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| Car and Driver Magazines Nissan 350Z Project Car Ready for 2007 Grand-Am Cup |
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Can a championship winning club racer and America's best-selling enthusiast car magazine drive a bone-stock Nissan 350Z off the streets of Los Angeles and into the premier dealer-stock road racing series in the United States? Car and Driver magazine, in concert with San Francisco entrepreneur and amateur racer Richard Biscevic, intends to find out. The Car and Driver/ NoHotWire Ravelco project Nissan 350Z will run the 2007 Grand-Am Cup season and learn what it takes for a group of racing amateurs and car magazine editors to compete in the nation's newest and hottest road racing series.
Two perfectly fine but non-saleable 350Zs belonging to Nissan Motor Corp. were diverted from their date with a junkyard crusher and shipped to Impact Engineering in San Jose to be transformed into Grand Am Cup race cars. Once Impact Engineering had the cars ready for painting, regular Grand-Am Cup racer Phil Malgren professionally painted them at his company, Collision Craft in San Pablo California. Impact Engineering is currently finishing the fabrication work and NoHotWire Racing is preparing to run the cars.
The Nissan 350Z has proven itself competitive with the Porsches, BMWs and Mustangs that run in the GS Class of Grand-Am Cup. The process of converting cars straight from the dealer showroom to racing is a slow and arduous one. The team has over 500 hours stripping the cars of their interiors, meticulously seam welding the body for strength, installing roll cages, rebuilding the engines, redesigning the fuel systems, installing new suspensions, and reinstalling the cars' engine management electronics. All of this and more must be done before the team has a chance to turn a wheel testing in the next few weeks. The cars are set to debut at the 25 Hours of Thunderhill enduro in Willows, California in December and the team will have just a few short months to apply what it learns before the 2007 Grand-Am Cup season opener in Daytona in January of 2007.
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