Our latest project started as an accident. The S13 that we are using started off as Chuck Johnson’s, one of our writers, daily driver. It was a really nice S13 with a sano SR swap, built well with nice parts. Then a lady driving a late model Acura, amazingly with no insurance, decided to run a stop sign unbelievably in her own neighborhood smashing into Chuck and taking out the front end of the S13. Even though the damage was minor, Chuck’s insurance company totaled the car. Chuck bought the car back from the insurance company and most of the good parts were swapped into our Project S13 LSR.
The shell of the car sat at Chuck’s house until he decided to donate it to us for another cool project. Since we now have an S13 with no drivetrain, what better to do with it than stick a Chevy LS engine in it? What we envision is building a budget replica of Dai Yoshihara’s Formula D winning Falken Tire S13. After all we know how to do it. However, we will do it on a budget so perhaps it might not be as trick as Dai’s car, but it will rock.
We are not going to build the car just for drifting but as an all around car. Not too many people know but Dai and the S13 handily won Ken Block’s Gymkanna event which showed that the car has plenty of potential for grip driving. We plan to take the car to the Optima Challenge and other events traditionally dominated by domestic iron to see if we can do something at this event and other track activities.
To start the car off, we stripped it to a bare shell to get it ready for some fabrication. Stripping a car is hard work and not exactly easy. Here is how we prepped the car for the next steps of fabrication.
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| First the obvious, we took the interior out by unbolting it. Here Chris Marion attacks the inside of our S13. BTW, if anyone wants to buy a really nice S13 interior, let us know! |
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| Dai Yoshihara wanted to prove to us that he can work on cars. Here is Dai hard at work taking out the spare tire. |
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| Here I am doing something. I don’t know who was taking this picture. |
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| The last totally cherry uncracked S13 factory dash in existence! |
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| Removing the interior and wire harness took about 2 hours of working carefully to preserve the parts. The complete interior is for sale. |
