Among the bubble-wrapped body kits, rows upon rows of side skirts, hoods, and bumpers, Perry Yem fluidly maneuvers around the clutter like an endangered animal amid the thick forests of the Amazon River. Watching him from afar, he intuitively knows where each part is located, how to get from one point to another in the fastest time, and how low to duck his head to avoid random bumper pieces hanging from the shelves. This is his shop, his personal urban forest, known as Mastergrade Motorsports, also known as "Perry's second home." Located in the heart of Long Beach, Calif., Mastergrade Motorsports overlooks the Long Beach skyline, smog filled with a plush uptown scene on the other side, filled with housing tracts and black Cadillacs. It's definitely the most unlikely place where the most innovative and creative pieces of art work the automotive industry has seen in quite a while were built.
Just a year ago, Mastergrade Motorsports was put on the map with a yellow Honda S2000, which was featured on the cover of 2nr and was the talk of the car show circuit. Mastegrade's buzz was especially notable among the body kit aficionados, those who can spot a fake from 20 feet away and name the body kit manufacturer by simply looking at minute idiosyncrasies within the construction. When these same people saw Perry's version of the S2000, they were all stumped on who made it. The natural guess was a Japanese company, but they were all surprised that the design and construction was all summoned up stateside, in one of the largest cities in Southern California. At that point, Perry and Mastergrade Motorsports earned the respect needed to succeed in such an erratic business.
The S2000 marked the not-so-subtle beginning of Mastergrade Motorsports, which mainly focuses on custom wide-body kits and distribution of widely popular performance parts. Needless to say, Perry is the owner, who claims to beat his employees in a game of basketball when he's not running the shop. But his talents obviously go further than the basketball court. A graduate of one of the most prestigious art schools in the country, Art Center of Pasadena, Perry designed the S2000 and of course the sexy Nissan 350Z found within these pages. Unlike those designers who use CAD and special computer equipment, Perry sculpts his designs from scratch. "When I see the car, I know exactly what I want in my head," explains Perry, "With the Nissan 350Z, I just went up to it and started cutting away at the metal." An artistic move that hasn't been seen since Renaissance artists chipped away at large block of stones to create works that are considered masterpieces today.
And what resulted in his cutting is one of the cleanest, most aesthetically pleasing Nissan 350Zs since Nismo's famous JGTC versions. The wide-body kit extends the car's width 4 inches all around and mainly consists of carbon fiber and fiber cloth, which is an adaptation of fiberglass, just more easily accessible. The whole process of customizing the exterior took Perry approximately 1-2 weeks. His style of designing harkens back to the old-school Veilside look combined with the subtle nuance of a Top Secret body kit. Perry wants his kits to seem like it was made for the car, as if it just rolled out of the Nissan plant. More importantly, he claims that his body kits are not only beautiful and unique, but also as functional as any of the body kits you see on Japanese tracks today. When asked if he wind tunnels tests his parts, Perry simply laughed saying, "Wind tunnel tests are for wussies." According to him, the way he tested his body parts was to simply drive it on the highway, in a real-life situation. This particular kit for the Nissan 350Z was tested on the roads connecting Los Angeles and Las Vegas after the SEMA Show late last year. He drove the car to upwards of 140 mph, and Perry noted that at that high of a speed, his 350Z was still nimble enough to turn on the spot, because of the strong downforce the kit was providing. "I felt the downforce as I stepped on the gas," he says, "I was actually surprised to see that I was going that fast." On a side note, he suggests not to try this at home.