The Ultimate Drift Unicorn: 1JZ-Powered Toyota Prius
Is it beautiful? No. Is it amazing? Yes.
Building a drift car and thinking the standard cookie-cutter options are too boring? Want to ensure that when you show up to your local event for the first time there will be a certain respect for your build? Let’s be honest, everyone and their mom has built an S13 or E36 drift car. Those builds are easy, the literature is vast, and the aftermarket support is endless. However, that isn’t going to impress anybody. It’s been done.
In order to really shine, one has to be unique.
At the end of the day, drifting isn’t for the faint-hearted. By definition, the sport is the act of trying to control the uncontrolled. Quarter-panels get smashed, frames get bent and hearts get broken. What will be the saving grace of the sport? What will bring back the shining light, the emotion that events have been missing? If your guess was a second-generation Toyota Prius, you just won the lottery. You might be thinking, a Prius? The old and ugly one too? Not even the better looking (debatable) modern one? That’s right. A Toyota Prius. We know it’s FWD. We know it’s an econobox hybrid. That’s why it’s perfect. Thanks to Kinganytime on Instagram, we get to see how you turn a beat decade-old emissions-champion and make it go sideways.
The owner of this premier drift car is Instagram user Just1kasey and according to his page’s description, he likes “unnecessarily modifying things” and “turbos.” We thought about stopping the article here because those lines essentially define this build in a nutshell. However, for the sake of integrity, we will push forward. The earliest mention of the build is in March of 2018. At this stage, the Prius looked more like a piece of scrap than it did a functioning race car. Around a year later, there was a Toyota 1JZ inline-six-cylinder engine stuffed under the hood. Considering the car only cost $250, the pricey JDM engine was the equivalent of a diamond inside a trash can. We love it.
Thanks to the help of a custom tube-frame front end to fit this engine, this Prius was ready to rumble. We have no idea what transmission, rear end, adapter plates, etc, were required to get this thing to slide. Honestly, we don’t think that it’s too important either. All we know is that somehow it does and that amazes us. Thanks for putting the fun back into building drift cars Kasey, you just gave a whole new meaning to the electric slide.
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