If you had told me in November 2003 that photographing a drag car in a Florida parking lot would eventually move me across the country, I would have laughed. At the time, I was just an employee at Enjuku Racing with a camera and an agenda: get our drag Nissan 240SX S13 in front of as many eyeballs as possible. The plan was to shoot the car and pitch it to Modified Magazine for a print feature. The plan worked better than I could have imagined. That push for coverage eventually turned into a full-time gig with Modified Magazine, and with it, a move from Orlando, Florida to Southern California. Every feature I’ve shot since, and honestly this entire site, traces back to this car.
Digging through the hard drives for these photos was a humbling exercise, because it’s almost crazy to look back and see how little I understood about photography then. My entire kit was a Canon Digital Rebel, the kit lens, and a 70-300mm, and I knew very little about aperture and shutter speed settings. This S13 is the car I learned on. Since I always had access to it through work, I ended up shooting it about three different times, and you can almost watch me figure things out across those sessions. The best photos came when the late Paul Souder got us access to his workplace, which handed us a backdrop of classic warplanes and the freedom to do some pulls on the car. Those frames still hold up, sort of, and I’m glad they finally have a permanent home here.
The car itself was exactly what an early-2000s import drag build should be: an SR20DET pushed hard with the parts catalog of the era. The turbo is a Precision SC-61 T3/T04E hanging off a Hotshot and Enjuku manifold, breathing through a Blitz three-inch downpipe, a custom test pipe, and a 3.75-inch A’PEXi GT-Spec exhaust, with a TiAL 40mm wastegate handling boost and a GReddy Type R blow-off valve venting it. Charge air runs through a GReddy R-Spec intercooler, and the head got Ferrea retainers and springs, HKS Step 2 cams and sprockets, and a 1.8mm metal head gasket to bring compression down for boost. Fueling is a Border rail with SARD 850cc injectors, a Walbro 255 pump, and an Aeromotive regulator, sparked by an MSD DIS-4 and NGK plugs, while a GReddy aluminum radiator with dual 12-inch Flex-A-Lite fans and a Nismo cap keeps it alive between passes. An A’PEXi Power FC runs the show with a GReddy Profec B on boost duty, and the result on the dyno was 544.2 whp and 412.6 lb-ft. In 2003, on an SR20, that number got people’s attention.
Everything behind the engine is built for one direction. A Fidanza 10 lb flywheel and SPEC Stage 5 clutch with an iron disc take the launch abuse, sending power through an Enjuku one-piece aluminum driveshaft, with a safety loop, into a KAAZ 1.5-way differential, with a B&M shifter handling the gear changes. The suspension is refreshingly simple, an Eibach Pro-Kit over KYB GR-2s with Cusco rear arms and toe rods and an OBX rear lower tie bar, because a drag car doesn’t need much more than geometry that hooks. The wheel setup tells you everything at a glance: 15×3.5 Bogart Flystars with 26×7.5 Mickey Thompson Sportsmans up front, and 15×9 Flystars wrapped in 26×10.5 Mickey Thompson ET Streets out back. Inside sits an eight-point chromoly cage, Sparco Torino seats with five-point harnesses and a Sparco wheel, and the period-correct gauge trio of an Auto Meter Monster Tach, a 52mm Auto Meter boost gauge, and a 52mm GReddy EGT. Outside, an Erebuni three-piece spoiler, a carbon hood, and the graphics finish the look.
The numbers the car put down were an 11.50 ET with a 1.60 sixty-foot, and that sixty-foot is the stat to notice, because getting a rear-drive S13 to leave that hard on that tire took real chassis work and real driving. Drag racing runs deep in our archive, and there are plenty of 240SXs in our collection. But this one is personal. This is the car that taught me how to use a camera, got my name in a magazine, and pointed my whole career west. Twenty-three years later, publishing it on my own site feels like paying off an old debt.
GalleryPhotos by Jason Siu
