Gizmo's FD RX7 and Twin-Turbo Porsche
Some builders have one car worth talking about. Gizmo has two, and they couldn't be more different. One is a beat-up FD RX7 that's been his trial-and-error drift car for the better part of six years. The other is a 1,080-whp twin-turbo Porsche running a Chevy LS engine where a flat-six used to live, built by a company Gizmo now owns outright.
Welcome to Behind the Build.
Two Cars, One Philosophy
Freddy Spectuned has been tuning Gizmo's cars for close to eight years, ever since Adam LZ connected the two of them over an ECU. The relationship has been a consistent loop ever since: Gizmo buys something, Freddy tells him what he actually needs, and Gizmo, by his own admission, learns the expensive way. Buy once, cry once. It took him years to actually live by it.
That dynamic shaped both builds in this episode, but in very different directions. The RX7 is Gizmo's personal drift car, a five-or-six-year trial-and-error project that taught him fuel system design, heat management, and cooling the hard way. The Porsche isn't a one-off. It's a production template, the same conversion his company Renegade Hybrids has been refining and selling to customers since the brand's founding in 1983, long before Gizmo took it over.
Car One: The FD RX7
The Engine Saga
This car's engine bay has seen more configurations than most shops see in a decade. It started life as an LS1, became a single-turbo six-liter, then settled into a naturally aspirated LS3 after the turbo setup ran too hot and too angry to live long. Freddy remembers screaming about it at the time: intake air temps holding at 165 to 180 degrees and coolant temps running at 230 to 245 during the turbo era, with the worst sessions spiking even higher. That's not a number an engine survives long term, turbo or not.
The current setup is a stock LS3 making 430 horsepower through the 8HP50 automatic, paired with a BTR Stage 3 V2 camshaft, a newer-generation NA-focused grind. Aside from a trunnion upgrade, the valve train stays factory. It's about as basic an LS swap as you can build, and that's intentional. Gizmo has learned through years of fixing his own mistakes that simple and reliable beats exotic and fragile.
The transmission is an 8HP50, bought bone stock out of an LKQ junkyard pull, running on a Turbolamik TCU that Freddy talked him into after running the same setup in his own Supra. Gizmo had it installed and tuned in three days flat. The 8HP swap made the car feel noticeably more alive than it did as a turbo car, smoother, more direct, like it's on rails.
Even after the move to naturally aspirated power, heat remained a recurring theme. The factory air intake originally sat inside the engine bay, pulling hot air off the engine itself, a problem solved by relocating the filter using a Corvette C6-style intake setup that pulls cooler air from outside the bay. That same heat-focused philosophy extends to the alternator, which Gizmo upgraded to a DC Power unit after the factory unit kept losing voltage under sustained track use.
Engine Components:
- LS3, 430hp factory rating, BTR Stage 3 V2 camshaft
- DC Power 270 Amp XP Alternator, Chevrolet LS Engines
- K&N Performance Intake Kit FIPK, Corvette V8-6.0L 2005
- TurboLamik TCU Full Kit
- 8HP50 automatic transmission
Fuel System: Built for Slosh
The FD chassis has a reputation among RX7 owners for brutal fuel slosh under sustained lateral load, and Gizmo learned that lesson the way most drift builders do: mid-session, with the car shutting off at a competition. At the time, a different ECU didn't log internally, so the only clue was a video of the dash showing fuel pressure dropping to zero mid-lap. The fix was a proper in-tank surge tank system, which solved the problem outright. Gizmo says he can drift the car now with the tank nearly empty and never feel it.
Fuel Components:
Electronics: Haltech Doing the Heavy Lifting
The car runs a Haltech NEXUS Rebel LS standalone, which carries its own built-in PDM channels, supplemented by a separate Haltech PDM unit for additional fan and pump control. The two communicate with the Turbolamik TCU over CAN bus, so the trans temperature data drives automatic fan activation without any manual switching. It's a setup built for a car that gets driven hard for hours at a time, not babied for a five-minute dyno pull.
Electronics:
Suspension: Stiffened Past Stock Recommendations
Even with everything dialed to the suspension manufacturer's own alignment specs, Gizmo says it took him a long time to get this car to actually drive well. The car runs Part Shop Max coilovers and angle kit, and the factory-recommended spring rates weren't stiff enough for his taste, so the car now runs Swift springs at a custom 24k rate, despite the suspension's adjustable pickup points theoretically allowing for a softer setup. The front end could still stand to go stiffer, by his own admission, but it's far from a serious problem. Once it was dialed in, he says it drives like an S-chassis car. It rips.
The car runs electric power steering, mounted in a tucked position that draws zero attention to itself, which Gizmo seems entirely fine with.
Interior: Function First
Inside, it's a no-nonsense drift car interior. A DCT sequential shifter handles gear selection, paired with a Chase Bays hydraulic handbrake and a Link display for live data. One personal touch stands out: a custom pedal-feel simulator that Gizmo fabricated himself using a 2JZ dual-valve spring and an inverted sleeve to generate realistic clutch pedal resistance. He made about a dozen of them before moving on to other projects, and the design file still exists if Drift HQ ever wants to put it into production.
Interior Components:
- DCT Sequential Shifter 390GTE, Carbon Fiber Gloss
- Sabelt GT 3 Racing Seats (pair)
- Chase Bays Hydro Handbrake
The Honest Truth About This Car
Gizmo doesn't dress this car up as a showpiece. It's beat up; it's been crashed. He's candid that his own car gets the bare minimum of attention because he spends his time helping everyone else with theirs. That's not a flaw in the build; it's just what a personal drift car looks like when the owner actually drives it hard, every chance he gets.
Car Two: The Twin-Turbo Porsche
From Side Hustle to Full Company
This Porsche isn't a one-off build; it's a production template for an entire business. Gizmo's company, Renegade Hybrids, has been doing V8-into-Porsche conversions since 1983, originally with small-block Chevys, long before LS power became the standard. Gizmo didn't start the brand. He bought it.
The decision came down to simple economics. Gizmo had been running drift cars and Supra builds for years, the kind of work where a hundred-thousand-dollar customer car generates payment plans of five hundred dollars a week, which is brutal on a small business's cash flow. Meanwhile, customers bringing in two-thousand-dollar Porsches he'd never even met in person would wire full payment upfront with zero hassle. That contrast made the decision for him. He'd been buying parts from Renegade Hybrids' East Coast shop for roughly two years, working through a two-year backlog of builds the original company couldn't keep up with, until buying the company outright made more sense than continuing as their customer.
The Engine: An LS Where a Flat-Six Used to Be
The conversion mounts an LS engine using a custom motor plate that bolts to both cylinder heads and lands on the factory engine mount locations, which requires some trimming of the chassis. Gizmo notes this particular car is trimmed more aggressively than the typical customer build, mostly because it was his first attempt, and he got carried away with the cutting wheel. Coolant lines get rerouted through the back of the car, and that's effectively it. LS fits.
This car originally ran an aluminum LS3 block, roughly the same weight as the factory M96/M97 Porsche engine it replaced. It's since been swapped to a 5.3 iron block, which adds real weight in the rear compared to both the aluminum LS3 and the factory engine. The twin-turbo setup runs a pair of Garrett G35-1050s, a turbo combination Freddy specifically pushed Gizmo toward after frustration with cheaper Chinese-made units that ran dangerous back pressure and a torque curve that hit hard early and fell off a cliff. The goal with the Garrett setup was the opposite: low back pressure, a torque curve that builds smoothly, and head gaskets that stay where they're supposed to.
The results back up the approach. At 25 psi, a one-to-one pressure ratio, the car put down 1,080 horsepower to the wheels on Freddy's own dyno, with the rev limiter set at 7,800 RPM and the power curve still climbing, not falling off. Freddy capped it there out of caution for the valve train, but with upgraded valve-train components that allow a rev ceiling closer to 8,200 RPM, he expects the same car to produce 1,100 horsepower with no other changes. On pump 93 octane and a more conservative 15 psi, the same architecture made right around 795 horsepower, numbers Freddy compares directly to a factory GT2.
Engine Components:
- 5.3L iron block (current), originally an aluminum LS3
- Garrett G35-1050 Super Core, Standard Rotation
- Garrett G35-1050 Super Core, Reverse Rotation, 68mm Compressor
- FAST LSXR 102mm Race Runner Intake Manifold
- Injector Dynamics 1750-XDS, Set of 8
- Turbosmart Gen V Race Port BOV, Black
- Radium Engineering GM LS Engine Fuel Rails
- Custom in-house turbo manifolds (Renegade Hybrids)
- Two CSF air-to-water intercooler cores
Drivetrain: A $30,000 Answer to a Simple Question
The first question every prospective customer asks Renegade Hybrids is how much power their transmission can handle. The honest answer involves real money. This particular car runs a built GT3 transmission, a roughly thirty-thousand-dollar piece on its own, paired with the Renegade clutch kit and adapter, the company's own engineered solution for mating an LS engine to the factory Porsche transmission housing.
Freddy is candid that getting into one of these conversions properly is expensive from the jump. Between the engine, the kit, the harness, and everything required to do it right, the entry cost adds up fast, somewhere in the twenty-to-thirty-thousand-dollar range before you even start chasing serious power numbers.
Drivetrain Components:
- Built GT3 transmission
- Renegade clutch kit and adapter
- Custom motor plate mounting system (Renegade Hybrids)
Electronics: Link ECU, Sold as a Complete Package
The wiring and engine management on this car run Renegade Hybrids' own plug-and-play harness, built in-house and paired with a Link G4X ECU. This isn't a one-off solution. It's the same kit the company sells to customers doing their own Cayman, Boxster, or 911 conversions, with full CAN bus integration that keeps cruise control, oil pressure readouts, RPM, and even factory air conditioning fully functional. The first version of this harness, built four years ago for a customer's car in Port St. Lucie, was rough, built from scratch with a lot of message decoding along the way. Today, it's a refined, repeatable product.
Electronics:
- Link ECU G4X XtremeX (109-4000)
- Link MXS Strada 5" Dash, Street Edition
- Custom plug-and-play wiring harness (Renegade Hybrids, in-house)
Suspension and Wheels
The car runs Feal coilovers spec'd for the 996 chassis, an off-the-shelf solution that Gizmo says drives like a Cadillac compared to the stiff, solid-bushed drift cars he's used to. That comparison held even after the engine swap from aluminum to an iron block added real weight in the rear. Plans are in motion to send the shocks out for custom valving and spring-rate work, continuing a relationship Renegade Hybrids has been building with outside suspension specialists to refine ride quality across the entire product line. Because of the car's wide-body kit, it runs 305-width tires, something a factory-width 997 conversion simply can't fit without going far more conservative.
Suspension Components:
- Feal Coilover, 97-05 Porsche 996 (2WD)
- 305-width tires (wide-body specific)
Interior
The Philosophy Behind Both Builds
Gizmo's answer to what he enjoys more, building the cars or selling the kits, is genuinely both. Building keeps him hands-on and sharp. But the relationships built through selling kits to customers all over the country, and the world, are what stuck with him most. He talks about a 76-year-old grandmother from Maui who shipped her blown 997 Turbo to Florida for an LS3 conversion her boyfriend talked her into, then drove the finished car across the country back to California before ferrying it home. Gizmo and his crew now call her grandma, and they've genuinely gone to visit, driven the car, and ripped up mountain roads with her in Hawaii.
That's the throughline connecting a beat-up personal drift car to a company built on putting V8s into Porsches: relationships built one build at a time, whether the customer is paying five hundred dollars a week or wiring full payment to a total stranger sight unseen.
If you're sitting on a 911, Cayman, or Boxster and wondering whether an LS conversion is in your future, Renegade Hybrids sells the kits, engines, and adapters that make it possible. Check out their full lineup at renegadehybrids.com.
That's what Behind the Build is about.
