Nissan VQ Street Cam Shootout - Tech

It's been a long time coming for a VQ cam test, and we've put a lot of effort into swapping and properly testing some of the more popular camshafts available for the Nissan VQ35DE engine. The VQ35 is one of my favorite engines of all time, offering great power delivery and output, while being extremely reliable.

It's a shame then that this fantastic engine produces such mediocre power from the factory, and one of the large contributors to the lack of power are the tiny cams, specifically to the non-revup VQ. However, there's a wide range of cams available for the non-revup engine; in fact, many of them have been available for years. Needless to say, it's about time they actually get tested back to back.

There's a very good reason as to why more VQ camshaft tests haven't been performed on this motor - a typical camshaft swap on a stock 350Z takes upward of eight hours. Be that as it may, we wanted to take the time and do it right. First off, let's talk about the car we're using for this test and how we were able to get the cams swapped, dyno'd and tuned in less than three full days.

By using my personal 350Z race car for the test, we were able to remove almost all of the typical restrictions from the engine to highlight the changes that come about from a camshaft. Specifically, we have SG-Motorsport longtube headers and race exhaust, carbon intake plenum with a stock non-revup manifold and a 90mm throttle body. Because flow into and out of the heads is relatively unrestricted, gains and losses from cam changes can be easily measured. We found a few tricks to speed up the cam-swapping process, and we didn't even have to take the car off the dyno. By the end of the test, we had a process down where we could swap cams quickly, and by purposely leaving a few bolts out (the ones that go through the upper oil pan into the front cover, for example) we were able to shave hours off of the swap time. Not something you'd do for a permanent install, but for the purpose of this test, it's just fine.

The camshafts that we would be testing in this shootout were Jim Wolf Technology S1 cams, Tomei 264 cams and Nismo R-Tune cams. We've compared the advertised numbers in the table below, versus the stock camshafts:

As you can see, the specs are very close between the cams we're testing. They all offer a near perfect idle and low-rpm driveability, while hopefully offering a large boost in performance. This test is designed to show the gains that can be had with a cam streetable enough that Nissan could have installed it from the factory. In a future issue, we'll be doing a high-compression, high-power cam test for those of you who aren't frightened by a lumpy idle and are willing to sacrifice some bottom-end torque in exchange for top-end power.