It's late on a warm July night in York, Pennsylvania-a small town just outside the capital city of Harrisburg-and I'm blasting down Interstate 80, behind the wheel of this storm trooper-esque creation. Maybe my senses are slightly dulled from the luxuries of leather-wrapped Yonaka Motorsports seating, a full Rockford Fosgate Power- and Punch-equipped system, and decreased NVH levels courtesy of Nissan's transversely mounted VQ35DE... but I'm having a hard time believing we're moving as fast as the three-digit number the Altima speedometer is climbing towards. Riding shotgun is none other than East Coast tuning icon Brain Fox, who, reading the look of cautious disbelief spread across my grille, offers one of his signature chuckles and some words of encouragement, "Go ahead dog, beat on it. She can take it," With a glance out the passenger window, he casually adds, " she does every day I drive 'er." A quick blip of the throttle matches revs to 5th gear, as the Turbonetics blow-off valve gives a hint at what's to come. I downshift and floor it. My blank stare turns into a shit-eating grin. The Artisan GTK-650 turbo spools to life, spiking the STRI boost gauge past its 12 psi mark, as a rush of more than 450 whp pushes us past the 70... 80... 90 mph marks and beyond in mere seconds. "What did I tell you?!" screams Brian, "Kenny knows his shit! ...Now let's go get some quesadillas."
In a hole-in-the-wall, mom and pop Mexican joint at the outskirts of town, some crappy tavern fare was ordered up, devoured, and quickly washed down with cervesas, as our subject of conversation gradually became the tale of Brian's newest creation; this collaborative effort between himself, Houston-based Kenny Strickler of turbochargers.com, and Nissan America.
First, a little background: In the past eight years, Brian has built over 87 cars, many of them specifically for the SEMA show. Let that sink in for a moment: 87. That's about 87 times as many SEMA cars as even the luckiest few of us have been able to complete in the same amount of time. Last year's event was Brian's first time working with both Nissan and Kenny, on the world's first turbocharged Versa.
"After the success of the Versa we built for SEMA last year, Kenny, Nissan and I were looking for a new project," Brian began. "The six-speed Altima coupe had been released a few months earlier, and was predicted to sell out everywhere; Nissan couldn't even spare a "crusher" car (a company-owned test car) for us to build. Kenny wanted one so badly that he actually bought a new one-one of only three in the country at the time-at a discounted rate, and took delivery only four weeks before the show.
"Nothing was on the market for the car. And I mean NOTHING," he continued. "A body kit manufacturer in Cali kicked in a G35 front lip that Kenny modified to fit the Altima," Brian continued, "and I snagged a company-owned Altima coupe (the auto version) to use as a test-bed to develop new Fox Marketing/Bodykits.com side skirts and rear valence, while Kenny got started engineering the Artisan turbo kit." Supporting the aforementioned GTK-650 slug, Kenny worked an Artisan 650cc injector set, fuel rail, three-inch downpipe and exhaust, crank pulley, and battery relocation kit to the sideways-facing VQ's prototype turbo set-up, and adapted an AEM FIC to help it all run smooothly. But the attention grabber of the set-up is Kenny's one-off, hand-fabricated, equal-length turbo manifold that positions the GTK slug even with the bodyline of a custom hood - another bit constructed specifically for the vehicle. "The production Artisan kit doesn't use that manifold and hood," Brian confesses, "That's just for Kenny. And the total development time for the kit, from the drawing board to road testing? Four days."
By Luke Munnell
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