HeyJaredThe Car Nerd with Jason Hassett
Welcome to The Car Nerd by Jason Hassett, your go-to destination for all things automotive excellence.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 19
- Latest publication
- Sep 24, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 9, 2026
Latest episodes
Volvo 850 BTCC: Why Volvo Raced an Estate in the BTCC (opens the original)
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In late 1993, a Swedish race shop arrived at Volvo’s factory in Gothenburg to collect a bare 850 bodyshell. They wanted a saloon. The production line was building estates. So they took one. A few months later, Volvo announced that it would enter the British Touring Car Championship with an 850 estate — a car shaped more like a family holiday wagon than a touring car. Rivals laughed. Mechanics called it a baker’s van and a pizza delivery wagon. But the story of the Volvo 850 BTCC car was far more
Lada: The Soviet Car That Outsold Honda (opens the original)
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In October 1974, a convoy of Soviet cars arrived at a former RAF nuclear missile base in East Yorkshire.Twelve years earlier, three American-controlled Thor missiles had stood on that same site, armed with thermonuclear warheads and pointed at the Soviet Union.Now it was being used to prepare Ladas for British customers.And fourteen years later, Lada would outsell Honda in Britain.The story began with the Fiat 124 — but the Soviet version was far more than a simple copy. Engineers subjected the
McLaren F1: The Record Even Bugatti COULDN'T Beat (opens the original)
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In 1988, four men from McLaren were stuck in an airport after the Italian Grand Prix when a conversation began that would change road cars forever. McLaren dominated Formula One. Gordon Murray believed that knowledge could be used to build something completely different: not a racing car with number plates, but the greatest road car ever made. There was no top-speed target. No turbochargers. No traction control. No power steering. The driver would sit in the middle, the chassis would be made fro
Jaguar X-Type: The Greatest Ford Mondeo Ever Built (opens the original)
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In 2001, Jaguar launched the car that was supposed to transform the company. Ford had spent billions rebuilding Jaguar, but the brand was still selling nowhere near enough cars. The answer was Project X400: a compact executive saloon designed to take Jaguar directly into the territory dominated by the BMW 3-Series, Mercedes C-Class and Audi A4. There was just one problem. Underneath, it was based on the same platform as the Ford Mondeo. The British press called it a Mondeo in a dinner jacket. Cr
BMW E30 M3: Mercedes Accidentally Created the BMW M3 (opens the original)
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In 1983, Mercedes built a car that BMW couldn’t answer.The 190E 2.3-16 had a Cosworth-developed cylinder head, sixteen valves, and a set of world endurance records before customers had even taken delivery.BMW’s chairman walked into Motorsport, turned to engineer Paul Rosche, and gave him one instruction: build a sporting engine for the 3-Series.Fourteen days later, the first prototype was running.What followed was not simply a faster E30. BMW cut apart an M1 cylinder head, bolted it to a four-cy
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