The Fancy Missile

|The Fancy Missile|

Last week we looked at the Restomod S13 build, lets take step back from that and look at another Grip Royal car this week. This car belongs to Briggs McKnight, the paint expert here at Grip Royal. Briggs is responsible for everything paint related at the shop. Steering wheels are his #1 priority, but he also paints the cars and any other parts we want to refresh. Briggs pilots an SR20 equipped S13 Hatchback. The goal for this car was to be simple, reliable, and consistent.

As you start looking at the more closely it starts to become apparent, this car definitely gets used. For the last four years, it has been beaten on, broken, fixed, and beaten on again. The Origin Aggressive front bumper stays together with the assistance of zip-tie surgery, the same goes with the VIS side skirts. The wheels are simple circle-track wheels. Briggs sprayed them white and added our Rainbow Flake paint additive to give them a little flair.

Z-style bubble flares cover up the sticky Nitto NT01s up front. Theres loads of grip in the front of the car. Thanks to ISR Performance, the suspension is all adjustable. ISR Pro Series arms in the rear allow a much larger range of toe and camber adjustment, allowing us to set these values to exactly what we want. The coilovers are also ISR Pro series. These are 32-way adjustable coilovers with a threaded shock body. The threaded shock body is very nice because it allows you to adjust the ride-height without affecting your spring preload.

All of the trim pieces that surround the exterior of the car have been repainted black with yellow paint splatter. A nice touch that makes a good contrast against the clean yellow exterior paint.

The power for this vehicle comes from a mostly stock Nissan SR20DET. A few bolt-ons are visible; ISR Performance intercooler kit, ISR Performance aluminum radiator, Blitz blow-off valve, and an oil catch can. Its not very complex under here, but thats good for this application. Briggs has a cool little “cheat code” for this car. The wheels he’s running are 15×8 +0. The smaller wheels have two effects. 1) Less rotational mass means less torque is required to spin the tires. 2) A smaller diameter wheel will spin faster, which gives the car very nice acceleration characteristics.

Inside the office, Briggs has a Grip Royal King, #DONTSUCK edition. He’s also installed one of our 1-of-1 tap shifters which, incidentally, he is responsible for making here at Grip Royal. A bucket seat holds the driver, the passenger gets a stock S14 seat, and the rest of the car is gutted. After all the carpet and sound deadening was removed, the interior was painted gloss black. Briggs added yellow paint splatter to match the rest of the car.

This car does its job and its usage shows, but coated in Yellow and cleaned up, it looks great sliding around the track.

And it even has underglow.

 Next week, we’ll take a look at Scott’s drift car. Thanks for reading!

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