Last Saturday I was down at the Stillen open house working the booth for the Cosworth. I was late as usual so I had to cruise down the 405 doing about a 130mph in the GT-R. I was trying to maintain 120, but there was some traffic here and there. I blew by a 2 350z cruises, a G35 cruise, and a PT cruiser cruise. I assume they were going to the Stillen open house. I wasn’t trying to show off, but I was actually kicking ass because I was late. Actually I never show off and front. However, I’m always driving fast so people think I’m frontin’ on them all the time. Fuck’em because chances are I’d blow them away anyway. Anyhow so I get off the freeway and I get lost because I guess I forgot that whole Costa Mesa area even though I worked at the original Apex building across the street for 3 years. Oh well…..so there were a ton of Nissans with the bulk of them being 350z’s. A total of 4 Skyline GT-Rs rolled in and I realized that all of them were tuned at XS except for one. That one was weak….heheh.
The highlight of the show, for me at least, was Steve Millen’s old school IMSA GTO Z32 300ZX Twin Turbo race car. Even though it’s old as shit, it’s still buff as shit in my book. When you take a careful look at the car you can see that it is actually much closer to today’s high end tuned street cars than today’s race cars. Today’s race cars are more exotic and have a ton more $$$ in them widening the gap between race car and street cars. But when you look at old race cars you can see that today’s high end tuned street cars have many similarities to this early 90’s race car (at least in the engine bay). IMSA GTO was always a manufacturer’s or extremely rich man’s race so there were no big title sponsors. Nissan flipped the bill on this race car and so there is a lot of money in it, but just not compared to today’s commercialized racing. Friends at Cosworth who worked at Electramotive (who built the GTO cars for Nissan) back in the day told me that it used a stock VG30DETT block with a billet steel main girdle, billet crank, forged pistons, o-ringed heads, dry sump oiling and big boost through inlet restrictors. These are the basic essentials for any high output engine and so you see these things on today’s super high end street cars. Today’s race cars you get those same things, but you get purpose engineered engine blocks, exotic materials in the engine parts, carbon everything, 50,000,000 channels of datalogging, etc. Race cars have big money shit these days. Anyhow, I thought it was cool how this 300ZX had two sleeve bearing Garrett T28 turbos, a production block, maybe 12 channels of datalogging if it was lucky, and stainless headers. Nothing fancy except for a shitload of ducting because race teams didn’t spend big money on aerodynamic development either. Dope car.
