What is hot rodding? Ask 100 different people and you’ll get 100 different answers. At its purest though, hot rodding is about making due with limited funding and parts, filling in the gaps with pure skill and ballsiness. Sure, some people consider the only true hot rods to be 80 years or so old, but these days anybody with the right passion and limited budget can turn just about anything into a hot rod.
Corbin Goodwin is the builder and owner as the “Zero BLEEPS Given RX-7, a hotrod Mazda cobbled together with money from pizza deliveries in Corbin’s parents’ garage. Matt Farah of DRIVE had a chance to hoon this death trap around the valley roads of Malibu, and he had more fun than anyone driving such a POS should.
But that’s because in a certain regard, Corbin built the ultimate “troll mobile”, neglecting the paint, interior, and just about every other aesthetic on the RX-7. It doesn’t even have a fuel gauge, just a ghetto-rigged Harbor Freight voltometer. The engine is a 5.0 V8 backed by a T-5 transmission and there’s a nice suspension setup as well.
You wouldn’t know it just looking at the car, but Corbin claims to have sunk some $13,000 into the RX-7 over the past two years. Matt Farah drives the POS, and while at first he’s scared of dying, once he figures out how to manhandle the Mazda, he seems to quite enjoy the visceral experience of driving a near-death machine. We bet we would too, because at the end of the day, who gives a BLEEP as long as you enjoy your car as much as Corbin seems to enjoy his.