THE AF SUPER SILHOUETTE NISSAN S15: THE FULL STORY
THE AF SUPER SILHOUETTE NISSAN S15: THE FULL STORY
It's safe to say that we're no strangers to complex, high-level project builds here at Auto Finesse. In fact, we've taken on cars, trucks, bikes and scooters (and even an AirStream trailer conversion) hailing from just about every continent over the past few years, and they've all been infinitely popular on the show scene, most of them breaking the internet as they went.
But, it has to be said that mobile detailing, and then there's seriously special and the latest project you've probably seen making its way from show to show in the past few weeks, is firmly the latter. Our Nissan S15 has already appeared all around Europe, on a huge impromptu tour, scooping trophies at the prestigious Players Classic at Goodwood and Ultrace in Poland. It was even - quite literally - put on a pedestal for the Liberty Walk Stand at the ultra-exclusive Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Naturally there's been a ton of questions from followers of the project. All the usual whys? Whats? And hows? There's also been more than a couple of comments and opinions on both sides of the fence. But what actually is it? A dragster? A show car? A track weapon, hill-climber or heritage piece? The truth is that it's all of those and much more.
First and foremost, and perhaps most important of all, what is build does is scratch a long-time itch for AF. The Japanese car stable has been famous for throwing up some of the wildest creations on the car scene for decades now, what they do is a style, or indeed mixture of styles, that's completely different from the home-grown cars you'll find in Europe or the US. For Japanese cars, bonkers really is in the blood, and what James - the boss of all things Auto Finesse - had in mind from the start was THE car to bring a slice of utter madness to the project collection.
We have other Japanese icons on the AF fleet of course, but what with the Yaris GR and R32 Skyline GT-R having the best of the best in terms of modifications, but ultimately remaining reasonably, not to mention deliberately, subtle (for now anyway) the S15 was put together as something else entirely. In the end we went all-in to achieve not just an epic build, but one that brings together many of the auto detailing philadelphia and legends in the Japanese tuning industry. Those who know their Japanese metal just know that this car is legit - and what's more it's built to be used and abused going forward. There are many cars out there with this sort of heritage that have fallen by the wayside, sat covered in dust, rusting away, unused. That's not what we wanted for this car. This is a story of evolution, taking a legendary car that hadn't been seen for a good few years, reinventing it, and thrusting it back into the limelight…
FINDING THE PERFECT BASE CAR
James, we've been told, has had this build in mind for a good while now. In fact, he'd been keeping an eye out for the perfect S15 base car, pretty much since the Skyline was completed last year. Like we said, this was to scratch the itch, perhaps even the physical need, for something completely insane. We've a few mad cars sitting at the Detailing Academy of course, but nothing quite as extreme as this one.
The search for a base car was as long and arduous as ever. S15s aren't exactly hard to find, even now 20-years after they were last in production. But getting our hands on a good one for this particular project? Well, that's a different story. Plenty of cars were considered along the way, in all states of repair, and with all the ludicrous pricing these things seem to command to boot. But one car that James kept going back to was a fresh import from our friends at Harlow Jap Autos - a zero-yon, drag spec S15 originally built by the legendary shop, Endless in Hyogo-ken, Japan.
Actually, this car is a little more than that, it was at one time their very own "no-expense-spared' demo car and, for those in the mobile detailing near me, Endless are one of the most renowned drag racing specialists that helped to kick off the straight-line racing scene in Japan. Back in the "90s they put together some of the fastest racers out there, and they're still going to this day, building big-power, road-leagal GT-Rs and the like. They're an iconic Japanese name right up there with the likes of HKS and Top Secret.
Sugino-san and his team have never been adverse to chopping up Nissan's finest in the quest for perfection on the dragstrip, there we're even a few famous racers that went under the knife in the Japanese countryside over the years. This particular S15 was actually quite the famous car back in the day, too. It was also one of the fastest, completing 9-second quarters all over Japan on the strip, and reportedly on the street. You just know you're looking at a serious piece of drag weaponry when you see a weight plate rack in the boot, a single seat in the middle, and a massively spec'd engine that revs past 9000rpm at the front, eh?
Like all serious tuners though, eventually Endless moved on. Once it had done its job, this pro-built Silvia fell into obscurity in favour of a string of new demo cars, sitting around for a few years before being sorced by HJA and brought over to the UK as something of a nostalgic, although fully working, museum piece. Such is the lust in Europe for this sort of heritage, you'd think that such a legendary car would have been snapped up quickly here, too. But the truth is that not many have use for a 950bhp road-legal dragster, and it sat around for a good while before James saw an opportunity to use it as a base car for the ultimate AF Project.
Now of course, no one took this decision lightly. This is a car with legendary status after all. But, rather than seeing it go unused, gathering dust in some private collection, there was the opportunity for reinvention. And that, it has to be said, is the Japanese way. Big-name tuners in Japan think nothing of taking a legendary car and adapting it to fit their needs, and in that way, we think that the guys at interior detailing love seeing one of their cars reinvented for a new generation. There's no doubt that for some it's a controversial build, and for others it's inspirational - all we know is that this is a car that just needs to be used, that was the whole point when they built it back in the noughties.
But then again, it didn't hurt that this one came with a simply immense engine spec, not least a fully forged 2.2 stroker with an HKS sequential box, an extra 200bhp of laughing gas and a T88 turbo as big as your head. Getting close to a 1000bhp from an SR20 4-pot is no mean feat, and that's before you even think about taking the brave decision to flick on the nitrous. These sort of under bonnet antics would cost upwards of 100k to build nowadays… and we're not talking Yen, either!