Red Hot Silvia

The Nissan 200SX, or more popularly known as the Nissan Silvia, has gotten a bit of a surge in popularity over the past few years. The emergence of drifting, as well as the anime Initial D, has made the 200SX a legend. Here in the Philippines, 2nd hand units are commanding high prices despite the car being around 10 years old. Being a 2 door coupe and seeing as how Nissan Philippines only imported a limited number of units, making a Silvia stand out from the crowd should not be too difficult of a proposition.

The S14 Silvia you see here is the result of meticulous attention to detail. Starting life as a completely stock green unit, the car has transformed to a red hot coupe that is bound to turn heads. Since most units imported by Nissan were equipped with an Automatic Transmission, the first order of the day for this Silvia was a Manual Transmission conversion. With that taken care of, careful attention was paid to extracting the most power out of the already potent SR20DET. A Turbonetics T04E turbine is matched to a Greddy 24R Intercooler and Greddy E-manage to force feed the engine. A Sard fuel regulator and Sard 550cc high flow injectors take care of the fueling needs. Finally, a full 3-inch exhaust system with titanium Espelir muffler finishes off the engine work, yielding an astonishing 308 horsepower and 298 lb-ft of torque at the wheels.

Power is nothing without control, but in the case of the Silvia, people usually want to lose a bit of control by drifting. Tein Type HE Drift Spec Coilovers were installed on all four corners to better instigate oversteer. Tein, Nismo, and Greddy bars and braces add to the stiffness of the chassis. A Brembo brake system from a R34 Nissan Skyline GTR was installed at the front and coupled with Endless brake pads to ensure that if the going gets too tough, the brakes will always bite.

Arguably, the thing that sets this Silvia apart from most is the exterior. A full M Sports widebody kit including front and rear bumpers, front and rear oversized fenders contribute to the hulking stance of the car. M Sports carbon fiber front canards and diffuser adds to front downforce while a Sard carbon fiber GT Wing adds downforce to the rear. Finishing touches include M Sports carbon fiber hood and C-West GT style carbon fiber mirrors. A bright shade of red was painted over the car by the professionals from Alex Car Restoration. Finally, a set of rare and wide 18 x 9.5 Volk Racing CE28N wheels were mounted on the front while an even wider pair of 18 x 10.5 were mounted on the rear.

The interior is kept simple but all parts installed are of the highest quality. BRIDE ZETA II seats ensure that the driver and passenger are kept snuggly in place during wild oversteering maneuvers. A Nismo JTC Steering wheel and Nismo GT shift knob is utilized while Sard gauges ensure timely monitoring of engine vitals.

With a Silvia that looks and performs like this car, it’s no wonder that Nissan’s sports coupe is as popular as ever.

What is Horsepower?

How do you define Horsepower? A good way to effectively explain this word is to give a glimpse of history back to the time of the British inventor James Watt (1736-1819). It was Watt who coined the term “horsepower,” to increase sales of his improved steam engines. He had previously agreed to take royalties of one third of the savings in coal from the older Newcomen steam engines. This royalty scheme did not work with customers who did not have existing steam engines but used horses instead. Watt observed that a horse could turn a mill wheel 144 times in an hour, or about 2.4 per minute. Watt calculated that the horse pulled with a force of 180 pounds (just assuming that the measurements of mass were equivalent to measurements of force in pounds-force, which were not well-defined units at the time). So:

James Watt and Matthew Boulton later standardized the figure to 33,000 ft. – lbs. / minute, the figure we use today. Horsepower is defined as work done over time. The exact definition of one horsepower is 33,000 ft. – lbs. / minute. Put another way, if you were to lift 33,000 foot-pounds over a period of one minute, you would hav

Forged Performance : AMS Turbo Upgrade GT-R Tuning :596 whp

Kris over at GT-R Blog posted a link to this video of a R35 Nissan GT-R tuned by Forged Performance. 596 wheel horsepower at 18 psi of boost on 91 octane fuel.

Modifications on the car are :

• AMS Upgraded Turbos 800cc Injectors Forge Actuators Greddy Intercoolers AAM Downpinpes CBRD Y-Pipe

What does octane mean?

If you've read How Car Engines Work, you know that almost all cars use four-stroke gasoline engines. One of the strokes is the compression stroke, where the engine compresses a cylinder-full of air and gas into a much smaller volume before igniting it with a spark plug. The amount of compression is called the compression ratio of the engine. A typical engine might have a compression ratio of 8-to-1.



During World War I, it was discovered that adding a chemical called tetraethyl lead (TEL) to gasoline significantly improved the gasoline's octane rating.

The octane rating of gasoline tells you how much the fuel can be compressed before it spontaneously ignites. When gas ignites by compression rather than because of the spark from the spark plug, it causes knocking in the engine. Knocking can damage an engine, so it is not something you want to have happening. Lower-octane gas (like "regular" 87-octane gasoline) can handle the least amount of compression before igniting.

The compression ratio of your engine determines the octane rating of the gas you must use in the car. One way to increase the horsepower of an engine of a given displacement is to increase its compression ratio. So a "high-performance engine" has a higher compression ratio and requires higher-octane fuel. The advantage of a high compression ratio is that it gives your engine a higher horsepower rating for a given engine weight -- that is what makes the engine "high performance." The disadvantage is that the gasoline for your engine costs more.

2009 Lotus Elise

Latest car 2009 Lotus Elise. Lotus Elise is equipped with a standard 1.8 liter, 14, 189 horsepower engine that achieves 21-mpg in the city and 27-mpg on the highway.

The other trim is Convertible SC which is fitted with a standard 1.8 liter, 14, 218 horsepower, supercharged engine that achieves 20 mpg in the city and 26 mpg on the highway. A 6 speed manual transmission with overdrive in standard on both trims.