You don't gotta tell me twice. Let's go. You're driving or am I driving? -Yeah, I'll drive. -Let me get my helmet. -I wish you had a beard to deal with, with your chin strap. -Are you done messing around? -No. I don't want to pull all my wisdom out. -Okay. Are you good now? -Let's go. To the wall. Here we go. In 48 hours you could do a lot to transform the look of your car. The new coilovers improved stance and performance with full adjustability over all four corners. -The key to finding the right car for your next project is to figure out what your goal is when it's all said and done. We took a regular old Lexus that had a lot of potential and got it on its way to becoming a budget baller. Although brakes aren't anything flashy on a car this old it's money well spent. We wanted a daily driver that can look and feel luxurious without paying a luxury tax. We're not playing with monopoly money here, and we know y'all aren't either. For around $1,500 you could do everything we did today with regular tools and get it done in a weekend so you could drive to work on Monday and look good doing it. You don't want to miss Blacktop Speed Shop. [ engine revving ] I say we're done. -Button it up and let's go. -That's gonna work. -We are just getting started on this 2011 Lexus IS250. -The goal is to make it look and ride like a new gen Lexus for a fraction of the price. -We got a BMW that wants to play? We ain't got nothing for you buddy. I'm sorry. We ordered this awhile ago but. -We got it from China.
-Wreck it Ralph calm down!
Yes, it's like Christmas time! That's the rear diffuser. -We've got to fit a budget body kit. Got some dent repair to do. Gotta paint the hood, add new wheels and tires, and an imported info-tainment setup that'll look too good to be true. -They chase! No freakin' way dude! That is bad ass!
Show Full Transcript
[Brian] We've only got 48 hours to transform the look and feel of this average Lexus. That one's done. DUN, done! To see if we got the right car for anyone balling on a budget. [Jason] That was bad. [ Music ]
[ chalk scraping ]
[Brian] What is the right car? Is it the fastest car? Is it the cheapest car? Or is it the car that makes the most sense for your budget? [ Music ]
[ ding ] [Jason] This is our 2011 Lexus IS-250. We are going to do a budget build on this. We like to start out with a great base. It's a Lexus, so it's pretty much a Toyota with fancy badges on it. This one's only got 112,000 miles on it. You can expect this car to last 300,000 to 400,000 miles if you take care of it. This is already a V6 rear wheel drive car. It's an automatic. They're very lightweight, nimble. They're fun cars to drive. -Woo! -You can find these all over for $6,000 to $8,000 dollars. This car may look like it's from 2011 but we're going to build it to look like a newer IS-500, which you can get now for $50,000 to $60,000 dollars, and we're going to try to rival that with our budget build.
-This is the best part right here.
Welcome to Blacktop Speed Shop. I'm Brian, this is Jason, and we're here at Polecat Training Center in beautiful Fayetteville, Tennessee to beat on our 2011 IS-250 to see if we got a good deal. -Or to see if we overpaid. And in order to figure that out we're gonna have to pull it off the trailer. -I thought you was gonna get it while you was under there? -I couldn't reach it. -Gonna have to push the ramps out too. -Which way do they come out? You're end or mine? -You're way. -You gonna push them. -Yeah, gonna have to. -You're going to trust me to line this up? -Sure. -That'll be your first mistake. -You gonna back it off? -Oh yeah, leave it up to me. Make it the new guy's fault if it breaks. -I'll move the ramp for you. Hey "R", "R" stands for backwards. -I thought "R" was for race? -All right, straight back. -I'm watching you. -Straight back. You on the ground in the back. [ Music ] Oh yeah. -You want to know something sad. That parking brake was on the whole time. It don't do nothing. We can't slide it. -Now we're going to take a couple laps around the track. One of the main things we observe right off the bat visually looking at is the brakes. We could tell some rotor wear and some thin pads. So we're anticipating some braking problems. -It's got 100,000 miles on it and it's 15 years old. So you could probably take a good guess and say that suspension's worn out. Coilovers are a cheap and easy upgrade. We're going to load the car with cameras. We're going to have a drone in the air so you can get every single angle. Ready? -Ready, let's go. -How low it is and the angle is pointing at the wheel. It's perfect. It's pointing at the rear right now. We got to get the tires warm and everything. [ Music ] [ drone humming ]
-Why do I hit my head every time. [ tires screeching ] -I got one rule. Don't wreck. [ Music ]
Yeah, let her run. I smell brakes.
-Overall first impression, What do you think? -It's a solid car. It handles nice. -The brakes are worse than I thought. -Overall though, taking corners and diving. Now I know we're not pushing it hard as it'll go either yet? Still getting the feel of the track right. Still learning what we're doing at this particular place. But all in all man, great car. -Well you know what we've got to do now. Now we got to see how well it stops. Coming up, can we stop at 60 miles an hour on these 15 year old brakes? Did I hit something?
[Brian] So we've already drove the car around the track numerous laps. We knew the brakes were spongy and soft, but we want to show you how bad the brakes really are. So we set up some cones for a 60 to 0 mock brake test. Good brakes on this car should give you about 115 feet of stopping distance. So we've got this set up now. Jason's getting set up in the car.
And he's going to hit the brakes and we're gonna see what we can do, but there's no way this can work. All right Jason. Let her rip.
[ Music ] -The brakes were actually a little bit worse than what we really thought. Throwing it in the corners like we had been for hours on end today, and it's gonna prove to you what we've dealt with all day. [ Music ]
[ tires screeching ]
-What happen to blowing through the cones?
I would have bet the farm that no way this would have stopped. -Maybe I wasn't going 60. I don't know. When I looked down last I thought it said 60. I might have hit them early. Coming up to them cones right there. I felt like I was flying.
[ tires screeching ] [ Music ] -If 115 feet won't do it 140 for sure will get it. -Did I hit something? [ Music ] -No. Dude they were hot. -I know I was doing 60 that time. -So what'd it feel like? -Not great.
-Like a wet sponge? -Like it kept going. -That was crazy. -I slammed the pedal and the car didn't do nothing. -The brakes are even worse than what we really thought. You just drove it and proved that, right? That was pitiful. I hit the brakes, man. Nothing, it just kept floating. -You know what this means? -We can only get better. -It's true. It's time to load up so we can get to work. -Did we screw the bumper up? We gotta fix that? -So we just got back from the track with our IS250. So we're going to go over our takeaways or what we actually learned. Number one, suspension. We talked about that. So let's go over it. So I know obviously you had some concerns with the suspension. Looking at, age, control. What do you think? -It's not as bad as I thought. It could have been worse. It's a little sloppy, a little sloshy, but anything can be improved on. So we're going to improve on it with some coilovers. -So one of the main reasons for the coilover as well, we can adjust our ride height. We can make it sit the way we want to look. And we have adjustability depending on where we go to drive this vehicle. [ chalk scratching ] Brakes? -Brakes. -Lack of. [ tires screeching ] -You just hit the brakes and it keeps going. It vibrates bad enough that, a blender, shaking you up like a blender. It was not good. -Brakes are a must. This is one thing that you would have to do for sure with this vehicle is brakes. Number three is tires. Our tires still have tread life on them. We've seen some excessive dry rot on the tires. We were running on borrowed time. So these are definitely the three things that we have got to address.
And that we took away from our experience at the track?
Also, one thing that we're really trying to prove here is things that you could do over a weekend. As a working person, you're off work on Friday but you have to return on Monday. This may be your only mode of transportation. So if that's the case we start on Friday and we have to be back at work on Monday. That means we have 48 hours. [ chalk scratching ] What if we don't get done in 48 hours? How are we going to get to work? -You button it up until it runs. Until it's road worthy. -We finish what we can finish. And what's not finished you live with until the following Friday. We're going to do it. We've got 48 hours. -I know. [ Music ] -Up next, no way should it look like that. Can you completely transform your ride in under 48 hours? That was so much easier than what I thought.
[Brian] Keeping with our budget build theme and things that you would do at home in your own personal garage, we're only going to use non specialty hand tools that you can get at any big box store to prove to you it can be done. [Jason] And we're going to get it done in 48 hours because if this is your car and you're going to do this on the weekend you've got to be able to drive it to work Monday. So after 48 hours, whether we're done or not, wrenches will be down and we're going to take it for a drive. -Also, just like on a weekend, time doesn't stop. You've got 48 hours. The timer's going to run until we're done. -Are we supposed to hurry? -So when jacking the car up like this there is specified jack points from the manufacturer like for a trunk jack. Scissor jack most of the time. And that's where you're supposed to lift a pinch weld on a unibody car such as this but we've got to put our Jack stands underneath there as we want all four wheels off the ground at the same time. Fine, I got it. -I thought you did. [ impact driver humming ] Oh man, these were real hard to get off. -Is it cheating if it works? -Yes, yes it is. [ Music ] Also, we will be getting new wheels and tires. These ones have some battle scars on them, not from me. -See all this dry rotting right here. -It's not dry rot. It was just cracking from all the horsepower. -Oh it's scared. Did you get our universal hood prop? -I don't know, is the car going to yell at me again? -So everybody at home you've done this before. And if you have it, it's just when will you do it. It's not if. Universal hood prop for everybody. -Down here our rotors are a little shinier than they're supposed to be. The shiny is called glazing. Glazing is not good. We might have a bigger problem than just the pads and the rotors because it's pretty hard to turn this. I have a feeling that our pins here, something might be stuck. I'll spray the top over here. -Well thank you. -You're welcome. -Actually I'll miss it and I'll spray everything else instead. How's that sound? -So we went to our friends at Megan Racing to get these coilovers. These are complete struts. Look at this. Look at the difference already. It's not even adjusted. Good thing about these. We can adjust them on the car when we get them on there. -I'd say they're rough. It's not supposed to do that. Yeah, they're locked in. So I'll worry about it after we get it put in there. -Well that one's done. DUN, done. That was so much easier than what I thought. [ clock ticking sound ] Back here on day two of our Lexus budget build. Took the vehicle out, drove it, got the suspension settled in. Ride height looks great, performs, quiet, handles. So it's time to move on to the brakes. So we stopped off at AutoZone and got some Duralast brakes. And that's where we're going next. -We decided to do a little better than just regular Duralast. We got their Elite Series ceramics. They're made to last three times longer and be 100 percent noise free. That's why we went with Elite Series instead of regular. -Don't forget, make sure you have something to hang your brake caliper with. Whatever you got will work. Just don't let it hang by the hose. -They're pretty thin. They're really thin. Maybe my side is worse than yours but I really ain't got much to pry off from there. Can we go back to cars that were made of steel? You might have somewhere to hang my flashlight. -We're in the go faster era though. -Oh, yeah. -Feel this ridge right here. -Yeah, that's good. That's what you want. Speed secrets with Brian and Jason. -Correct. I don't believe it's supposed to feel like that. -It's not supposed to do that. [ Music ] That don't usually come off that easy. Usually it involves a lot of hammer. Hey I think I got you beat on the ridge. -That good? -Yeah, real good. -Drip, drip. -This is what I wanted to show you more than anything though. -Look, this looks like the Grand Canyon. What is all this packed in here? You see it? -That's the forbidden pepper. -Look at that. -Neither of my slide pins have any movement. -No way should it look like that. That's crazy. I think we should paint our brake calipers and brackets. -You're the paint guy. You gotta tell me how to do that, but I agree. -So any time you're spraying rattle can there's always a flash time and a dry time. You're probably looking at 30 minutes or so, and it should be tacky or dry enough to go ahead and reassemble and put back together. -I'm gonna spray some Deep Creep in there and see if it loosens it up. [ Music ] One down. Hopefully the other one comes out to. [ Music ] It's gonna have all the brakes now you know that. -Yeah. [ Music ] -Whoever designed these lug nuts, they need an evaluation by somebody. [ impact driver humming ] -You gotta stress test it. -You know that one time when we worked on these cars. We could tell what it looked like until it was on the ground. -I'm gonna take a nap. When I get back it better be on the ground. -Oh, boy. She squatted. Brakes on, got full suspension in, ride height. We've already settled the suspension before as well. Easily something you could do in a couple of days. Less than 48 hours, 100 percent. You can see our clock already. We still got around 19 hours remaining. Also, we fooled around a lot messing around. We went to eat lunch. We took breaks, and it was two of us doing this. So solo dolo at home by yourself still feasible in a weekend, no problem. -I think that's enough talking. We need to go drive it now. Coming up, did our upgrades make any difference? -Well hopefully this time it stops when it's supposed to.
[Brian] Well we're back out here at Polecat Training Center in beautiful Fayetteville, Tennessee, with our 2011 IS250. We're back to test our new suspension and our new brakes that we put on the car. You ready?
All right, let's go. [Jason] 10-4. -Well hopefully this time it stops when it's supposed to.
[ engine revving ] [ Music ]
[ tires screeching ] Woo! Dude, that's like eight foot, ten foot away. -How's that? -Phenomenal. [ Music ]
[ tires screeching ] Woo! Dude it looked like you was doing 100. -I set the cruise this time. I know I was doing 60. -We going again? Do it on the dry. See how good it is? -Yeah, let's go. So we simulated those 60 to 0, 115 foot test. Phenomenal performance. Now we're going to demonstrate 35 to 0 in a 60 foot mark. That seems like a pretty good distance for round town driving or normal driving at regular road speed. Now keep in mind these brakes and have been hot for this test that we're doing for 60 to 0. So we're still banking on performance. We're still banking it's gonna happen. Hope grandma Sue will be all right walking across the road. All right, let's roll. Pedestrian test take one. -10-4. [ Music ]
-Oh yeah. Dude that's 30 foot or less. What did that feel like? -Pretty good. -Not sticky or pulsy. Did the ABS kick in? -Yeah. -But no sliding of the tires. Nothing happened up here. [ Music ] -I'm probably stomping it a little hard. If I did a little less it'd probably stop better. But when you're panicking you don't think of that. -Panic stop you're supposed to stomp it? Well our brake test is complete and we proved that our brakes were that bad before. Outstanding performance today. Everything went well. We do have some other upgrades to come though. We're going to make this car look like a newer model Lexus. We're going to do some work under the hood. We're going to delete the exhaust, and we got a radio touch screen upgrade to get to yet. But until then what do you say we go rip around the track. -You don't gotta tell me twice. Let's go. You're driving or am I driving? -Yeah, I'll drive. -Let me get my helmet. -I wish you had a beard to deal with, with your chin strap. -Are you done messing around? -No. I don't want to pull all my wisdom out. -Okay. Are you good now? -Let's go. To the wall. Here we go. In 48 hours you could do a lot to transform the look of your car. The new coilovers improved stance and performance with full adjustability over all four corners. -The key to finding the right car for your next project is to figure out what your goal is when it's all said and done. We took a regular old Lexus that had a lot of potential and got it on its way to becoming a budget baller. Although brakes aren't anything flashy on a car this old it's money well spent. We wanted a daily driver that can look and feel luxurious without paying a luxury tax. We're not playing with monopoly money here, and we know y'all aren't either. For around $1,500 you could do everything we did today with regular tools and get it done in a weekend so you could drive to work on Monday and look good doing it. You don't want to miss Blacktop Speed Shop. [ engine revving ] I say we're done. -Button it up and let's go. -That's gonna work. -We are just getting started on this 2011 Lexus IS250. -The goal is to make it look and ride like a new gen Lexus for a fraction of the price. -We got a BMW that wants to play? We ain't got nothing for you buddy. I'm sorry. We ordered this awhile ago but. -We got it from China.
-Wreck it Ralph calm down!
Yes, it's like Christmas time! That's the rear diffuser. -We've got to fit a budget body kit. Got some dent repair to do. Gotta paint the hood, add new wheels and tires, and an imported info-tainment setup that'll look too good to be true. -They chase! No freakin' way dude! That is bad ass!
