When A V8 Swap Just Isn’t Enough
Italy is a great holiday destination, but if you live in this country you have to fight on a daily basis with a government that just seems to be there to cheat and swindle its citizens out of as much money as possible. And that trickles all the way down to cars. Rather than supporting and letting the tuning industry grow and flourish, the government prefers to over-regulate every single aspect of it, from ownership to the blocking of any sort of modifications.
Let me give you an example. If you own a powerful car, and by powerful here I mean anything over 180hp (yes, go ahead and laugh), you have to pay an additional tax for every kilowatt over and above that number. So, if you’re lucky enough to drive an Nissan R35 GT-R in Italy, you have to fork out 4,000 Euro (approximately US$4,500) a year just for road tax. Want to change the wheels on your car? Maybe an inch bigger all round just to give it a little point of difference? Well, no you can’t, because any size that’s not homologated for your car simply isn’t allowed to be fitted. And forget slamming it out too; the police will slap you with a fine and order that your car be put through the annual compliance test. And everything’s like this. Of course, the government could support it all and enjoy the benefits that an industry with big potential could bring them, but they’d rather control it all.
The answer, of course, is to build cars for purposes other than driving on the road, and when that’s the only choice you’ve got you’re probably going to go a little overboard. That’s what Enrico Sartori’s Nissan Silvia S14 is. It’s stress relief; it’s a car built for the sole purpose of shredding as much rubber as possible every time it hits the track. Except when it came to building up his little toy S14, Enrico approached things in a slightly different way than most people would.
If you haven’t already figured it out, Enrico is the man behind Brill Steel; a shop that for years has been building some of Italy’s most extreme drift and time attack cars, with a very evident theme around big American V8 engines. You may even remember the all-carbon S14 it created a few years back.
