Mikko Kataja and his wife Kati have been hauling a second-generation Toyota Starlet up some of the most famous hill climbs on the planet — Pikes Peak, Mt. Washington, circuits across Europe — for years. The car used to run a modified Toyota 4A-GE inline-four screaming to 11,000 rpm. That wasn’t enough.
In 2023, they dropped in a custom 2.7-liter V8 built from Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle engines, and the little Finnish hatchback became something else entirely.
The engine, fabricated by Radical Precision Engineering, retains the Hayabusa’s 81-millimeter bore and 65-mm stroke but doubles the cylinder count with a second bank and a flat-plane crank. The heads are ported Hayabusa units. The pistons are Cosworth, and the camshafts are VHTRacing’s own design, tuned for maximum output.
The result revs to 10,000 rpm — a thousand short of the old four-cylinder — but produces roughly 405 horsepower, or about 150 hp per liter. VHTRacing keeps the exact figure close to the vest, which tells you they’re serious about competition, not YouTube clout.
The P60 Starlet is an almost comically modest shell for this kind of hardware. Built between 1978 and 1984, it’s a tiny rear-wheel-drive hatchback that Toyota named with more aspiration than the original powertrain ever delivered. Lightweight, simple, and unburdened by electronic nannies, it’s the kind of platform that rewards exactly this level of lunacy.
Toyota switched the Starlet to front-wheel drive with the P70 in 1984, which makes the earlier cars increasingly prized among builders who want rear-drive simplicity without cutting apart something rarer.
Mikko crashed the car in 2024. Rather than mourn, he rebuilt. The Starlet got new carbon fiber bodywork from Finnish fabricator Haidea, and the suspension was reworked to drop the ride height and widen the track.
The whole package came back tighter, lower, and meaner. Its first outing since the rebuild was the Wolsfeld Hill Climb in Germany. No real testing, no shakedown runs worth mentioning.
First in class, third overall. For a freshly reassembled car with an exotic powertrain and revised aero, that’s a statement. Mikko says there’s plenty left on the table once the setup is dialed in, and there’s no reason to doubt him.
The in-car footage posted to VHTRacing’s YouTube channel is worth your time, preferably at volume. The flat-plane V8 sounds like an angry Formula car trapped in a phone booth. The Starlet darts through corners with the kind of composure that only comes from a team that has been refining this platform for years, not months.
Builds like this rarely get the attention they deserve. There’s no factory press event, no influencer partnership, no glossy configurator. It’s a husband-and-wife team from Finland who decided a motorcycle-based V8 belonged in a 40-year-old econobox, then proved it on some of the toughest tarmac in motorsport.
The Starlet name was once rumored for a comeback as a hot hatch, but Toyota let the GR Yaris fill that space. No production car was ever going to compete with what VHTRacing built in their shop anyway.
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