How A Broken 40-Year-Old Toyota Changed My Life

On a cool April night in my cluttered garage, I sat inside the cabin of my 1985 Toyota MR2 with my shaking hands gripping the keys. What if it doesn’t start? I thought to myself, There are so many things that could go wrong. But with a turn of my wrist the 4-cylinder engine came to life, humming happily about 18 inches behind my head. I put the car into first gear and rolled the little midship out of the driveway into the dimly lit road. After a few seconds, the realization of what I was doing set in and I started to sob uncontrollably, only taking a breath to say something I never thought I would – “I can’t believe I’m actually driving it.”

Despite being an avid car enthusiast my entire life, until my MR2 I’d only ever worked on my daily drivers, which at this point in time was a 2015 Miata Club Edition I bought new. It didn’t really need much work done to it past routine maintenance, so aside from the various modifications I’d done to it like upgrading the suspension, my hands were largely idle. During the pandemic, this idleness grew unbearable, so I did what any reasonable enthusiast would do and developed a brief emotional dependency on browsing Facebook Marketplace.

Initially, I had a very vague idea of what I was looking for–I wanted something older, small, fun to drive, with a manual transmission, and ideally from a Japanese manufacturer. I’d always loved my husband’s 1993 SW20 MR2, so after some soul searching, I landed on a first-generation MR2, or AW11, as my target. After a few months of looking, I finally found the bright blue, very broken car that would become mine.

After towing it home a few days later, I’d almost immediately realized that I had bitten off more than I could chew. The car ran and drove in the loosest sense, sure, but it was very unhappy about doing either. But because I am the way that I am, I insisted on taking it on a diagnostic drive, partly to see how it behaved under load and partly because I paid for the thing so I wanted to drive it at least once before ripping it apart. It refused to maintain any semblance of an idle and would shut off completely at random intervals. It failed so spectacularly on that first drive that I distinctly remember the look of disdain given to me by an old man checking his mail as the car’s tach sputtered down to 0rpm at the stop sign in front of his house.

After some rather quick diagnostics, I determined there was total compression loss in cylinder 2. I was in such a state of disbelief that 0 psi was the accurate measure that I ran the test probably 4 or 5 times, but was always met with the same result. I tried to convince myself it was a fixable issue. It’s just a catastrophic head gasket failure, or carbon build-up holding a valve open! I’d tell myself. Spoiler alert: it was neither of those things.

In an attempt to more quickly figure out what issue plagued my new garage ornament, I decided to remove the cylinder head with the bottom end still mounted in the car. This choice made the process far more difficult due to the height of the midship-mounted engine bay’s opening. I’m not a very short woman, but my 5’7” frame struggled to access quite a bit of the various bolts and plugs I had to undo to remove it. I removed the heavy, iron cylinder head by hand (weightlifting is a great secondary hobby for car enthusiasts, by the way) and didn’t immediately see what was wrong. That is, until I closely inspected my good friend, cylinder 2.

Rather quickly, I figured out that the compression loss was caused by a detonation of some sort that caused a rather large chunk of the piston head to fly off, damaging the cylinder wall past any reasonable repair. I sat on the floor of my garage, covered head to toe in oil and grease, and felt tears well up in my eyes.

For the next 2.5 years, progress on the car came to a complete standstill. It sat gathering dust on its body, ’80s figure as the physical manifestation of my anxiety, imposter syndrome, and fear of failure. I’d never done the complexity of work it would need–in fact, the most complex thing I’d done on a car prior was replacing the shocks on my Miata. I’m not a good enough mechanic to work with things like fuel and oil systems – because that’s where mistakes become expensive and dangerous. I didn’t feel like “enough” of a car enthusiast to figure it out on my own–and I didn’t feel confident enough to even know where to find guidance.

I’d frequently find myself sitting in its driver’s seat with my eyes closed, palming the steering wheel and shifter, daydreaming about driving it on one of the rare twisty roads near my home in Dallas. My desire to fix the car was drastically misaligned with my energy level, as my grueling corporate marketing job left me in a perpetual state of intense burnout. After a day of impossibly quick deadlines, heavy workloads, and tense professional relationships, my mind and body had no energy left to fuel the passion that my heart so desperately wanted.

I felt an odd sense of guilt surrounding the car. After all, I was fortunate to be able to have a place to store it, money to afford the parts for it, and the physical capability to work on it myself. It’s not even like I worked a job involving manual labor to justify my tiredness at the end of every day–I sat at a desk under a fuzzy blanket with noise-cancelling headphones on listening to music I liked for 40 hours a week. But there I was, sitting in my Aritzia trousers, Coach loafers, and knit cardigan, absolutely drowning.

Burnout is incredibly common in the modern working world and is significantly more intense and persistent in neurodivergent people, of which I am one. Reflecting back I’d realized most of my entire career was spent in intense cyclical burnout. Any gap in employment between jobs was just long enough to get my head above water before being pulled back down into the depths. This time, though, was different. I genuinely liked what I did and the people I worked with, despite the rest of the working environment being stressful. Since I didn’t want to use my typical methods of quitting or floundering so badly I got fired to catch a break, I sought other creative outlets to give me a sense of pride and purpose. Content creation looked like fun, so I figured I’d give it a go.

How Hard Could It Be?

Initially, I produced weightlifting and fitness content, which seemed like a natural fit. I was reasonably strong, had fancy muscles, and spent hours at the gym each week already – all I needed was a tripod. However, as much as I enjoyed weightlifting and looking at my muscles in the mirror, I hated filming it. I don’t move gracefully, have a hard time controlling facial expressions, and generally speaking, hate the idea of making other people uncomfortable by filming in what is a place of comfort for me, but a place of vulnerability for most others. Soon after I started, every time I hit “post” it felt hollow. I posted a few stories with my cars in them and there seemed to be a lot of interest, so I took that as a sign. That weekend, I filmed a garage tour with my $30 bluetooth mic from Amazon and my iPhone and dubbed it “MR2-sday.” The post hit half a million views in a couple of days and my audience exploded. People loved my cars, they liked seeing me talking about them, and most importantly, I loved doing it.

A couple of weeks later, I permanently pivoted my content niche from weightlifting to automotive and rebranded the account to how I am now known to over 130,000 people on the internet: LeslieDriven. The MR2-sday series unexpectedly served as an accountability method for me to work on my car since I felt obligated to post an update at 12 pm sharp every Tuesday, and was met with numerous complaints if I missed a week. Like magic, within a few episodes I was working on the car and enjoying it, my confidence on camera was increasing, and I felt like maybe I would one day get to drive my little blue Midship without it dying in front of a grumpy neighbor’s house.

Eventually, my audience online had grown to the point where I was invited as a special guest to Radwood Austin, a concourse-style car show with various events around the country entirely focused on cars from the 1980s and 1990s. The event at Austin became my final deadline as I was to drive it the 200 miles from Dallas down to Circuit of the Americas myself. I had a car with a virtually empty engine bay and less than 3 months to get it not only running and driving, but running and driving well enough for a roadtrip. So I cracked my knuckles, made a banger of a garage playlist, and got to work.

I’d decided on a 2ZR swap some dudes at an MR2 specialty shop nearby called ATS Racing invented a year or so prior. Being such an uncommon swap ( there were less than 5 examples at the time) it was difficult to find guidance on where to really start to dig in. Luckily, the dudes who invented the swap were active in the local MR2 community on Facebook and quite friendly, so my husband set up a group chat with the four of us and I got to learning.

Those dudes, named Austin and Tyler, are in my opinion, the largest reason why I have a running MR2 today. Between the two of them there is an encyclopedic knowledge of the cars as a whole, the 2ZR swap, and virtually anything that can go wrong with them. Most importantly, they were willing to share their knowledge, given I put in the work, ask the right questions, and come bearing Braum’s milkshakes. If I was unable to reach a bolt, they knew the path to get to it. If there was a hose in the way, they knew if it could be cut with a quick glance at a blurry photo. Because of this I began referring to the duo in my weekly MR2-day updates as “The Wizards.”

With their parts list and seemingly infinite knowledge at my disposal, I felt empowered. I went to pick-n-pulls to yank parts from old Corollas (or tried to, they were all picked clean), spent hours upon hours cleaning decades of grease from my engine bay with degreaser and a wire bristle brush, and even tried restoring the plastics in the interior. For the first 3 months of 2024 I was on a pure 80s nostalgia-powered roll. Or, at least what I thought was 80s nostalgia – I was born in the mid 90s. In March I stood over the car with the yet-to-be-installed throttle pedal in my hand and revved it as it ran for the first time. And two weeks later, at about 1 am, it lived.

Leslie-In-The-Middle

The last few weeks before my trek down to Austin were a flurry of anxiety and progress. The car got put on a dyno making a neck-breaking 129.69 horsepower. I made small talk with the woman at the vehicle registration office who said she dated a boy with the same car in college. I commuted 20 miles each way to my office job, and even drove an hour and a half away to pick up some interior trim parts for it. Everything was going smoothly, and I felt ready for the three-hour drive ahead. That was, until I decided to detail the interior. I removed the seats to fully vacuum the carpets the night before we left – something I’d never done in my entire ownership. One of the seat mounting bolts stripped the threads on removal and left me with what was effectively a rocking chair for a driver’s seat.

About 2.5 months after Radwood, I discovered I was pregnant with my now 1-year-old son. In turn, the MR2 became not just a fun project car to me, but a connection to who I am outside of motherhood. After the discomfort of the first trimester passed, I eagerly went back to working on refining the car in whatever way it needed at the moment. So much of my brain was dedicated to prepping for the baby, I needed something completely unrelated to focus on occasionally so I didn’t get dizzy from reading dozens of diaper reviews and riveting recounts of how to implement Baby Led Weaning. In the early weeks and months after he was born, it became an instrumental tool for me in combating severe postpartum depression. My husband would regularly push me to leave the house alone, even if just to take it on a drive. And in those brief drives, usually to the Walmart around the corner, I felt like Leslie again.

At points, buying my MR2 seemed like one of the stupidest things I’d ever done. I felt so in over my head at points that I debated selling it so I didn’t have a giant blue totem of disappointment and inadequacy glaring at me every time I entered my garage. But despite every fiber of my being feeling intimidated, overwhelmed, and unprepared, I persisted. I can confidently say my career, confidence, and relationship with myself has been forever changed for the better because of it. So if you’re on the fence about buying your first project car, let me be the first to tell you to take that leap. It may change your life.

[Ed note: We’re big fans of Leslie and her MR2, so we’re grateful she agreed to write up the process of building it. Everyone give her a warm welcome -MH]