After the lovely eight hour journey to Liverpool docks and back in the Mazda Bongo, with only a 45 minute long Guns and Roses tape and a packet of Minstrels to keep me company, I was really looking forward to having a proper look around our new 2007 Drift car in the shape of a Nissan S15 Silvia Spec R on the trailer behind me.
I'd been sent some good pictures of it while it was in Japan, but you still have visions of catastrophes on the boat and such. It had started first time at the docks, which I was very pleased about, so I’d quickly driven it up onto our trailer, secured it, and then made a beeline for the motorway in an attempt to miss the rush hour M6 idiots on the approach to Birmingham.
There was no such luck, but I must admit to being mildly entertained towards the end of my journey by two commuters in company cars, in the midst of the most serious and potentially fatal road rage battle I’ve ever seen. They were actually trying to ram each other off the road, taking up three lanes of motorway in front of me for a good two minutes. It was definitely one of those moments that I wished I’d had a passenger and video camera, but anyway, back to the S15!
I pulled it off the trailer, and had a little squeeze of the throttle up the road, I was really taken aback by the power delivery. Our S14a drfit car has around 385bhp at the wheels, but I could swear that this S15 would be just as fast as a road car. It’s a standard engine, standard turbo running standard boost etc. All it has is an aftermarket exhaust and filter, but it pulls very hard from very low down in the rev range with power delivery almost like an large capacity NA motor. The bodywork is absolutely mint, the interior is just as good, the engine bay is almost spotless. On top of the exhaust and filter, it has a set of coilovers and some Enkei wheels.
I can’t thank japaneseusedcars.com enough for finding and shipping such a tidy car to us. It almost seems a shame to rip it to bits and take an angle grinder to it, but we have some rather ‘extreme’ plans for the newbie of the Driftworks fleet, and I’m really looking forward to getting stuck in..
We will be stripping the car down to a bare shell and transporting it to the experts at GarageD for a very extreme and skilled chassis prep. We’ll be documenting the progress along the way, and will hopefully be able to give you regular updates on the cars progress leading up to 2007 pre season test sessions..
Many thanks to JapaneseUsedCars.com for the excellent service.
And a pre-emptive thanks to the guys at GarageD for the fantastic job I know they will do with the chassis prep..
Thanks to Guns and Roses and Minstrels.
Phil
