Spirit Rei Miyabi for MAYHEM

Well, I’ve been thinking of Motohiro Taniguchi’s Spirit Rei Miyabi 180SX off and on since fall 2013. Back then, I didn’t even have a 180SX anymore, since the last one I had was in 2009. The bug to get back into the S-series was gnawing at the back of my head. I finally got back into it in 2014 with a black 240SX shell. I was lining things up to do in my mind a re-visit of early 2K Japanese drift styling. I went as far as sourcing a full black top SR20DET swap and other items earlier this year until a car I had seen that belonged to a friend of mine was up for sale… this…

The much talked-about 240SX of Arizona’s Streetsweeper Gang fame. It had been bought by my friend from the original builder earlier this year, and suddenly it was for sale. Funny how everybody who saw it knew about the car. I didn’t know anything about it let alone Streetsweeper Gang.

Just the fact that everybody was calling it Dougy Deee’s 240 bugged me. I did not nor do I want to be known by another man’s creation. This past October, I got the chance to see the car I had bought in August (see here), and I knew that the car had degraded but I did not know it was really that bad. What was going to be an engine rebuild quickly turned into a complete teardown of the car. I was completely horrified by what we were finding. Every time I looked at the car, I kept thinking of how much work it was going to take to make the car “mine”. The radiator/nose frame had been cut to accommodate a high mount intercooler system, and as a result, the pop-up lights were fixed into the “up” position. We were thinking of going Sil80, as a result. I sourced a genuine (P)S13 front swap from a friend of Michael Batchelor in Fayetteville, North Carolina who had a decent genuine Nissan parts Silvia front for a very good price. Sil80s look fantastic, but you have to do some work to them to make them really pop out. I tried to talk myself into making this work, but my mind kept going back to the Miyabi. Instead of continually trying to convince myself that the Sil80 was the direction I wanted to go, I just gave in to what I really want… the Miyabi. I got in touch with my friend William Porter in Japan and made an inquiry into the Miyabi. A few days later, I got a purchase invoice from Rajeet Dalal of Mastermind North America (Spirit Rei’s distributor for North America) for the Miyabi 3-piece kit along with the +40mm front fenders and +65mm rear quarter panel overs. I’m happy… I am psyched… and I am finally on my way to making this car mine.