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A bit of background: Our 350 is a 2004 UK GT model and was bought as a cat-c write off from a friend of mine
The car had hit a post while traveling along the motorway - the post went through the air con radiator, the engine coolant radiator and smashed a hole in the sump.
Luckily the body work and everything else under the car wasn't damaged at all. So all we had to do was to find and fit a replacement engine. Pretty straight forward.
This is the replacement engine - just a completely standard VQ35DE
We're going to be tracking the car so main priorities are sort the brakes out, get the suspension uprated and try and get the weight down.
I'd already tried some Performance Friction 01 pads in our other 350 and they were exceptionally good. The only down side was the amount of dust they produce and the cost - they're very expensive. This time I though I'd go to the other end of the market and try some yellow stuff pads. Although these weren't as good at the PF pads, they actually held up really well on track. And value for money wise they'll be tough to beat. They do tend to wear the disks quite quickly, but as we're only using fairly cheap standard discs it's not too bad.
We fitted a set of Racing Logic coilovers - these aren't a very well known brand but we wanted to give them a try. They're actually very good for a fast road car - I'll probably end up swapping them out later on for something stiffer and more track focused.
We fitted Superpro full alignment kit - this totally transformed the handling of the car - strongly recommended.
Superpro kit:
Some rear bushes fitted:
Old bushes:
As well as using the car on track, we also use it to develop products. We've tried and tested our grounding kits, de-cat pipes and plenum spacers. I've also remapped the car using the Uprev system. Just these mods took our car from 279 to 309bhp - which is around +11% - not bad at all for an NA engine.
We've also fitted an oil cooler:
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