Every trip to Japan is a new adventure in awkwardness, especially when you're required to get driving impressions on some tweaked-out tuner car through tight Japanese industrial parks with an incredibly polite pro racer strapped in as an escort. Who, of course, doesn't speak English. No pressure at all. I was already prepared for this when the people at GT Live invited our magazine to Japan to drive Endless Racing's Z-car Challenge Championship-winning 350Z. It was a perfect chance to see what the Japanese considered a streetable race car. What I hadn't anticipated was a crash course in B-grade acting and an appearance on TV Nippon.
In 2006, Nismo staged the inaugural season of the Z-car Challenge (SCC, April '07, p78), a 20-car spec series for tuners to duke it out in street-legal, track-capable, full-interior 350Zs--just our kind of stuff. The beauty of the series is it provides a battleground for thoroughly sorted-out street cars that can put up with the punishment and heat of sustained wheel-to-wheel racing. The only rules: all cars are required to have Nismo or HKS catalysts, weigh more than 3300 pounds, and use one of four street-spec tires.
I am in Japan to drive the championship winner, the Endless Racing-sponsored Z, piloted by Aoki Takayuki, who also drives the Weds Sports GT300 Celica, a GT500 Ferrari, and various Super Taikyu cars. The car is owned by TV producer Yasushi Koyama (who was behind my bad acting debut) and was built for over $120,000 (not including R&D costs) by the fanatics at Endless and Tomei. To prove Koyama's car isn't just another trailered track whore, the plan was to buzz around the Tokyo 'burbs, picking up strange looks and maybe even some groceries.
It's not hard to find the garish race car, as it is parked front and center in, of all places, a small outdoor Suzuki dealer and service center outside of Tokyo. Vulture-like salesmen (the type we're accustomed to seeing prowl around US dealerships) are nowhere to be seen. I like Japan. I am met by the car's owner and a skinny young man holding a video camera, who anyone would assume was just some slave intern. In the flurry of business card exchanges, introductions and butchered bows tangled up with awkward handshakes, the young fellow hands me his card--an unpretentious card with his name in Kanji and next to it in simple small English print: Aoki Takayuki, Race Driver. Apparently, Japanese racers can do more than drive and look pretty in the pits.
The heart of this 2004 Fairlady starts with a naturally aspirated 3.5-liter VQ35DE block blueprinted and reinforced with balanced and forged internals, all straight from the Tomei and Nismo parts catalogs. Much of the claimed 395bhp comes from the ported and polished 13.0:1 high-compression Nismo Spec-1 heads and beefed-up valvetrain components that bring peak power at 7500rpm. These upgrades, along with stainless-steel Tomei headers, ARC titanium exhaust and Nismo intake, are all off-the-shelf parts we can even get in the US. What we can't easily get is the winning edge from the custom Tomei ECU and tuning.
Chassis work is likewise a bolt-on affair, centered on a set of Endless/Zeal Super Function Super Taikyu Spec coilovers with X-coil springs. The aluminum-bodied remote reservoir dampers are custom-valved for dual purpose use, and have independent compression and rebound damping adjustments. In typical Japanese suspension tuning fashion, the stock anti-roll bars are retained, since most suspension roll rate comes from the super-stiff, 18 kg/mm (1000lb/in) front and 16kg/mm (890lb/in) rear springs. This is something we'll never get away with on our pot-holed Baghdad-esque roads. Longer Nissan Stagea front lower control arms are selected to add more negative front camber over the stock arms. Endless also replaced stock bushings with stiffer Nismo parts, for added handling precision and feel. The only chassis strengthening comes from a not-so-stiff-nor-safe, all-aluminum, bolt-in six-point Carbing/Okuyama cage, modified to clear the A-pillar tweeters. Clearly form outdoes function in this case.