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Mike Kojima posted on March 21, 2011 11:00 
The Three Day Wonder, Building a Turbo Nissan VQ35DE in Just 3 Days!
By Costa Gialamas
If you have been following our adventures with Dai Yoshihara in the Middle East, then you have probably read the story of how we converted his mildly built time attack car into a Formula D drift car in just a few days, sending it to Abu Dhabi to compete in a Formula D expansion event. You can read about our adventures from building the car to where we last left off here.
As we left our crew, in Abu Dhabi our VQ35DE Rev Up was dead with a blown head gasket. Unfortunately it was announced that we had another Formula D event in Qatar in 3 weeks. We had gone to Abu Dhabi with our fingers crossed. In the rush to complete the car, we had discovered on shipping day that our car suffered from boost creep and we could not lower the boost to less than 21 psi. The car had to get loaded on a container to Abu Dhabi and nothing could be done about it. At 21 psi our stock engine was pumping out 610 whp.
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| The car was already dead when we took these shots for the PR people. It sucked pushing it around. |
We knew that this was way too much for the stock engine to handle but we had no time to do anything about it. We had flown to Abu Dhabi with ported O2 sensor housings and our plan was to install them on the car to reduce boost to a more livable 15 psi which was the planned native wastegate pressure. Unfortunately, we had packed our B set of tools. Not wanting to be without our good tools for a couple of months, we packed all Craftsman tools with the car. What we discovered was that Snap On wrenches and sockets are much thinner than Craftsman .
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| Nick Hunter of 5523 Motorsports is an engine builder that JWT uses. Nick is intimately familiar with VQ engines so we figured he could assemble things faster than we could. To meet our timing, Nick built our engine at his house after his normal working hours. Without Nick's help, we probably could not have met our time schedule. |
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 6:09 AM
Nice writeup as usual, Mike. Keep these articles coming! I think it's funny that you mentioned the ISO 9000 standard. I think I pointed out that Steeda is ISO 9000 certified, as well, in my Mustang's build thread.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 8:16 AM
Good job on getting the engine built in time. Did you guys have more issues in Qatar? I caught a few of Dai's runs on the livestream. It looked like he was a bit down on power on the straight and straightening out like he didn't have enough power for the car's grip. Although a lot of people were having similar issues, so maybe it was just the track gaining grip.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 9:16 AM
The car had lots of power. Dai said it had more power at 17 psi than the old motor had at 21, at least that what it felt like to him. Now that the engine is running really well, it exposes the shortcomings of the rest of the car for drifting. We didn't want to set it up so much for drifting that it would mess it up for Time Attack and we didn't have time to change a lot of stuff either. Most of the problems were due to not enough steering angle. We didn't have time to really modify the steering. The track was real bumpy and slippery, there was sand on it as well. We were also having fade issues with the ebrake since we didn't have time to do a proper turning brake. The brake bias was wrong for drifting as well We were also on the old Falken 615's not 615 k's.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 10:39 AM
Mike, where do you find the time for these great articles?! And I almost thought is was going to be a complete Cosworth bottom end. JE does make a good piston though. So are you hinting that we might be seeing the Z at some of the Time Attack events this year? I am excited to see how the dyno turns out as well when it makes it back stateside.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 12:21 PM
Since you were using a tune developed without a running engine, I'm assuming it was rather conservative and that even more power could be made from that engine if it were properly dyno-tuned.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 1:59 PM
Wow, great info on all the nitty-gritty details of VQ engine building. I enjoyed the read and look forward to the Qatar trip story as well!
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 2:22 PM
Amazing build for such a short timeframe including sourcing parts! Looks like the heads needed a lot of clearancing for the JWT C9 cams. Why do the clearanced areas look a bit rough? Were the valves removed and was it done with a die grinder? Done in a hurry due to the time crunch?
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 5:03 PM
hardest working potato in FD.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 9:15 PM
Bruce- MotoIQ and Motorsports is my full time Job so thats how I have time. Team Falken stuff is my part time job. Dusty- The tune is so conservative it's ridiculous, there is probably 50 hp just in tuning. Ohm- The reason the surface is rough is that it doesn't need to be smoother
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 11:14 PM
Mike, you're a credit to the profession! For some reason I was thinking you were working at Technosquare or one of the shops in So. Cal fulltime with Motoiq being your overtime gig, no matter what it seems you're one of the busiest guys I know, period. Any of the project cars getting any time attack related upgrades soon? I'm getting pretty excited for the April TA!
Wednesday, March 23, 2011 8:11 AM
Damn, this is the kind of hard work I'd love to dedicate myself to. How I envy people who do this for a living (in a positive way!) Great article, Mike. Hope things go better this time around, in Qatar.
Thursday, March 24, 2011 1:11 PM
when you say the rod bolts have asymmetrical threads, do you mean one of them gets tighted to the right and the other to the left? or is asymmetrical thread something else?
 
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