Tuning that never asked common sense for permission
Anyone who thought car tuning still respected a few hard limits just watched them dissolve quietly. Dustin Brice, an American with a fondness for jet engines, built a Toyota MR2 that does not merely borrow styling cues from aviation. It uses a real military helicopter turbine to feed the engine extra pressure. The result looks less like a classic Japanese sports car and more like a ground bound aircraft that missed its runway slot.
Brice’s fascination with aviation, especially jet propulsion, shaped the MR2 inside and out. The cabin feels closer to a cockpit than a road car, the dashboard leans heavily on aeronautical cues and the overall stance suggests pre flight checks rather than a motorway commute.
The most striking element sits at the rear. There you find a turbine sourced from a Boeing CH 47 Chinook military helicopter. This is no theatrical prop. It is a functioning auxiliary power unit turbine, pressed into service for a road going experiment that takes tuning into unusual territory.
The project started innocently enough. Brice removed the original MR2 engine and installed a 3.5 litre V6 from a Toyota Sienna people carrier. For most drivers, that would have been more than adequate. For Brice, it felt underwhelming.
A conventional turbocharger or supercharger seemed predictable. Working as a mechanic for a company involved in jet engine research, Brice had access to a helicopter auxiliary power unit turbine. That moment pushed the build from ambitious to outright unconventional.
The helicopter turbine does not drive the wheels and it does not act as a standalone engine. Instead, it feeds the V6 with additional pressure, much like an exceptionally extreme turbocharger. Air temperatures climbed so high that a substantial intercooler became essential to keep the engine alive.
The turbine runs from its own 26.5 litre fuel tank filled with aviation fuel. Remarkably, the V6 internals remained stock. They tolerated the extra load without reinforcement, a quiet testament both to Toyota engineering and to careful execution rather than brute force.
The turbine can be switched on and off independently. Brice admits he uses it sparingly, largely because the noise levels are punishing. There is also a separate flame effect that sends fire from the exhaust, added purely for visual theatre and unrelated to turbine operation. In other words, the MR2 can behave like a restrained sports car or, when provoked, like a low flying aircraft that took a wrong turn.
This project is not really about outright speed or lap times. It is about the idea that technical passion does not always answer to logic. A helicopter turbine in a car solves no practical problem, yet it proves that engineering and imagination still meet in places where nobody is counting the rules too closely.
