Don’t Listen To YouTube, Your Project Car Doesn’t Have To Be A Mad Science Project

Car culture in recent years has felt unreachable and unattainable for young enthusiasts without access to daddy’s Amex Black card. With most cars and coffee events devolving into a battle between rich dudes to see who racked up more options on the Porsche GT3 RS that they never drive, and most car YouTube channels featuring big-dollar sponsored machines or full-bore unattainable fabrication shops. I’m here to tell you (ironically with some help from James Pumphrey on YouTube) that you don’t have to drive a K-swapped Ferrari 308 to be cool. Whatever you’ve got can be cool, too. 

James wanted to prove that you could pop a few DIY-friendly modifications on your three-decade-old daily driver in a short weekend of wrenching with your friends and end up with a frickin’ sick car that catches eyeballs and is fun to drive. It doesn’t take stacks of cash or years on jackstands to be cool. Do you have unironic love for your car and think it looks cool? Honestly, that’s enough. 

Over the course of a single weekend James took his shabby old Volkswagen and made it into a pretty slick car show machine. With a set of wheels and tires, some coilovers, a decent stereo system, a custom exhaust, and some new headlights and taillights, it looks like a whole new car. You don’t need a million dollar prototype to stand out, even in Southern California. But more than that, you can have a whole bunch of fun with just a few thousand bucks. 

I got into wrenching on cars out of necessity more than enthusiasm, because as a broke college kid who needed to get to class and my job working the counter at a convenience store, I had to fix anything that went wrong with my cars by myself. That evolved into modifying and updating, and I haven’t had a car with stock wheels since. Is it a curse as much as a blessing? Absolutely, but if you’re enthusiastic about it you can have a lot of fun and meet so many great people ruining your life with a crappy old project car. 

James has a similar experience across this video, as he gets help from a lot of his car enthusiast friends who push him to learn more and get better. Could he have just gone out and bought a catback exhaust and bolted it on in his driveway alone? Sure, but learning to weld a custom exhaust together with a friend is a lot more fun and entertaining, and probably a bit cheaper, too. 

Enthusiasts, and especially broke enthusiasts, have been the lifeblood of the community for decades, and that hasn’t changed. Yeah, maybe the price of cars you want has gone up exponentially in the last few years, but you don’t have to have a collector car to have fun. This is just a simple five-door MK3 Golf, but it can make you fall in love. Instead of complaining about how you can’t afford an Integra Type R anymore (you never could), go get something cheap and get wrenching.