2004 Infiniti G35 - Street Car

We've always considered automatic transmissions to be certifiably lame, but there are many talented car builders out there who swear by the damn things. These builders aren't into the show thing either, as you might expect. Their thing is big power wrapped in a basically stock body, rolling on big chrome wheels. Hey, whatever gets you through the night.

This month we're featuring two cars from this world, both from Southern California. The first is this G35 sport coupe that belongs to Jason Steinhart, and the other is Larry Dentice's bad and black turbo Lexus SC 430 you'll find on page 128.

Steinhart isn't a novice car builder, nor is he new to the pages of SCC. His turbo Suzuki Swift racecar and his heavily massaged second-gen. Eclipse were both featured in past issues. Unlike the builds of those rides, Steinhart was careful to keep upgrades on his G fairly simple. This time around, his focus was improving mechanical performance while keeping the look and feel very close to stock. Retaining its clean lines and luxurious ride were priorities.

He bought the car to replace his aging Lexus SC 400. The G appealed to him because, like his Lexus, it was a rear-wheel-drive sport luxury coupe and, unlike the new Lexus SC 430, it could seat four adult passengers. "I loved the car's styling immediately, even though it was a bit of a punk in the horsepower department," Steinhart says.

The first things to go were the stock rims and tires. Steinhart called a friend at TSW and requested a set of S-5 wheels in a 20-inch format, 8.5 inches wide up front and 9.5 inches wide in back. Nitto NT 555 Extreme tires, sized 245/35-20 and 275/30-20 front and rear, were stretched across the massive alloys to provide the needed stick.

The big TSWs added considerable rotating mass and visually castrated the car's stock brakes, so new binders were next on Steinhart's hit list. Stoptech upgrades were bolted in at all four hubs, complete with 355mm rotors, four-piston calipers and braided stainless lines. Colored portions of the brake assemblies were specified in black to keep the look somewhat understated, despite the hardware's intimidating proportions. "I didn't really need a 14-inch four-wheel kit, but damn they look good," he says.

Suspension upgrades have been limited to springs and shocks. Steinhart picked up Tein's FLEX damper system, which consists of coil-over springs and 16-way adjustable shock absorbers. West End Alignment in Gardena, Calif., gets credit for the installation. "I discovered Tein's out-of-the-box setup is a little aggressive," Steinhart offers. "The kit has 16-way adjustable shocks and even on the softest setting my fillings were coming loose."

When he got back from the dentist, Steinhart took the car back to Gardena and had a set of softer coils installed. Not long afterward, he hired ES Roadsport to install Tein's Electronic Damping Force Controller (EDFC), a cabin-mounted control unit that allows suspension adjustment from the comfort of the driver's seat.

Despite the massive power output, mods to the Nissan V6 are relatively spare. All power upgrades came from a single source, Stillen in Costa Mesa. The centerpiece is Stillen's G35 supercharger kit. Based on an Eaton positive-displacement two-rotor blower, the system is tuned for a linear torque curve and long-term reliability.

Since it was one of the first cars to receive the blower treatment, Steinhart's G35 received its forced-induction upgrades in stages. Because Stillen wouldn't install the kit without the intercooler, which wasn't ready when Steinhart was, he took the supercharger and car to Road/Race Engineering in Santa Fe Springs for the basic hardware installation. This included bolting in the blower itself, pulley, belt, NGK spark plugs and engine management components, a Stillen piggyback fuel computer and an additional injector ported behind the throttle body.

Later when the intercooler was finished, Stillen incorporated the front-mount chiller and brought the system up to stage two specs, which is currently the way it markets the system on the company Web site. Most impressive about the Stillen kit is it's covered by a three-year, 36,000-mile warranty that shields not only the kit but also imparts limited coverage to the engine itself. When equipped with the intercooler, the kit also enjoys full CARB exemption and 50-state street legality.

Subsequent upgrades to the car include a pair of tubular, ceramic-coated Stillen headers and Stillen cat-back exhaust, installed by Steinhart's "personal hillbilly mechanic," Pat McCleish at PM Automotive in Carson. Steinhart says the headers made a big difference in the car's top-end power.

He has also installed a smaller supercharger pulley that pushes boost to 7 psi. Considered the stage three upgrade for the supercharger system, the pulley negates the system's CARB certification but pushes power levels to more than 400 hp.

Because of the blower's conspicuous location on top of the engine, running the Stillen kit requires users to replace the factory hood with one with more overhead clearance. Steinhart first replaced his with a Stillen carbon-fiber unit, but felt like the carbon made the car seem too much like a Z. Unwilling to paint over the carbon fiber, he traded it for a Stillen fiberglass piece, which was color-matched to the car by Manuel Villalpanda at Reflections Auto Body in Lomita. The only other changes on the exterior are JDM Skyline badges. The interior is stone stock.

To date, Steinhart has remained faithful to his original plan and uses the car primarily as daily transportation. While the five-speed automatic tranny is perfect for when the traffic is slow, Steinhart claims that by using the tranny's manual shift mode, he's also able to chirp those big tires through third gear and "play drifter boy all day." He also says straight-line acceleration is off the hook.