YouTube channel nivlac57 introduces a new more extreme Turbo Vortec 4200 DOHC VVT Inline 6 project car for the 2022 No Name Nationals. It’s my Dad’s 1974 Datsun 240z/260z/280z that he originally bought for $100 and built for the Hot Rod Magazine Pump Gas Drags. It won the Hot Rod Magazine Readers Rides Quickest for Cheapest in America.
Do you ever look at an old car magazine and wonder what happened to all the cars that were in them? We don’t live in some fantasy world where things just snap out of existence. Everything has to go somewhere. Everything has a story. Maybe the car was just state of the art at the time but it became outdated and now it’s just living in a museum somewhere collecting dust and it’s just there to document history. Maybe it was sold taken apart but will one day return to its true potential.
Maybe it was chopped up hauled off to the scrapyard and only fragments of it remained or maybe its appearance in the magazine hadn’t shown its true potential. Maybe it’s still actively being developed. Maybe it got cut in half and welded back together – reshaped, remolded, re-engineered, repurposed, reused, reinvented.
Maybe it was shoved into a barn to await its next journey. Maybe it still hasn’t reached its full potential. Maybe it’s time to break it back out and push it to new heights.
This is my dad’s 1974 Datsun 260z I guess I should give you a little bit of history on the car. My dad originally purchased this thing in around 2005 for a hundred dollars. These cars used to be worthless believe it or not and this is not the only one that he had purchased. At that time, he bought five or six of them and the most that he paid for one was I think a hundred dollars. Originally, he was building this car for the hot rod pump gas drags. And that means that it had the exhaust routed all the way out the back and it had a lot of street comforts that maybe you wouldn’t see on a race car.
That event kind of got out of control and for whatever reason, my dad decided not to participate, and we ended up taking the car to the 2006 dollar grassroots motorsports challenge. At the time it had a small block chevy with a set of 180-degree headers and it sounded pretty wild. After that, it sat for a few years, and eventually, my dad decided that he wanted to start converting the thing into a land speed car. That’s when we made the lengthened front end that you saw earlier, and we lengthened the car around 16 inches in this area and around four inches on the nose of the car. The idea there was to make it one a longer wheelbase these cars are notoriously short and even with 16 inches of lengthening, it’s still only a 106-inch wheelbase car which is less than a Camaro.
Also, by making the car longer you make it more aerodynamically stable and that was the theory once we made the parts and steel. We had a friend who helped us make them in fiberglass but basically, he took a week off of work and he came up here and we made a front end and a hood. We went from a front end that probably well weighed well over 100 pounds to uh right around 50.
After lengthening the front end, the land speed deal kind of didn’t really work out. We were actually going to try to work with some people in order to do a more of a sponsored type deal but that kind of fell through and we decided that we wanted to take it back to the grassroots motorsports challenge in order to set the drag E.T. Record into the nine-second range.
To do that we did our very first turbo ls combo that ended up not going super well. We learned a lot about wastegate control and well just the fun of running junkyard engines. That’s where a lot of our knowledge on how to prepare ls’s came from after that we ended up putting the small block that was originally in the car back into the car and with some spray the car got down into the nines.
So, the car got down into the nines it went at 9:52 at 141 miles per hour, and basically, since then it has been sitting waiting for its next journey. Many of you know that we have been pushing these Vortec 4200s harder and harder as time has gone on and we have made over 800 horsepower to the wheels with one of these. One way to make a faster car is to make more horsepower another way is to reduce the amount of weight of the vehicle and another way is to make it more aerodynamic.
This car weighs much less than anything that we have put the six cylinders in and it’s much more aerodynamic. So, if we can make the same amount of horsepower that we have in the past this should be the fastest one yet. Another thing to note here is there are two turbos rather than one like we normally run.
This isn’t really done for any scientific reason frankly a single turbo works just fine but we decided to go with a twin-turbo just to mix things up a little bit. Also, we had these turbos sitting on the shelf. These are the same turbos that we ran on the nova when it made just over 800 horsepower to the wheels so they should be more than adequate for our 4.2 liter.
So we’re going to be doing quite a few unique things that we have not done on any other combo with the six cylinders and I’m really excited to get started on this.
Twin Turbo 4200 Datsun Part 2 ~ How To Build a Turbo Kit
Andrew and Calvin continue work on their Twin Turbo Vortec 4200 DOHC VVT Inline 6 Trailblazer Engine powered Datsun 240z/260z/280z. They go through the fabrication, tube fitting, TIG welding, wastegate placement, and brazing of the hot side of the turbo kit…
Part 3 ~ Turbo Kit Fabrication + How To Keep Your Car from Lighting on Fire
The duo complete the cold side of the turbo kit fabrication on the Twin Turbo Methanol breathing 1974 Datsun 240z/260z/280z powered by a Chevrolet Inline 6 DOHC VVT Vortec 4200 6 cylinder engine. They also we talk about the risks of running aftermarket fuel rails and how to prevent car fires like the one Collete Davis recently had in her C6 Corvette Drift car. This Twin Turbo Straight 6 is going to be a ripper…
Stay Tuned…
