Track days are becoming ever more popular in America, though it's taken us long enough to catch on. For years, Americans have spent thousands in aftermarket performance enhancements, but most of us to never see a track at all. Yet the very reason many of the parts we've installed were developed for track use. It would seem the Japanese care less about Hot Import Nights and more about sliding sideways up a difficult touge run.
But just because we're a nation late to the track day party doesn't mean we have any fewer opportunities to get out there and give our cars hell. Track days are popping up all over the country, and in most cases, you can even bring a couple hundred bucks and have hands-on instruction. But in the case of any track day, you'll need your own car. And there's a realistic chance you'll wreck that car.
So how do you get into track days if you're Jack Tsai, a man who owns three cars, the cheapest of which is a $60,000 BMW M3? And what if the skill you want to learn is the wanton art of drifting? If you guessed "Take the M3 to the track and see what happens," you guessed wrong. Jack's answer was to buy a cheaper car-one that was more suited to the rigors of drifting, and one that wouldn't break the bank if Jack broke the sheetmetal.
The obvious candidate came in the form of an S14 240SX, the car that drifters will swear up and down could have been purpose-built for sideways shenanigans. Thing was, Jack wanted to change a few things before heading out to the track-just a few. He'd been told the use of a different engine was ideal for his purposes, but he wasn't prepared to settle for the SR20DET that had become so common in drift cars. So an RB25DET was sourced from Japan and hastily installed by a shop that Jack would, out of the goodness of his heart, rather not mention.
This is because what was to be a quick engine swap turned into a six-month ordeal. The original shop managed to get the engine installed, but was unable to get it running. After spending months off the track, Jack scooped the car out and into the hands of a man he met through mutual friends, James Chang. In conjunction with the owner of Top Fuel, Andy Yu, the duo was the first to swap an SR20DET into a USDM S13 chassis back in 1995. And Chang has been doing it ever since. Now owner of a shop in City of Industry, Calif., called G-Dimension, there's nothing he likes more than putting big engines in small Nissans. The stock RB25 was running within days.
Problem was, Jack wasn't happy with the performance of the new engine. Maybe it was because the car sat for so long that he expected more. Or maybe stepping out of his CLS55 and into the 240SX made the RB25 feel torque-deprived. Either way, G-Dimension was happy to oblige, and promptly ripped the engine out of the S13 chassis in an effort to do things right, from the ground up.
The idea was to build an engine that could tolerate high boost pressure and that wouldn't need to be pulled from the engine bay again. Thus, an array of forged internals went in, including 9.0:1 compression pistons from CP and a forged, counterweighted, balanced and micro-polished crankshaft. Rod bolts from ARP hold Carillo rods together under pressure while a head gasket from Tomei ensures there is no leakage.
Keegan Racing Engines in Downey, Calif., worked the stock head to its own stage two specifications, including porting and polishing, a four-angle valve job, bronze valve guides and new valve stems. Valve springs from Tomei work with stock retainers to regulate the combustion cycle as they rock valves on Tomei's Poncams, with a 256-degree duration on both the hot and cold side. The entire package is held tight by ARP head studs. G-Dimension used Jack's car to fabricate its own solid RB25DET engine mount kit, which keeps the engine from twisting in place when the man stands on the loud pedal.