If you want to capture moments, no one will do it better than a photographer. In their new special series, Car Culture, Hagerty teamed up with professional automotive photographer Larry Chen to capture America’s raw motoring culture. Their latest episode featured a Nissan GT-R-powered Mustang by car enthusiast and YouTuber TJ Hunt.
To make it on the internet, you need to be consistent. For Thomas Hunt, it comes naturally. He reached the top of the list of automotive influencers in the United States with a vlogging camera and his first car, a Subaru BRZ. Today, he has an impressive 2.1 million subscribers on YouTube.
But gaining 2 million plus subs on YouTube isn’t such a big fete in 2022. Creators have garnered triple that kind of following without as much as a word out of their mouth. Hunt gets the props for not only achieving what he has at a young age but always striving to get the most out of what the industry has to offer.
“His Journey as a simple car enthusiast on YouTube turned him into the necessary connection between two generations. As if it wasn’t impressive enough to build these great cars at such a young age, TJ is also quite the wheel man,” Chen revealed.
TJ Hunt has quite the collection, but the most interesting of the bunch is a 1965 Fastback Ford Mustang. It’s quite the unconventional combination – the ultimate cross between intimidating American pony car demeanor and Japanese brute force underneath: a Nissan GT-R-powered Mustang.
“This car, people will normally put like the modern V8 or put like a Coyote. Everyone’s like you’ve got to put the new GT350 motor in, but my thought was like, it’s already been done,” Hunt confessed.
Taking inspiration from his favorite car movie, The Fast and the Furious, he went against the tide and swapped an RB26 engine into a Mustang. The 1967 Ford Mustang Fastback used in Tokyo Drift (2006) also had a Nissan Skyline GT-R stroker.
Hunt got the 1965 Fastback from a neighbor for $37,000, and with the help of a friend, sourced a GT-R engine. The RB26 power unit is stock, with a single turbo. They had to modify the manifold to get it to fit into the 1965 fastback. While it could pull out more, he confesses they had to stop at 440 ponies on the dyno since it was an old shell.
We recommended watching the video below for some behind-the-wheel action from this real-life movie car built to last.
Humphrey is a car enthusiast whose love and passion for automobiles extended into collecting, writing, driving, and working on cars. He got his passion for cars from his Dad, who spent thousands of hours working on his old junky 1970 E20 Toyota Corolla. Years later, he would end up doing the same with a series of lemons he’s owned throughout his adult life. Full profile
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