Luxury sports sedans don’t seem to get much love in America. But in Europe there are serious sports sedans everywhere you look—Audi S4s, BMW M-cars and Mercedes-Benz AMGs being particularly popular choices among the gearheads and speed freaks on the other side of the Atlantic. You know sports sedans must be an important segment in Europe when even a pure sports car manufacturer like Porsche is getting into the sedan market with the ’10 Panamera, and it would appear that Lamborghini and Ferrari will follow suit with sedans of their own in the not-too-distant future.
Tim Trank wanted a European sports machine of his own. His dream, back in 2002 while a junior in college, was to buy a BMW E46 M3 and modify it with all the best bits. But this plan suddenly needed some rethinking when his wife announced she was pregnant. At first they made due with her VW Golf and Tim’s ’95 Accord coupe since money was tight, but then in 2005 Tim found himself filing for divorce. That’s when his need for a four-door became undeniable because he had joint custody of his daughter, Rylie, and needed to be able to get her in and out of the back seat without breaking his back. With a bit of searching, he found a real estate broker who was “upgrading” to a Benz and wanted to unload his ’04 Infiniti G35 6MT (6-speed manual transmission) quickly, so Tim snatched it up at $5,000 below book value. Not the Euro luxury rocket he once coveted, but still a damn fine sports sedan.
Having downsized to a smaller house after the divorce, Tim now found himself in the position that he could afford to start modifying his new ride. “I knew nothing about what was available for the G35 sedan, so I started looking around on the Internet and came across G35Driver.com, the largest G35 forum on the net and what I still blame for my addiction,” he says. “The forum showed me what mods were available for my car, and there were members pushing the limits of the VQ35DE, showing me how far I could take this thing.” But as Tim learned online, there was a limited selection of parts for his sedan, so he had to get creative.
“The very same day I picked the car up, I ordered an exhaust, intake, plenum spacer, lowering springs, 20-inch wheels and a few other goodies. It was fun like this for a few months, but I found myself wanting more. The car was slow compared to my Honda 600RR motorbike, so I decided to add a supercharger.” Since he wanted a smog-legal system that he could install himself, Tim ordered a Stillen supercharger kit. “The install was easy and the car was a lot of fun for a few months, but pretty soon I wanted more power so I tried the Stage 3 upgrade and then the Stage 4 upgrade. But I still wanted more,” Tim says. During this time he also upgraded the suspension to Tein CS coilovers and upgraded the undersized brakes to a 13-inch Rotora Brake package.
With a goal of 400 whp, Tim began researching turbo kits. He didn’t want any turbo lag, so he knew he wanted a twin-turbo setup. That’s when Tony and Jeremy at UMS Tuning in Mesa, Arizona, showed him a dyno graph for a Z they just finished with a GReddy TT kit and overlaid a graph of his supercharged G, both running at 8 psi of boost. “The Stillen Stage 4 kit only made more [horsepower and torque] below 1800 rpm; after that, the TT kit blew it out of the water. Time to sell my motorcycle to fund a turbo kit!”
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