It's nice to be able to recount your life in trophies. They crowd the shelves bearing their first-, second- and third-place labels. You look back over them and remember the show, what your car looked like on the stage and the girls you brought home on your arm after you won. Hell, you probably can't remember the girls' names, but it seems like sex and hot cars go hand in hand. Especially if you're Lewis Clark and you own an Infiniti G35 with candy apple skins.
Over the last seven years, Clark has accumulated quite a list of both cars and trophies. Before he could start his latest show project, he had to clean house. He sold his 1999 Honda Accord, with which he had won numerous trophies and had featured in our pages. He took the proceeds to an Infiniti dealer in 2003 and picked up a new G35 coupe. Satisfied with his accomplishments and ready to take a break, the G35 was supposed to be a plain daily driver. After he had the car for a mere three weeks, his sponsors caught wind of it. The next thing he knew, he was dragged out of retirement and back into the scene. Like Michael Jordan, once he was back in the game, he was all the way back into the game. But this daily driven buildup took a bit of time. Each step of the way he was racking on mileage, which goes to show you not all show queens are trailer queens.
Since this car was his daily driver, he did a progressive buildup that spanned several months, allowing him to drive the car to work and still make progress in the buildup. He began with wheels. He selected DTS three-piece Maya wheels, sized 20x8.5 inches up front and 20x10 inches out back mounted up with Dunlop SP Sport 9000 tires, 245/35ZR20 and 285/35ZR20 respectively. Once Clark was set and rolling, he enhanced his sounds next. (We guess that daily commute played into his decision.) He went to Pro Autosound in Santa Ana, Calif., to get his ride bumpin'. The centerpiece is a Pioneer DVD 9000 head unit, complimented by Focal Utopia 6.5-inch component speakers in the front, 6x9-inch speakers in the back, and a pair of 11-inch subs in the trunk. To drive all these speakers, he needed some serious juice. Clark found what he needed in the Xtant 1200.1 and 600.4 amplifiers mounted in a custom amp rack and a custom enclosure with the subwoofers in the trunk. Two Phoenix Gold capacitors hooked up to an electronic fuse box supply the incredible amount of power needed to drive this system the way it was meant to be heard: hard and loud. Of course with a DVD head unit, additional monitors became a necessity, and Clark had three 7-inch Icon monitors installed in his newly customized trunk and a 5-inch monitor mounted to his rearview mirror.