1995 Nissan 240SX - Modified Magazine

For many young enthusiasts who dream of sliding sideways while converting rear tires into dancing plumes of smoke, the idea of joining the ranks of a professional drift series may seem utterly unattainable. How and where do you even get started? Do you have the means, patience and passion it takes to build a competitive car and develop your skills behind the wheel? Are you willing to eat nothing but noodle soup so you can afford to roast countless sets of tires? And the list goes on. So much so, in fact, that if you look at these questions all at once it would be pretty easy to be overwhelmed and give up before you even started.

For Dave Briggs, a 23-year-old from Toronto, his drift dreams started when he got hooked on Option and Best Motoring videos as well as the countless drifting videos online. His obsession with drifting grew deep enough that in 2005 he made his first trip to the "House of Drift," Irwindale Speedway, to watch the D1 madness up close and personal. Whether it was the smell of the tire smoke, the sound of the highly tuned engines bouncing off their rev limiters or the sight of the world's best professional drifters sliding past in a type of orchestrated violence, Briggs was officially hooked for life.

After watching from the sidelines for a few more years, Briggs decided it was time to get in the game and live his dream. He bought an S14 Nissan 240SX because it seemed like the best "starter" platform for drifting and proceeded to build it the only way he knew how. "I put it together more or less by looking at pictures of D1 cars, looking at the stickers for parts ideas and then going to those companies' websites and ordering what I thought looked best." Once the car was built, Briggs began renting track time so that he could start applying all the drifting techniques he'd been studying online. Later that same year, the Drift Mania Canadian Championship (Canada's FormulaD) held a drivers search and as Briggs put it, "I had a good day, managed to string together a couple really good runs and the next thing I knew DMCC was giving me my pro license!"

At the end of his first DMCC season in 2008, Briggs cracked the Top 16 a couple times and was developing quickly as a driver, but he knew that he'd need a pro-quality car to move up the ranks in 2009. That's when he bought this mint-condition '95 Nissan 240SX with just 40,000 original kilometers on it, completely gutted it and sent it to O'Brien Motorsports for a chromoly rollcage and front tube chassis. From there, it went to SG-Motorsport and the expert hands of Sasha Anis and crew. As a Canadian Touring Car GT Class champion who competed in an S14, Sasha and his team at SG know all about building professional-quality race cars. In fact, Briggs enlisted SG to build his dream drift machine because he was so impressed by Sasha's attention to detail when doing a wheel alignment on his "starter" car at the end of the '08 season. "Sasha literally went over every inch of the car pointing out where things could be fixed or improved, and that's when I knew this was the guy I wanted to build the new one."

According to Sasha, "Rather than building a regular 240 drift car like everybody else has, we wanted to build a really gangster race car that'll stand out from the rest. We're talking top-shelf build quality and race car-style aero and tuning." Arriving at the shop as a rolling chassis with a cage in it, Sasha and his crew at SG installed a fresh Mazworx big-bore SR20DET stuffed full of go-fast goodness, including Tomei 280 cams and forged internals designed to allow 8500 rpm while producing 465 ponies at 20 lbs of boost on the U2Ndyno.com DynaPack. But the real beauty is its broad powerband, allowing Briggs to make full use of the short gearing in the bulletproof 300ZX transmission and 4.3 final drive.