First off, to clear up any lingering confusion, the car sitting right before your eyes is called the Nissan Cedric. Never exported to the U.S., this particular model, designated the Y30, was produced from 1984-1987. If the Cedric, called the Nissan 300C outside of Japan, conjures up any thoughts of a JDM taxi in your mind, then you're dead-on right. Often sold in Japan into fleet service, the Cedric can be found pressed into duty as a driver's education car or as a taxi.
So what the hell is a car like this doing in our magazine? Simple, really. Yuji Hamamoto, an engine tuning and swap specialist at C&Y Sports Racing Service of Nagoya, Japan, specifically wanted to build a badass version of a car normally found in driver's education schools. In Japan, when people see a sedate Cedric done up to the level and style of this car, they assume that the driver is up to no good, and that's exactly the image Hamamoto was going for.
When he crashed his original Y30 Cedric, Hamamoto knew that he would have to up his game for his next project. The plan was to go all out, building the most insane, hot rod version of a taxi that there ever was on the back roads of Japan. This Cedric was purchased less than a year ago and promptly turned into the flaming monster you see before your eyes.
The centerpiece of Hamamoto's buildup is a gleaming inline-six, factory turbocharged RB26DETT engine, pulled from a Nissan Skyline GT-R. As the resident engine swap specialist at C&Y Sports Racing Service, Hamamoto has seen his share of interesting engine and chassis match-ups. The RB26DETT and Cedric combination did not even make him think twice.
The RB26 twin-turbo engine has been known to put out four-digit power numbers in some cases, but Hamamoto was aiming for a "conservative" 500 wheel hp. His own straight six was disassembled and fit with N1 Skyline GT-R pistons. The block, crankshaft and connecting rods remain stock. Besides some custom porting work, the cylinder head remains factory stock as well. After cinching the head down over a Tomei head gasket, Hamamoto fit a set of Tomei camshafts with adjustable cam sprockets and called the engine complete.
Outside, the decision was made to dump the twin turbocharger setup in favor of a larger single snail. HKS' popular T04R turbo was chosen, fed by a tubular HKS exhaust manifold, heat wrapped of course. Sucking in air through a HKS air filter with a custom aluminum paneled airbox cover, the turbo exhales into a 4-inch stainless-steel downpipe and out a custom fabricated cat-less exhaust system.