In the world of drifting, the name of the game is to stand out from the crowd. Not just in performance and actual driving skill, but the car itself needs to grab the crowd’s attention. The South East is home to a few professional drifting teams. XAT Racing in Tampa, Florida are no strangers to building S-chassis performers, so it was no surprise that this year they’d bring out a competition vehicle to the Formula D circuit. Bill Sherman has been known as Hachi Bill for quite some time now, drifting on the streets of Tampa in his Hachi. After an unfortunate demise at a Formula D event following a great performance, XAT Racing decided to put Bill behind the wheel of their newest project – something that would definitely fit his style of driving and really set himself apart from the crowd. While some people love it and some people hate it, there’s no denying that there’s another S13 in the world like XAT’s Bandit.
Its biggest attribute that really gets the crowd’s attention is the fact that the S13’s front end isn’t the familiar 180SX one or even the Silvia front end, it’s off a ’79 Trans Am. That’s right; XAT went way out of this world by outfitting a complete ’79 Trans Am front end onto the S13 chassis. Charge Speed front and rear wide body fenders along with an M3 style rear wing complete the exterior, but it’s without saying that the front end alone was enough to make people scratch their heads and take a closer look.
Under the hood, XAT Racing kept the trend of being different alive by turbocharging the KA24DE rather than swapping in the infamous SR20DET motor. Fully built with 9.0:1 compression Wiseco pistons, the Garrett T3/T04E turbocharged KA puts out a massive 384 rwhp and 358 ft/lbs of torque. XAT Racing completed the rest of their turbo kit with some goods from GReddy, Megan Racing and TiAl.
Suspension wise the S13 has received a complete overhaul so that Sherman can reliably compete against the other 15 drivers when it comes to tandem competition. Megan Racing along with Tanabe make up the bulk of the suspension upgrades, while the car smokes plenty of Falken Azenis rubber on and off the track. In car electronics has been kept simple with a series of gauges from Defi to help monitor the performance when tuning the car and going sideways.
It’s definitely a nice change of pace when we see projects like this coming from shops outside of California. XAT has really set a whole new mark in the world of 240 tuning and the Bandit performs plenty well enough to prove it.
