This is the best idea ever.
Sport Compact Car has an unparalleled fleet of project cars. At latest count, we have 14 rolling test beds helping us find the needles of truth in an aftermarket of overpromising haystacks.
Until now, we've had a sort-of-annual tradition of recapping the progress of all our project cars. Just figuring out where all our project cars were, who had the keys and what was bolted onto them was almost as big a challenge as remembering which month we were supposed to run the story. So when this new idea appeared, it took awhile for us to figure out how to pull it off-something like three years.
The idea was simple. Instead of just telling you why they weren't running this month (look for that on page 126), we would take all our project cars and race them against each other, regardless of their present condition. Genius.
It gets better. Not only would the simple act of unpacking the stopwatch squelch all of the normally hollow office boastery, we'd up the humiliation by subjecting all of our cars to the same unsympathetic editorial criticism we unleash on every car unfortunate enough to find its way to our offices.
Each of our projects, you see, is managed by a single staffer. Sometimes that staffer owns the car, sometimes they've just adopted it, but either way, the care and feeding of a project car leads to an almost parental bonding. After carefully selecting each modification and adding countless quarts of knuckle blood to the car's construction, the evenhanded judgment of our crack evaluators can be tipped to favor their personal creation.
Flaws are understood, rationalized and driven around when the parent is behind the wheel. Each bad habit is a trade-off consciously adopted to achieve some other goal. Rides like crap? Sure, but it handles. Can't idle? Maybe, but the huge injectors and lumpy cams make giant-killing power. Unmanageable clutch? Yeah, but it won't burn up doing 12-second quarter-mile passes. You get the idea.
It's easy to forgive your baby for these faults, but jump in a car you've never driven and the balance of performance to pain-in-the-ass shifts. Only then do we see if the payoff is really worth the compromise.
Each car, then, is driven for lap times by the staffer who knows it best, but the rest of the day's lapping, and the harsh editorial pen, belong to someone else. To someone, in most cases, who has never been behind the wheel of that car.
So this is it. After years of not quite getting around to it, months of planning and countless nights of thrashing to get almost everything running for the big day, nearly the entire SCC fleet is assembled, ready for battle. On the day of reckoning, 11 of the 14 cars showed up to justify their existence. Some even seemed prepared.
Then, precisely at 8:30 a.m., as the last project car rolled into the pits ready for the day when all the boasting would be replaced by excuses, when the burning questions of which project car really reigned supreme would finally be answered, the unlikely happened-water fell out of the sky.
OK, so never mind that "who's the fastest" crap. It's time to see which car is fastest in the rain.
Project 350Z"Whatever you do, don't wad it up," Jacquot lectures me as I pull on my helmet. "I don't want to have to explain to Nissan P.R. that you totaled their car, got it?"
"Sure, boss," I mutter as I turn the key.
I already know what I'm in for. Following Project Z at the Track Attack, I'd seen firsthand the massive oversteer that dominates its persona. Don't get me wrong; I love oversteering cars, but today's hurricane makes the Streets of Willow Springs feel like a soaped down skating rink. This should be interesting.
The stock Z is a solid, easy-to-drive car that relentlessly understeers at the limit. It will only bite when provoked. The S-Tune suspension package is superbly damped and can be coaxed to rotate with lift throttle and trail braking. Project 350Z has a hybrid NISMO and Hotchkis suspension and it's questionably adjusted for the current conditions.
Revving it, I can hear the whine of the Vortech supercharger over the smooth roar of the Borla exhaust. Some may think this is annoying, but I like the mechanical cacophony. I ease out the clutch and roll hard into the throttle. My first impression is that the supercharger hardly does anything. Studying the dyno charts, I know this not to be true, but the Vortech's late power delivery does not at first feel fast. Thank God.
My first flub arrives within a few hundred yards. A large puddle has formed on the front straight. No problem, I think, plowing through the puddle, foot to the floor. "Yes, it is," says the Z. Two hundred and seventy-five millimeter section width tires provide more than enough surface area to float this beast.
Project Z instantly snaps 45 degrees to the left as the engine runs full steam into the rev limiter. Holy shit! I crank in opposite lock, foot to the floor, imagining what Jacquot and the folks at Nissan are going to do to me. Somehow I chase down the steering and the car straightens and begins accelerating. I short shift to fourth and dial back on the throttle for Turn One.
Turn Two is a tight, 100-degree low-speed bend and oversteer here is actually useful in helping the car rotate. For once, things go well. Turn Three is normally a medium-speed, third-gear sweeping left-hander and I take it slowly, drifting gracefully, tail out at a 45-degree angle. Photographer Henry DeKuyper runs for his life anyway. The rest of the session is more of the same-when Project Z doesn't hydroplane, it oversteers. It's like driving a swamp boat in an ocean of WD-40.
The same setup that makes Project Z a grip monster in the dry makes it virtually undriveable in the wet. And in this deluge, its stiff springs, wide tires, aggressive limited slip and massive roll stiffness combine to make this car a slow, oversteering hell beast. But hey, I didn't stack it.Mike Kojima
Project 300ZX Twin TurboUuuuuh...The guttural groan that rumbles from deep within Mike Kojima's sausage-like being every time he encounters an inferior intellect defies all attempts at spelling. It's a sucker punch to the diaphragm replayed in slow-mo, wrapped in deep-fried exasperation with a cherry on top.
Hang around Kojima and you'll hear the groan-like Albert Einstein taking a crap-often. There are few who can match Kojima in any contest of brain, so nearly all attempts at communication involve him stooping down, mentally, to some frustratingly low level.
Today the Kojima symphony is directed at Jacquot and at the very science of meteorology. His Z, his baby, has survived the last 13 years without tasting the forbidden nectar of a raindrop, and today its precipitation cherry is unceremoniously popped.
The Z survived the trip to the track (on a trailer) without wetness. It's unloaded without body damage and driven carefully into the pit garage without getting dirty.
Then, exactly as the track mayhem is scheduled to begin, the skies open. Watching the rain threaten to wash the invisible halo of bling from his meticulously polished museum piece of superior Japanese engineering, Kojima's body tightens until he's so tense you could shatter a diamond by bouncing it off his shoulder blades.
Project 300ZX dominates the Sport Compact Car project garage like Arnold Schwarzenegger would dominate the southeast Latvian junior high women's wrestling team. Its superiority has always been unquestioned. It was taken as fact that, were it allowed to escape the garage, it could blow any other project car off the race track with one turbo tied behind its back. There's only one fool and one car willing to even attempt to take on the Z. That fool is me, and that car is my Silvia.
From the beginning, the true purpose of Project Silvia has been to dethrone Kojima's masterpiece, and, to be honest, the true reason behind the Battle of the Project Cars is to provide a venue for the dethroning. In preparation, I stopped slummin' with Falken street tires and stepped up to Toyo RA-1 race rubber. I took the spare tire out and even checked the tire pressures. I even thought about checking the alignment.
It should come as no surprise, after this painfully long buildup, that I never get to drive the Z. It steps out into the rain only for very careful low-speed photography, as Kojima is unwilling to expose his masterpiece to these unsavory conditions. He does drive the Silvia, though, and as if to show me why I'm not driving his car, he slowly and carefully builds up speed in mine until he slides it off the track.
I've driven the Z before, though, around the painfully square, police-infested grid that surrounds Kojima's suburban home. From the first exquisite bark of the exhaust, it's clear this is no normal tuner car. The sound is half IMSA GTU car, half Ferrari V12. There is a sharpness to the tone and a quickness to the response that says the engine belongs on a race track.
The zero-weight flywheel and twin-disc clutch force you to blip and lurch and rev through the neighborhood like Dario Franchitti in gridlock, and the earth-crushing 3,400-pound curb weight somehow fails to damp the car's responsiveness.
Rolling onto the throttle in second gear takes you on a symphonic journey through the fabulous range of the VG30DETT's song, but most of all, it provides a terrifying series of unexpected g-forces you can usually only get by riding a ride when you aren't as tall as the line.
It takes a few minutes to calibrate your expectations to the power delivery on any turbo car, but especially one that puts more than 550 hp to the ground. I never manage to finish that calibration. The spine-quivering bellow of the exhaust is like blowing the doughnut horn in the police academy dormitory. I only dared hit the gas once.
Next year, Mike. - Dave Coleman
Project Rally Beater Here's the deal: I'm both the oldest and fattest guy who writes regularly for SCC. To avian-derived Jacquot, that's just an opportunity for hilarity. He always assigns me to write about cars that are damn near impossible to get into and out of. Then he takes photos of my awkward efforts and enormous ass and publishes them where my children can come across them years from now and recoil in shame.
That's why I wound up writing about Dave Coleman's Project Rally Beater 1971 Datsun 510. And it's why you may find at least one of the photos presented here so thoroughly unpleasant.
And when it comes to thoroughly unpleasant, there isn't a car on Earth that looks worse than the 510. In a world where classic 510s are too often treated like precious street rods to be buffed to glistening perfection by their anal-retentive owners, Dave's has been bounced into every object he could find and then left outside to rust.
There isn't a straight body panel on the car; the paint is consistent only in the inconsistency of its coverage; the interior looks like a family of beavers has consumed it and then liberally fertilized the empty shell; and it seems to start only after Dave performs some weird Celtic combustion ritual and rolls it down a hill. To say it's ugly is to be kind. To describe it accurately is to be obscene.
But it's incredible to drive. Once I grease up and slide into the driver's seat, it isn't easy to acclimate myself to the nest of wires where the dashboard used to be or the nest that's where you'd expect the stock ventilation controls to be.
The transplanted Nissan SR20DE pulls hard, the five-speed transmission shifts like a Formula car's, the structure (thanks, I suspect, to the repeatedly proven safe roll cage) is tight, and the suspension soaks up and spits out anything short of ballistic missile fire. On the Streets of Willow Springs, the Rally Beater isn't in its native elements, but it's easy to simulate rally conditions by simply cutting between the corners and crossing unimproved desert.
Does the car have problems? The steering is loose, it makes noises that sound like banshees eating a barbed-wire salad, and there's always the possibility you'll scrape your hand on an exposed rusty surface and require a series of incredibly painful tetanus shots. The Rally Beater isn't for everyone and it sure the hell isn't for me.
But Dave has been grinding on this car in the crucible of competition for years and though it's infinitely ugly, it's also comprehensively capable as a rally machine. I'm old enough to remember when 510s were just cars instead of glorious icons enshrined in the Church of Sport Compactness. There are other 510s out there that are prettier, faster and less likely to cause an infection, but there aren't any that are more fun than this one.Plus, I can't get out of the thing.John Pearley Huffman