For years, my mantra has been “fast is fast”. It doesn’t matter how you attain the speed, so long as you can back up your claims. That’s not an easy feat to do when your claim is sky-high…nowadays, it’s not hard to run 13s or even 11s, and horsepower figures are astronomical, but the variety of vehicles capable of such numbers have dwindled. Take a look: what are the fastest rides that are readily available right now? LS-powered anything, Coyote Fords, Subarus and Mitsubishi EVOs, traditional old-school muscle with some healthy work done and the occasional lightweight Honda with a stout B-series motor. Compare that lot with everything that has been produced in the last thirty years and you come up with a token minority of engine series available for tweaking.

I’ve staked my claim as the weird one, so I’ll say it: while I will never knock a fast LS or boosted STI, I find the radical departure from the normal refreshing. Think back to that Continental-swapped Taurus from a couple of weeks ago…unloved platform, an engine nobody gives thought to, turned into a sweet little sucker-maker of a car. That I love, cars you’d never expect: the flip-body V8 Camry from last year’s SEMA and the Honda Odyssey you see before you, built by Bisimoto Engineering. 1,029 wheel horsepower from a burgundy minivan. It’s ballistic, it sounds like an F1 car got stuck inside the cargo area and is screaming to be let free, and looks batshit crazy. And this is the tame car from the company. If you want wild, how about the 1976 Porsche Carrera that Bisimoto had to actually reduce the power output on? It might not be a radical departure from the norm…there are plenty of fast Porsches…but any car that hangs it’s turbos out for the world to see has our attention. Matt Farah got the chance to wheel both of these ballistic machines around, and we are pretty sure that he may have wrecked his drawers in at least one of the cars, if not both. We aren’t making fun of him, either…on a canyon road in California, 1,000 horsepower in a twitchy 911 and a minivan would scare the ever-loving hell out of us, too.