The Supra’s return after nearly a year away quickly becomes more than a reunion with a favorite drift car. An oil-pressure problem under braking gives the team an immediate mechanical reason to tear into the car, while a planned housing change creates an opportunity to experiment with the naturally aspirated four-rotor’s porting. That combination gives the project a useful dual purpose: correct a potentially damaging lubrication weakness while investigating whether a different exhaust-port configuration can improve an engine already operating in a fairly specialized state of tune.
The oil-pan work is among the clearest technical sections. The team’s theory is that the newly effective brakes exposed a weakness that had previously gone unnoticed: under deceleration, oil could move away from the rear-mounted pickup. Rather than presenting that explanation as proven, the video appropriately treats it as a working theory and shows the revised solution, including a relocated pickup, a baffled enclosure, trap doors intended to control oil movement under different acceleration forces and additional drain openings. The dry-sump discussion also provides useful context for why the team is modifying the existing wet-sump arrangement instead, although the revised pan is not subjected to the braking test needed to establish whether the starvation problem has actually been solved.
Opening the engine produces a stronger justification for the rebuild than horsepower alone. Bearing wear is discovered before it progresses into a more obvious failure, and two damaged seals provide another reason to refresh components while everything is apart. The explanations of how the rotary’s oil-control seals function, why the components need to remain organized and how replaceable inserts can preserve expensive specialized plates make the disassembly reasonably accessible even for viewers who do not routinely work with rotary engines. The workshop banter sometimes interrupts that education, but the mechanical inspection itself remains one of the episode’s strongest elements.
The new housings introduce the more experimental half of the project. The stated goal is to reduce overlap by changing when the exhaust port opens relative to the intake, with the hope of improving both output and the engine’s behavior and sound. The team initially talks optimistically about gaining roughly 20 horsepower per rotor and potentially exceeding 600 horsepower, but importantly, those numbers are presented as expectations rather than guaranteed results. The video also acknowledges an unusual advantage of this rebuild: changing the port configuration while leaving much of the combination otherwise similar creates a comparatively focused opportunity to see what the revised geometry actually does.
The dyno session is valuable precisely because the hoped-for headline number does not materialize. The discussion corrects an earlier recollection that the engine had previously made substantially more power, establishing 520 horsepower as the relevant naturally aspirated high point. Initial runs are disappointing, and the tuner and engine builder progressively explore fueling and unusually large ignition-timing values rather than pretending the new parts immediately produced a breakthrough. Some of the tuning conversation is necessarily anecdotal and shop-specific, particularly the claims about how much timing this particular rotary wants, but the video makes the uncertainty and experimentation visible instead of presenting those choices as universally applicable tuning guidance.
The final result is considerably more interesting than simply calling the rebuild a failure. The reported best run reaches 514 horsepower and 311 pound-feet of torque, short of both the 600-horsepower ambition and the prior 520-horsepower peak. Yet the comparison shows peak torque arriving roughly 1,000 RPM earlier and a substantially wider portion of the rev range remaining above 450 horsepower. For a drift car, that broader and earlier delivery could prove more useful than a modest increase in a single peak number, although the video stops at the dyno and therefore cannot yet demonstrate how meaningful that improvement will be behind the wheel.
As a presentation, the episode benefits from showing the entire arc from diagnosis through disassembly, component inspection, port comparison, reassembly and dyno testing. It also willingly preserves disappointing results, which makes the engineering process more credible than a heavily edited success story would have been. The downside is a loose structure filled with meals, visitors, jokes, merchandise promotion and extended shop chatter that dilutes some genuinely interesting rotary-engine material. The unresolved oil-pan test and transmission-harness issue also mean that the car leaves the episode improved in several respects but not yet fully validated as a finished package.
Pros
- Clearly explains the suspected relationship between hard braking, oil movement and the rear-mounted pickup while treating the diagnosis as a theory still requiring testing.
- Shows a meaningful oil-pan redesign using a relocated pickup, baffling, trap doors and revised drain paths rather than merely stating that the lubrication problem was addressed.
- Uses the engine teardown to identify actual bearing wear and broken seals, giving the rebuild a practical reliability purpose beyond chasing a dyno number.
- Provides useful explanations of specialized rotary components and the reasoning behind the revised exhaust-port geometry.
- Preserves disappointing dyno results and corrects the earlier horsepower recollection instead of manipulating the comparison to manufacture a successful 600-horsepower outcome.
- Demonstrates a measurable change in the engine’s power delivery, with more torque arriving earlier and a broader high-output range despite essentially unchanged peak horsepower.
Cons
- The 600-horsepower expectation proves far too optimistic for the demonstrated configuration, with the finished result reaching 514 horsepower.
- The revised oil-pan system is not tested under the braking conditions that originally caused the pressure problem, leaving the primary reliability fix unverified by the end.
- Discussion of aggressive ignition timing and rotary tuning relies heavily on the participants’ experience and experimentation rather than a detailed technical explanation viewers could independently evaluate.
- Frequent shop banter, visitors, food discussion and promotional material make an already technical rebuild considerably more meandering than necessary.
- The dyno establishes a potentially more useful power curve, but there is no driving segment to determine whether the earlier torque and broader output meaningfully improve the car on track.
- The transmission electronics remain temporarily disconnected after a sensor or wiring problem, leaving another part of the completed package unresolved.
The missed 600-horsepower target ultimately makes the episode more informative, because the rebuild produces a different kind of improvement than the team expected and the video does not disguise that outcome. Strong mechanical access, useful rotary explanations and transparent dyno comparisons outweigh the wandering workshop pacing, although the untested oil-pan revision means the most important reliability question remains open.
