It’s time for an origin story of a car that has defined my motorsports and car build history way before Grumblo or my personal social media presence were a thing. The Racesilvia S12 came to be as a consequence to several circumstances back in 2004.
First of them was, I wanted a turbocharged Nissan with 500 horsepower. A very reasonable want for a 19-year old doing his military service at the time, but by then I had already been following the Japanese drifting, time attack and street racing scene for a good 5 years. Thus, the vision was strong.
The second circumstance was, that drifting was just starting to emerge in Finland, but was not showing sure signs of being there to stay yet. I had been doing track days already and had to make a choice of whether to go for drifting, of which very few people up here had even heard of, or heading for traditional circuit racing and pulling inspiration from the time attack side of Japanese tuning culture.
As you can probably guess by now, I chose the latter route. But the next circumstance that affected the choice of such an odd base vehicle was rules. If you want to go racing, you need to pick a series that allows you to do the things you want to do with a car, and each rule book comes with different limitations. I had two choices for series that would allow a turbocharged Nissan to run, first was Super Saloon which was basically home-built prototype cars and almost anything was legal. Super Saloon ran full slick tires and was considered the fastest saloon car category in the country, but in all fairness the championship for that category was already dying away with less and less cars entering for every season.
The other category left was Roadsport A, a modified street car category with liberal rules, but one that back then limited the choice of chassis to ones homologated by the FIA before 1985. They did not want to ruin the level playing field by allowing cars like the E30 M3 or Sierra Cosworth, therefore setting that hard limit. Of course with that, the S13, S14 and S15 were out of question, but the Silvia S12 had been homologated at the end of 1984 by Nissan, both with a 4-cylinder FJ20E engine and IRS rear suspension in the JDM market and with the VG30E and a solid rear axle for the American market. And with that, in July 2004 I went to buy a rolling shell of a Silvia S12 from Hämeenlinna, Finland.
The next two years were spent building the car, a process which would deserve a documentary film in itself, but with no internet to search information from, no parts readily available and no previous experience of building a race car from scratch, me and my dad invented our way through the process and exactly 2 years later, in July 2006 we tested the car in Botniaring for the first time.
The SR20DET was pushing 420 horsepower on the first season. We had swapped the Nissan S13 rear subframe in place of the original S12 rear end. We had custom coilovers from Bilstein by Rallysystems. And we had very little knowledge on setting up a race car, but we read literature, tried things and slowly made the car better through the years.
After 4 seasons of racing we were at 570 horsepower and 650Nm with 1.4 bar boost in the SR20. That last season we broke the valve train twice, due to a stupid shortcut in a solid lifter design choice we had made the winter before. The last race of that last season, I qualified 2nd, 0.020 seconds behind Jussi Salonoja’s E21 that was THE benchmark of the category back then. I came around in 3rd place with 3 cylinders after lap one, having broken another rocker arm, bent valves and the whole ordeal once again. And that was the last time the car was raced.
16 years later the car is still in my possession. Every few years me and my dad get back to it and slowly progress it towards its new evolution phase with an SR16VE engine, a big Garrett turbo, a new dog box and 160kg lighter weight than before. One of these years, we will do that comeback and make another run for the trophies we never got back when I was a young, upcoming driver trying to learn a sport with a home-built car that was quite too powerful but so much fun to drive.
If you appreciate the journey of our S12, do check out the Racesilvia merch Collection - it means a lot to us and might just push us that bit closer to finishing the Racesilvia 2.0.
