One thing I learned pretty quickly shooting feature cars in Southern California in the mid-2000s was that the cars worth chasing for a cover were often the ones that couldn’t be driven anywhere. The WELD Technique Factory S14 was the clearest case of that I ran into. I met the car at Sun Automobile USA in Santa Ana, and it took about a minute to figure out it wasn’t going any farther than the parking lot outside the shop. I shot what I could inside, in a warehouse that gave me nothing to work with, and made do. That’s still a disappointment all these years later, because the car deserved a real location more than almost anything else I photographed in that era. Nonetheless, the results ran on the cover of the April 2005 issue of Modified Magazine.
The car was a 1998 Nissan Silvia S14 built as a drift demo vehicle by Atsushi Ito, president of WELD Technique Factory in Yokohama. WELD had only been around since 2000 at that point, and Ito’s approach, according to the original story, was to think through every part of a car before touching a bolt. That philosophy shows in the S14, where very little remained as Nissan delivered it.
The engine is still an SR20DET, but not much about the installation is standard. WELD built a custom firewall and pushed the engine back in the chassis, and the handmade turbo-back exhaust runs straight through the cabin rather than under the car. The block is bored 1 mm over with a balanced crank and Z32 300ZX pistons, and the head was machined and polished in house. A’PEXi supplied the camshafts, cam gears, 1.1 mm head gasket, 550cc injectors, fuel pressure regulator, and catalytic converter, with an R33 Skyline fuel pump feeding it and JUN pulleys and a water pump on the front of the motor. A Trust TD06-20G turbo sits on a Trust exhaust manifold with a Trust wastegate and oil cooler, blowing through a WELD twin intercooler and custom piping with Samco couplers. A Z32 airflow meter handles the metering side, while cooling hardware includes an FWin twin radiator and shrouded dual Flex-a-lite fans mounted in the trunk. The electrical side runs Sun Auto Hot Earth products, including the Hyper Ground System, Hyper Voltage System, and muffler ground system. An A’PEXi Power FC manages the engine with a Trust PRofec B boost controller and Trust digital speed meter alongside it. WELD’s period specifications rated the car at 450 PS at 7,200 rpm and 62 kg-m at 6,430 rpm on 1.5 kg/cm² of boost, roughly 444 hp, 448 lb-ft, and 21 psi. Power goes through an ORC Pro twin-disc clutch to a NISMO two-way LSD.
The chassis and suspension got the same level of attention as the engine, starting with the cage. Okuyama built a custom 20-point roll cage, and WELD added what the spec sheet described as extensive chassis reinforcement along with a forward-tilting vented hood and custom rear air ducts. A’PEXi N1 Pro dampers are paired with Ikeya Formula pillow ball arms, tie rods, and bushings, a WELD custom strut tower brace, and Largus stabilizer bars front and rear. Braking is handled by WELD Type-R slotted rotors and pads with R33 Skyline Type-M calipers. The car was photographed on two-piece Work Meisters with 235/40R17 Goodyear Rev Spec tires up front and 265/35R18s in the rear.
Outside, the car wears a Trust Gracer Aero Style body kit, an A’PEXi Extreme adjustable wing, Craft Square carbon fiber mirrors, and a Sun Auto Powerview HID headlight system, all under the blue livery with sponsor decals for Speed Hawaii, Work, Sound OG Style, Sun Automobile, A’PEX, Goodyear, Nismo, Xanthic Design International, TS Factory, Omega, BN Sports, and Art Factory Graphic. The interior is every bit as purpose-built, with a Sparco Rev 5 Plus seat, Sparco harness, quick-release steering wheel, and pedals, along with a WELD push-button starter. A set of Trust gauges covers oil pressure, oil temperature, boost, water temperature, fuel pressure, and exhaust gas temperature, with an Auto Meter tach alongside them.
As someone who has always been drawn to custom fabrication, and especially to builds that commit to one-off work instead of bolting on a catalog, I can say that very few projects I’ve seen since come close to this one. The firewall alone would have been the headline on most cars. Here it’s one item on a list that also includes the relocated engine, the cabin exhaust, the 20-point cage, and extensive chassis reinforcement. More than 20 years on, the WELD S14 is still one of my all-time favorite cars, and I’d still trade the warehouse photos for one hour with it somewhere with better light and a personality that matches the car.
GalleryPhotos by Jason Siu
