Hey guys,
Hey guys welcome to another episode of the build we got a hell of an episode today my name is cody groom i spend my time showing you guys amazing cars and the stories behind me damn it’s about the people places and of course cars welcome to the build chris forsberg is a three-time formulative champion and is currently the owner of forsberg racing he currently
Has three championships 17 wins 57 podiums and 92 top 10 finishes he started competing in 2004 and has been going ever since nice angle from here the last 10 years in fd forsberg has been using his 370z this is the first season of a new car forsberg’s new car is none other than the 2023 nissan z coming with a 400 horsepower twin turbo v6 and in a six-speed manual
You can see why people are excited for this car obviously you’re changing cars what’s going through your head on that well what’s nice is there’s a lot of similarities between um this chassis and the 370z utilizing a lot of the same parts as before so not physical like parts off that car but just the same brands the same components in the engine the um same
Turbo setup same suspension setup with bc and park shop now here’s where it might irritate you a little bit the z does not have the z engine instead has the vr38 out of the gtr am i complaining about this hell no for what this thing needs to do it needs to have a thousand plus horsepower so that original engine just isn’t in the question clearly we got our engine
Located vr38 the same engine that we’ve been running for the past couple years and it’s just absolute powerhouse you know we’ve been making like 1200 wheel out of these things for years and we are still you know kind of figuring out what they do and don’t like we run it in the ultimateiac as well and we’ve had you know zero issues with that car the thing has
Been running um tip top putting the power down it’s all great um a couple issues on the pro car because it gets thrashed a little bit harder we run nitrous through it as well we’ve run vp import which is like the highest octane fuel you can run in these engines but yeah so a couple of things that we did differently on on this engine package or this mounting setup
I should say is that we actually did the engine mounts to the frame rails instead of to the subframe you can take the cross member out of this car without actually dropping the engine some of the other things we had to do on this chassis we actually cut and extended our manifold on this side because since we have the factory frame rail it was kind of rubbing onto
The old setup and mainly because we’re running bigger turbos now when we first built the setup we had the the g25 660s from garrett and now we’re running g3770s so we’re making uh more power those two turbos alone are capable of making like 1400 wheels so pretty pretty stout little turbos and so yeah we had to cut this clean that up get a section of tube cut that
Down lay it in there re-clock this up so it’s nice and parallel with the other turbo and weld that all back in because everything kind of moves and swells like this turbo will move like a half of an inch when it gets full red hot after a run so you’ll see you know this manifold just kind of like you know rolling in a different direction so at this point the vr38
That you guys are seeing is not the vr 38 that actually ends up in this car they are strictly using this vr 38 to make sure that everything fits lines up and then as soon as the brand new engine comes hold the engine again put that motor in and then line up all the parts and components with that so yeah for the chassis we worked with rob parsons over at vending
Solutions and he’s got the cage kits so he came down and he scanned the car so we had the perfect interior structure of it and then he built this roll cage on the computer laser cut it out bent it in his cnc bender and shipped it down to us and it was a perfect fit all the tubes are pre-bent they lay right up into the a-pillars and they get welded all the way up
And through to have full contact so there’s actually no gussets in the car these are just like light plates that we cut and bent and laid in there through some tacks and then glued them in to keep that nice and water tight and smoke proof so whatever you want to call that smoke tight like i said we’re going to have this boxed off all the holes in the firewall
Will get plated off and then this big main hoop is going to get plated off as well so that it’s all separate so there’s no fluid contact within the cabinet so the whole chassis you know gets stripped down obviously and then we cut it up in some fashion body was perfectly fine obviously it’s brand new before we started but we want to take it down to this level
Because this is the end result of a pro drift car we take out the factory sheet metal and we have a nice wide body coming uh for this chassis so this is basically just a flange to mount it to right and then we remove the factory uh tail light buckets we actually shave them all down and we’ll re-hang these with like little rods so that um it can all kind of move
If we really get into the wall hatchling comes down they have this nice new uh molding piece on the new chassis which looks really good just lays in here gives it that like samurai katana blade look but um outside of the exterior styling yeah we cut all this out because eventually it’s going to get crushed in so this is like a high impact area uh for drifting
You know this is where the chase car wants to be is right in this door rear quarter panel area and if this really gets crunched in you know it can actually pry back out into position here had to you know cut a couple welds right there had to drill some spot walls up here and then just like kind of freehand cut this all off to uh give it that you know nice clean
Look especially once it’s all painted you know right now you got that factory white paint some steel it’s some of the primer some bare metal so once it’s all this steel it gray it’s just going to blend together really well and look good nothing to look at yet but so we obviously cut this part out from the factory sheet metal because it gets pretty much crushed
In every run uh ideally it’s getting crushed in almost every run so we’re going to weld in um a tube all the way across the back of this car to cap off the end of the frame rails and then we’re going to add a crash structure around like that to protect the back of the car and then from there we’re gonna have these little wings that bolt onto each side that will
Be the replaceable collapsible piece when we do actually bump into the walls so this piece will you know bend and move and rotate to not affect the rest of the car if you’ve never watched formula drift before formula drift is a little bit different than other racing basically you have a lead driver and a chase driver the lead driver is going to go and have to hit
Certain points on the track slide out the rear end and make sure to go through different zones the chase driver then has to emulate that driver’s line to me it’s such a cool sport because you see the talent it’s not about getting to the finish line it’s about actually the precision to follow someone else’s line that you don’t know what they’re gonna do when it
Comes to the build the z took six weeks to build now i’m talking literally from getting the car to finish and driving six weeks coming from the 370s very similar there’s a few things that we’re able to carry over right however it was still a brand new car built so we’re going all the way down to the chassis all the way down to the bare metal and back up again so we
Had the car for six weeks full stripped down and measuring and welding and fabricating took the first three and then we painted the car literally three weeks ago today and rebuilt it for the last two and a half weeks you’ll see with chris and the team there is time spent on making sure that it looks good as well as performs incredible amount of work that happened
Today so we got both subframes in front and back we got all the suspension on and we are going through some of the plumbing and such too hmm so you got to remember at this point the car has not been driven it has not been tested it has literally been put together and shown up to this event the car first touched the ground wednesday like 6 p.m and that
Was the actual time of our debut load in the trailer went down debuted the car and then came here to the track yesterday went through the whole car systems check going through everything and then we went straight into today no practice no dyno we basically just like sent it straight in for the first practice first run we have the nitrous off we have it on
Low boost go out and just give it like a nice easy pull like 80 at best just to see how the engine is doing it was basically our little dyno pole send the log over to our tuner he checks it everything seems good makes a couple small changes we go out to do our first like actual pass i pull up into the chase lane uh brandon sorensen was in front i gave him to like
Basically turn one to the corner before i left the line but what i did not know is he spun into turn two and i come around turn two and there was just nowhere for me to go and so i slid into the side of his car put a nice big crack in the side of our car fortunately the hit only led to some damage in the body kit so the z is actually running a street hunter wide
Body kit designed by none other than john ceball who we recently highlighted a few episodes back in the porsche build episode i gotta say i wish it looked like this from the factory that first crash wasn’t all bad it was the icebreaker of the day after that chris forsberg went out and sent it you know it’s like you want to take it easy and ease into it but these
Cars don’t like that you know drop the tire pressure adjust the suspension appropriately and just go out and put your foot through it um i thought it was like coming in good and like you know i’d say we’re very comfortable there are similarities between this and the old chassis we’re allowed to carry over a lot of notes and information so that’s why we’re able
To hit the ground running yesterday and qualified eighth with only eight laps in the car ever foreign ends up taking eighth place but just like most motorsports it goes off of points so now forsberg is 18 points brand new car after the first event of the year i’d say that’s a success
Transcribed from video
THE 1300HP 2023 NISSAN Z | THE FIRST OF ITS KIND! By Driving Cody