Dream Car: Autech S15

A work colleague of mine had been looking at getting a sports car across the ditch. Since no-one can actually check the vehicle for him, he sent the seller on a wild goose chase to get as much information about it.
Despite having a rebuilt engine, that 25-year-old Nissan had low compression on one cylinder. Hearing this, it made me wonder what would I do if my R34 had low compression. I immediately jumped onto a few websites to consider my options - Pulsar GTiR, Leopard, Gloria, R31.

While looking into a certain company that works with naturally aspirated Nissan engines, I was disappointed that there were no longer any S15’s for sale locally at the $9,000 mark. I then went onto the Goo to find the cheapest one, and found this example.

Michael Kelm once wrote an article on CT which covered these models and I was intrigued to find that, despite dropping the famed RB26DETT into an R33 sedan and Stagea, Autech had mostly worked with tuning SR20DE’s and RB26DE’s.

Now the actual car:
This is a white S15 Silvia with a 6-speed manual transmission. It has a red-top SR20DE with to-die-for extractors.
Being a country of drifters, New Zealanders have an unavoidable urge to bolt an eBay turbo onto these beauties despite the high compression ratio - Shinichiro Sakurai’s hard work gone down the outhouse in the name of street cred.

Some of you might have noticed that I’ve gone against exterior modifications lately - sure, I like the Rocket Bunny and Liberty Walk kits, but for my own car I would keep the exterior stock (even the wheels) with a set of KYB shock absorbers and a good set of tyres - if you remember the first few seasons of Initial D, those cars were basically stock.

Enough of the anti-mod rants; I believe that my next car will either be a sleeper or a classic, and this ticks all the boxes for the former - four-pot sumitomo brakes from factory, a naturally aspirated SR20DE with as much power as an SR20DET or RB25DE, a nice 6-speed gearbox, even the factory airbox.
What I also like is that it is a sports coupe and is therefore smaller than my Skyline, which places it just above a Fiat 124 in my list of dream cars.

The interior of this one is very tidy, apart from the seats, and doesn’t have any gauges or screens drilled into the dash which is unusual even for Japan.
If I had this I wouldn’t make it a drift pig like every owner out there, I would turn it into a weekend canyon carver with a decent amount of grip.

At $6,150 + $2,000 to $3,000 on top to ship and comply, this is a great price, especially with only 106,000Km on the odometer. Unfortunately it’s a 2002 year model and I’m not a car dealer so I will have to wait 3 years before I can legally register it if I were to import it.