Opera Performance Nissan 350Z - GT4 Tuner Garage

The interior of each car remains mostly stock, short of a few expertly crafted pieces, including a full STACK instrument cluster in the RSX and the sickest street car rollcage we've ever seen in the Z.

The rollcage is braced and welded to the frame of the car in so many different places we weren't sure how many points it was -- we lost count at 16, and there wasn't even a bar over the windshield or above the door windows. Yasu knows those bars can cause severe injury and even death when on the street without a helmet, so the stock frame was reinforced instead. Amazingly, with all of these reinforcements and bracing, the Opera Z weighs only 62 pounds more than stock. It's pretty easy to guess that the producer of GT4 and owner of Polyphony Digital Inc. isn't exactly going to be riding around in a rickshaw, but the attention to detail really must be seen in person to appreciate.

Unlike any of the other cars Yamamoto-san has created, the 350Z sports a subtle body kit penned by Yamauchi himself and put into production by Razo. You can actually buy one here in the States through Razo distributors. During high-speed testing, it was found that the wing alleviated a low-pressure area and allowed air to flow more directly over the rear of the car, resulting in a 10km/h increase in top speed while still making a marked improvement in downforce. Wonder if they found that out through testing on GT4?

A 300-page manual could be written on the build process of each of these cars, and an additional 300 pages could be spent documenting each build with photography. Think of this as a quick summary to remind you that whatever it is you've done to your street car ain't nothin'.

By James Tate

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