Sarah's Ride
By Annie Sam Photography by Greg Perry
If you have been a fan of NPM for awhile and now MotoIQ, you have probably been reading The Queen of Questions, Sarah Forst's tech column from day one. Our statistical tracking software has shown that Sarah's works are the most highly trafficked of all of our features. So some of you are probably wondering, how did she get to know all of this stuff.
Well if you know Sarah, you understand that she is very thorough and loves to research things. She has a financial background and complicated analysis and number crunching are natural for her. She learned much about extreme tech from building up her own car many years ago, meeting some of the countries top Nissan tuners and becoming a master of tuning herself in the process. Now Sarah has several cars in her arsenal ranging from a G20 winter beater to a G35 daily driver and a NX2000 track car but none are as interesting as her super Sentra.
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Sarah basically grew up with the Sentra, buying it new as a cheap school-work commuter as a teenager when her hated Ford Tempo blew up. She was not really into cars at the time and the GA16DE powered automatic appealed to the practical financial side of her. Somehow Sarah the studious geek got introduced to the San Diego street racing scene and found herself into cars. Unfortunately she also became a ricer with a GA powered automatic Sentra with a body kit, 18” wheels, sound system with an X Box, neon lights and a fart can exhaust, the best she could do as a poor collage student. Sarah once placed at a Hot Import Nights, a far cry from being a serious performance machine.
Skip forward a few years and Sarah graduates from college, swears off street racing and is making decent money in the world of finance. She sets out to redeem herself by building a serious car out of her ex school commuter. The first things to hit the junkyard were the anemic GA16DE and the automatic transmission. A friend of Sarah's had crashed his 200SX SE-R and his car became the donor for a bunch of the little parts to make an SR20, manual transmission swap possible. Once the donor car was purchased, the project began in earnest.
As all big projects require a lot of unanticipated parts, Sarah did the right thing and stuck with higher quality genuine Nissan OEM parts wherever she could. Anyone who has dealt with the typical dealer parts counter morons knows that having the right parts guys to help you makes a huge difference. Puente Hills Superior Nissan is a dedicated performance parts dealer and they know what you need and stock most common SR20 and JDM Nissan parts as well.
