In this post I want to document the development process that I went on with my Red 180SX, this chassis followed on from my Black 180SX and the ethos behind the build was keep it simple.

I purchased the car in 2018 and it had a host of great bolt on parts on it, suspension arms, coilovers, bolt in cage and my favorite thing the BEE R Rims. I was in a drift team called the Insane drifters and the chasssis was painted in the team red just a few weeks after picking up the car. I would go on to compete in both individual and team events all around Australia.

The early days saw the car with a mix of BEE R rims and TE37’s with factory rear steel fenders.

In 2009 I switched to the bronxe TE37 and ran a few rounds of Drift Australia, this gave me the opportunity to run tracks such as Oran Park which no longer exsist.

This was the end of the road for the factory rear fenders, after many trips to Tasmania and weekly drift events around the country the rear guards were getting difficult to service and maintain a good look.

The car went under the knife, I wanted to run low so I raised the rear strut tops, raised the rear subframe and tubbed the engine bay to get low and still maintain good performance.

The lowmount turbo setup had some revisions and I made up a mid mount intercooler, plumbing and ducting to make it all work together.

I had always wanted to build a roll cage and my good friend Adrian Mozza Morrisby from Tasmania made it possible for me, he actually paid for and sent me the roll cage tube required to do it, this was after a trip to Tasmania where he saw my fabrication ability and gave me the confidence to do it, I’ll be forever gratefull as it gave me a huge amount of confidence.

Once the cage was complete I painted the interior with about 15 pressure pack cans, safe to say it was a big job.

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I developed my own gearbox conversion to run the Z32 300ZX gearbox, once proven I made these for my team mates and then half the country as we all had SR20’s and we were all sick of blowing up 3rd gear, this and modified knuckles actually funded just about all of my drifting.

From here on things got a little more serious, a high mount TD06L2 Turbo kit really brought the SR20 to life and after that I was completely happy with the cars performance, I found the sweet spot and would only maintain what I had for many years to come.

The car went through a few stages of styling, the Driftmaster phase still holds a place in my heart.

The car really started making a name for itself and drifting in Australia was starting to shine, we were invited to V8 supercar Events, all major car shows, even Top Gear Festival had a drift track and we were drifting around it. I’m going to say that 2010 era Aussie drifting was the PEAK of it all.

The taste of success, the days of running at the highest level with 300kw and 235 tyres are long gone. It was fun while it lasted.

The car waivered between URAS, ORIGIN and Type X and I could never make up my mind as to what kit I liked more.

Always so much support at the racetrack.

The car always had a cool idle, I captured it when the car was in a relatively clean state.

Calder Park played host to a lot of drifting, the Thunderdome got opened up for drifting and I was part of the very first group to layout the tracks, a layout that still gets used to this day.

I always hated doing any driveline repairs and removing the gearbox was a task made much more difficult than it needed to be due to the size of the stock tunnel. I made a new tunnel that solved this problem all whilst making sure the factory dash and console would slide straight back over it.

In 2014 Sam from DrDrift performed the last tune on the Power FC ECU, to this day this motor still uses the same tune and produces close to 300kw with complete reliability.

The car bounced around the east coat and I competed at as many events as possible, a lot of my friends and team mates got out of the sport and I found myself just going through the motions, I found the car stagnated and my driving did too, once the social aspect of my drifting declined I didn’t find that had too much to give the sport.

I never stopped finding ways to improve the car though, the dogleg shifter that was necassary on the RB25 gearbox caused some mishifts mid battle due to the side loading of the design, to fix this I designed an external shifter and it worked perfectly with some throw adjustment built in.

By 2014 I had spent the best part of 6 years developing and competing in a car that I’d truly grown to love, I hope you enjoyed this post and it gives you some appreciation of what a drift car goes through, this sport is one of the most demanding on car, driver and team, for me to run my own program over these years was a huge effort and one I look back on with fond memories.

Thanks for reading.

Red 180SX 2008 to 2014

PS13 2006 to 2012

Black 180SX 2003 to 2008