The Three Day Wonder, Building a Turbo Nissan VQ35DE in Just 3 Days!
By Costa Gialamas
If you have been following our adventures with Dai Yoshihara in the Middle East, then you have probably read the story of how we converted his mildly built time attack car into a Formula D drift car in just a few days, sending it to Abu Dhabi to compete in a Formula D expansion event. You can read about our adventures from building the car to where we last left off here.
As we left our crew, in Abu Dhabi our VQ35DE Rev Up was dead with a blown head gasket. Unfortunately it was announced that we had another Formula D event in Qatar in 3 weeks. We had gone to Abu Dhabi with our fingers crossed. In the rush to complete the car, we had discovered on shipping day that our car suffered from boost creep and we could not lower the boost to less than 21 psi. The car had to get loaded on a container to Abu Dhabi and nothing could be done about it. At 21 psi our stock engine was pumping out 610 whp.
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| The car was already dead when we took these shots for the PR people. It sucked pushing it around. |
We knew that this was way too much for the stock engine to handle but we had no time to do anything about it. We had flown to Abu Dhabi with ported O2 sensor housings and our plan was to install them on the car to reduce boost to a more livable 15 psi which was the planned native wastegate pressure. Unfortunately, we had packed our B set of tools. Not wanting to be without our good tools for a couple of months, we packed all Craftsman tools with the car. What we discovered was that Snap On wrenches and sockets are much thinner than Craftsman .
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| Nick Hunter of 5523 Motorsports is an engine builder that JWT uses. Nick is intimately familiar with VQ engines so we figured he could assemble things faster than we could. To meet our timing, Nick built our engine at his house after his normal working hours. Without Nick's help, we probably could not have met our time schedule. |
