We are all familiar with the age old saying that when one door closes another door opens, well for me the door closing was hitting a bank after cutting the corner and losing the back of my Nissan Silvia S14 race car right before the finish line of the Wallaceville hill climb. This abrupt stop from over 100kph completely totalled the car and resulted in 3 broken ribs and an ankle injury requiring surgery to repair several ligaments 6 months later. My first thought as I rolled out of the car when it stopped was if I'm going to keep crashing these cars I’ve got to learn how to build them or it’s time to give this sport up. After some consideration and a lot of pain I decided that giving up wasn’t really an option for me so I walked through the new door of learning how to build race cars professionally.

So where does one begin when deciding to make a career change and learn how to build a race car? For me the obvious choice was to go and do a mechanical engineering course at Weltec so a month later that’s what I did. For the past 10 years I have built high end architectural homes so I am already pretty capable on the tools however the focus on working with metal was a big learning curve. The skills gained in this course allowed me to transition into the world of engineering and fabrication and finally start doing what I am truely passionate about, building cars.

My favourite motor is the SR20DET and I really like the challenge of a rear wheel drive hence why I had an s14. After stripping the crashed car of all the salvageable bits I was left with a motor and gearbox and not much else so I had to decide what to do next. I wanted to use the motor and I wanted to find a cheap rear wheel drive chassis that was not so rare and expensive like the s14 has become. The obvious choice was the Subaru BRZ / Toyota 86 chassis and thus a new vision was born. The aim was clear, put the SR20DET engine and s14 box in the BRZ and take it drifting so the project begun.

Updates to follow…

It all begins with a Vision.