Personal: Sorry, been busy trying to buy a house and typical work/family/school stuff.
A few months back, Jon R contacted me. He had re-acquired the Project car M30. He originally bought it from Koji and had it for a few years. Since then, the car had degraded and changed hands multiple times. Before Jon, Cameron had it and he used it as a drift car. He eventually blew the motor. So Jon picked it up with intentions to rebuild it to what it used to be. Just as life, things changed and Jon couldn’t support the project anymore.
As of this posting, the intention and verbal agreement is I will pick up the car.
I’m kinda of excited about it. As you know, my Blue M30 is my main car and I wanted to show it as an F31/M30 at it’s purest. Of course, nobody really cares for a stock M30 except people that can appreciate it as such.
With the PCM (Project Car Magazine) M30, it’s been modified in such a way and professionally done. If you go through the pages of the build, they did an amazing job of documenting the swap. You don’t see these professionally done cars as much and why there are very few quality builds with these type of cars.
That is when a lot of pieces started to fall into place. I planned to follow Jon’s idea of bringing it back to it’s former glory. But the really interesting thing is that, I can put my touch to it.
So all the ideas that were gonna go to my Blue M30, can be put to the PCM M30. As I mentioned, I have showed my blue M30 at RADwood and I was super happy to do it. But again, let’s be honest, people don’t really want to look at a stock car! LOL.
Project Leopard WAS a show car and it had all the ingredients that intrigued people. Obscure chassis, MT conversion and RB25DET. As mentioned, Jon wanted it to bring it back to it’s former glory and I was on board with him on that. This car has also been track proven too with Cameron sliding the car for awhile.
In it’s current state, it does need a refresh all around. The RB25 is taken apart. Most of the custom pieces are there such as the transmission mount and drive shaft. The wiring harness is all in place and the R31 subframe/crossmember as well.
My idea of old cars new comes to play again. I would get the RB25det block redone regardless. So I think that is what is gonna happen. I definitely DON’T need 800hp. I want to make some good power, but nothing super extreme. So I want to strengthen the internals. There are some other issues that I need to research.
My plan is to have it towed up here (bay area hopefully I have a house by then) and slowly build the engine. I unfortunately don’t have resources or hook ups. I’m tied to NO community (like drifting)…so I have to go alone on this.