Joshua Brown
- Mar 20, 2018
- 3 min read

Braden Carlson: Youtuber, Drifter, and Engineer?

When it comes to youtubers and drifting you're already thinking of 240's, 350z's, and E36's but Braden along with a few other youtubers have become major advocates of rear-wheel drive Volvo's and for good reason. "Turbo, RWD, Cheap." Which is very accurate as Braden bought his for only $400. But that's not the only cool vehicle he has or the reason he started his channel.

Braden started his channel early March 2015 with his brother Brock. " Originally we called the series "Budget Auto Builds". The idea was to do what I wanted to the rabbit without spending more than $600. You know how that's gone, lol". Along with the Volvo 740 you see above Braden also has a 1979 Volkswagen Rabbit. Which right now is in the middle of being swapped for a 2.0 16v engine out of a 1991-92 Jetta GLI

The 16v is getting a complete rebuild, which wasn't the original plan but due to some scoring on the cylinder walls it changed into an all out build. So now the engine will be bored and given Wiseco 11:1 compression pistons. The head off the engine has Tectonics Tuning 268/276 camshafts with an adjustable cam gear. All that paired with a BBM billet fuel rail and Microsquirt fuel management (read Megasquirt just more basic) will have Braden shooting for 200 N/A hp in a >2000lb car and make for a very fast little car.

Coming back to the drifting side of things however is Braden's 1986 Volvo 740 Turbo nicknamed "Jasmine". Again, bought for $400 originally but still hasn't cost more than $2500 in total. The Volvo has a 57 trim ebay turbo, Megasquirt engine management which Braden built the harness for, of course a welded diff, and a tune from a man named Kenny off the Volvo forum TurboBricks over the air whilst the car was doing pulls on the "track" as he called it. Not only has the car started up every time (besides the occasional battery when I came to shoot it) but it's been smashed off the limiter and is also "never driven with the intent to be nice to it" and never had any real issues.

It's old, it's beaten up, but it absolutely shreds. So far the Volvo has only seen one drift event but during that event it had smacked a concrete wall, and continued to drift for the rest of the day. It's also seen plenty of time around "Mexico" making plenty of noise and smoke along the way. This isn't Braden's first Volvo either, he's also had an N/A manual 240 and technically another 240 which was rolled and had nearly zero damage that is currently being turned into a death-taxi. It's safe to say that the love for them is pretty strong because whenever someone talks about getting a drift car he will always recommend one.

Braden started off building rockets as a teenager with his dad. Idaho has plenty of rocket launches and building awesome high powered rockets, and eventually going to college at Wichita State University for Aerospace Engineering definitely made for a love of building things. However not continuing his degree he moved back home and soon after started his channel. As for his love for cars and drifting, " I started watching Top Gear before I could drive, had myself convinced I would get this crazy expensive cool car for my first car. Got the Golf because it was cheap, and it's a Volkswagen, so I had to work on it" thus sparking the love for wrenching on vehicles instead of crafting rockets (Which he still does regularly). " Drifting for sure when I was driving the F250 every day. Snow days were the bomb." But anyone who develops a love for cars gets sucked in and in Braden's case, a Volvo is a great car to end up in.