You’d be forgiven for thinking the SW20 Toyota MR2 had already been modified in every way possible. That’s essentially what I thought before seeing this one with a friggin’ turbine in the engine bay. It’s not your neighbor’s K-swap, which is exactly why I wanted to talk with the owner: To learn what’s going on with this aviation-inspired sports car that skips turbos for something more.
“My hobby is jet engines,” Dustin Brice explained to me over the phone. “I was sitting in the garage one day, and there’s a Fast and Furious movie with a car that’s kind of doing the same thing. It has a small jet engine in the back, and it’s providing electrical power to a device they have on the car. And I was like, ‘Man, that’s super cool.’
“I got to thinking, and I’m like, ‘Well, I’ve always wanted to put a turbine in a car. So, let me use air power from the turbine to supercharge a piston motor.’ That’s how that idea came to be.”
Thankfully, Brice is a machinist at a research company that works on jet engines. This at least partially explains how he came to own an auxiliary power unit from a Chinook helicopter. Rather than replacing the 2GR-FE V6 in his MR2, a 3.5-liter sourced from a 2008 Sienna minivan, he decided to combine the two. The aircraft APU now acts as a blower in the most extreme sense of the word, making between 6-8 psi of boost.
The trick was getting the turbine to provide air rather than electrical or hydraulic power, like it does on a helicopter. Fortunately, there’s another variant of the turbine Brice used that does provide air, so he simply had to swap some parts. I don’t know a thing about this kind of hardware, though he explained to me, “There are a lot of different types of turbine engines that provide air. They all work pretty much the same—different layouts of how the compressor and power section work, but it’s a common type of motor.”
It runs on jet fuel (what else?) that’s stored in a frunk-mounted seven-gallon tank. Brice doesn’t spool it all the time, and he likens it to nitrous injection. Unlike a traditional belt-driven supercharger, it doesn’t require engine power to operate, and unlike a turbocharger, there aren’t any exhaust flow restrictions. “I’m still using an intercooler because discharge air from the turbine is very, very hot,” Brice said. “It’s over 400 degrees Fahrenheit.”
“I don’t run the turbine a lot,” Brice added. “I only really run it when I’m tuning it, which is usually on the interstate—just when I’m cruising around—because I can turn it on or off where noise isn’t going to be an issue. Other than that, the fire you see is just for show, and that’s not all the time.
“Other than the noise, you wouldn’t really know that it’s running.”
Brice insisted that the car’s current setup is a proof of concept more than anything. It’s the result of random 2 a.m. wrenching sessions in his garage, purely to see what can be done with a turbine acting as a supercharger on a piston engine. The 2GR-FE has proven to be the perfect test bed, too, as it doesn’t need upgraded internals to handle the level of boost the Chinook APU is pushing.
If you’re wondering why anybody would go this route instead of installing a turbo or a normal supercharger, I’d say you’re missing the point. People don’t solely build cars for max performance, though many do. Some folks do what they do simply because it’s what they like. Take a look at the rest of Brice’s car and you’ll see that the jet-fighter aesthetic takes priority over absolute efficiency. It would be a whole lot easier to drive fast without the yoke steering wheel, the heads-up display, and the chunky joystick shifter. But you know what else? It would also be a whole lot less cool.
When I asked Brice how he responds to critics who always have a better idea, he said he just tells them, “I like Toyotas and I like jet noise.”
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