The loudest car we filmed in Quebec this season wasn't trying to be loud at all. It was a white Lexus IS300, parked at a Sunday-morning meet with factory badges and one exhaust pipe, and its owner says it makes more than 1,000 hp. Earlier in the season, at iCar in Mirabel, we'd watched the exact opposite: a BMW M5 dressed as a yellow taxi, roof light and all, going round and round in its own tyre smoke. That's the Montreal car scene in two cars. One whispers. The other doesn't stop shouting.
Sunday morning at Epicure Classics: the IS300 sleeper
Our clip is fourteen seconds, one static shot from straight behind the car, and nothing moves except the exhaust note. The boot wears the Lexus script and the IS 300 badge, the round inner tail lights are the factory ones, a Fireball sticker runs across the top of the rear window and a BBS frame surrounds its Québec plate. One tailpipe peeks out under the right side of the bumper. Around it the meet carries on: a red car on the left, a silver saloon with its bonnet up on the right, hoodies by the fence and a gas station canopy behind.
"Choppy" is the word we used for that idle in our caption. Turn the sound up and you'll hear why.
Why the 2JZ is already in the Lexus IS300
The North American IS300, built from 2001 to 2005 on the XE10 chassis, left the factory with the 2JZ-GE: a 3.0-litre straight six, the naturally aspirated cousin of the twin-turbo 2JZ-GTE in the A80 Toyota Supra. Same family, same famously strong iron block, rear-wheel drive. That's why "2JZ" and "IS300" turn up in the same sentence at every tuner meet in North America.
What's inside this one now, which turbo, which head, we don't know and won't guess. The owner calls it a mental build and quotes more than 1,000 hp. We didn't put it on a dyno, so that number is his, not ours. For what a 2JZ can do when someone really commits, see the 900 PS carbon AutoBahn Soarer.
iCar, Mirabel: the V10 drift taxi
Most taxis try not to slide. This one exists for nothing else. It's an E60-generation BMW M5 in taxi yellow with a chequered stripe, DRIFT TOUR on the doors, a black stripe over the bonnet, white multi-spoke wheels, sponsor stickers on the bumper and a taxi light on the roof. A drift taxi's job is to put somebody in the passenger seat, and iCar, the motorsport complex in Mirabel north of Montreal, gives it a wide concrete pad to do it on. The car wears the colours of Drift Tours, tagged in our post.
The E60 M5, built from 2005 to 2010, is the most unhinged saloon BMW has ever sold: its S85 is a 5.0-litre V10 with 507 PS and a redline past 8,000 rpm, Formula 1 ideas bolted into a five-seat executive car. We tagged the clip #s85 and nothing we saw says otherwise, but we didn't open the bonnet, so take the engine as the car's reputation rather than our inspection.
Thirty seconds of smoke, second by second
The reel runs thirty seconds and is cut from more than one moment of the day: the light changes from cloudy to clear blue halfway through. In the first five seconds the taxi comes along the red-and-white barriers on the far side, already sideways; at six seconds it slides past us side-on, smoke pouring off the rear tyres. From seven to nineteen seconds it's a long arc across the far end of the pad, past a black tower and the pink sponsor banners. At twenty-two seconds it points straight at the camera on full lock, and from twenty-four seconds it spins into a donut until the smoke swallows the whole car.
Our caption called it a "double V10" drift taxi. In this clip only one yellow M5 is on screen at a time, so we can't show you two. The full clip is still to come. Passenger rides like this are the best way to understand drifting: a JZX110 Mark II Grande did the same job at Ebisu in our D1 Grand Prix story, and for the sport at its top level in North America, see Formula DRIFT at Stafford 2026.
The verdict on Quebec's car culture
Montreal's car people don't only come out for the Grand Prix, though that weekend is something else too: the cars of the 2026 F1 weekend. On ordinary weekends it's parking-lot meets on Sunday mornings and a drift pad just north of the city in Mirabel. The lesson from both cars is the same: in Quebec the most interesting car in the lot is either the one that looks the most normal, or the one painted like a cab.
Video: One Breath Pictures.
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