One of the most interesting aspects of our Nissan Sunny ZX build centres on parts, namely working out which performance parts from within Nissan’s early ’90s range will work with our car. That’s not to say that Nissan’s OEM offerings from the era of Pat Sharp, Fun House and Fido Dido stickers were especially complex , rather that we wager it’s been many, many years since anyone set about trying to uprate the chassis of a ZX Coupe – after all, when did you last see a standard one?
Ensuring that the chassis of our Sunny is up to the task if of crucial importance however, with our plan being to install a tuned C18DET between the (flared) front wheel arches. It’ll be more or a relaxed cruiser than a B-road hero (certainly not a track day proposition), but that doesn’t mean that pulling to a stop is any less important, all more so when you consider that the owner does much of his driving in central London. We therefore began looking around Nissan’s contemporary range of suitable OEM upgrades, eventually settling upon the GTI-R, or as it was known throughout much of the world, the Pulsar.
While hardly a common sight on the UK’s road network in 2018, the GTI-R was at least a cult car with a dedicated club motorsport and associated aftermarket community ‘back in the day,’ which is how we found ourselves perusing the Motorsport Tool’s website. The company stocks a vast array of hardware intended to make hurling a car through a Welsh forest or along a twisting Irish lane that bit easier, and therefore had no trouble supplying us a Wilwood brake kit for Nissan’s largely forgotten ’90s Evo-botherer.
The kit itself is a four-piston offering, complete with 24x 280mm vented front discs and all fitting hardware. Wilwood actually offer a larger, more capable 310mm version of the same kit, but we thought this would be both overkill for a car like ours and also a potential hindrance in terms of wheel clearance. On the subject of which, we’ll soon be commission the good folk at 3SDM to build us a set of their alloys to our exact specification, so keep your eyes peeled for more info in the coming weeks/months.
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