For those of you who do not have the, um, pleasure of knowing Samad Mirza, let us tell you: he's an interesting cat. We've known Samad for quite some time now, and whether we should have made that known or not, we're not quite sure. He asked us to be gentle when writing this story because his mom was going to be reading it. So, for the designer of Rikdaddy.com and the guy who sends us Chicago-style pizza in the mail, we'll try the best that we can. Looking down at his three pages of gibberish he slapped together regarding the build up of his fine machine reminded us of the countless instant messages we used to get from him on a daily basis when he'd run into problems. Aside from bad grammar, awful spelling and a complete disregard of sentence structure, his story is quite compelling.
Being born in Pakistan and moving to Chicago when he was four, his only dream was to grow up and work in IT, which he does now. But between his awkward childhood as a hairy little boy and now, he discovered two more ambitions-marrying a hot white girl like Jessica Barton and converting a Nissan 240SX into a Silvia. Obviously, the Silvia conversion was much more within his grasp
Like most pre-drifting 240 owners, Samad bought his '97 SE because he didn't want to fall into the crowd of endless Hondas. In fact, he was so hard up to get behind the wheel of a 240 that he ended up buying one from a cop in Illinois. Less than a month after his big purchase, Samad sent his car down to Indianapolis for a simple SR20DET swap-or so he thought. He was promised to have it back in three weeks, but ended up yanking it from the shop nearly three months later, running in limp mode.
He sent it from shop to shop trying to get it finished, but once too many different mechanics get their hands on a car, more problems arise. Even after slapping on a host of power parts like the Uras turbo manifold, Garrett GT25R turbo and Blitz intercooler, the car still wasn't performing up to par. Growing impatient for his car to run properly, Samad started gathering non-engine related parts to ease his pain. He started off with a set of 18-inch Volk Racing SF-Challenge wheels from Mackin Industries. He wrapped those Diamond Black beauties with some Dunlop rubber and somehow managed to stuff huge Rotora brakes behind the fronts. Afterwards, he threw in some Tein Type HA coilovers. Then came the external mods, like the full ings+1 D Spec body kit and BASF custom silver-to-gold shifting paint.
At this point, Samad's car had spent more time in his garage on jack stands than it had on the street and was still running so rich that flames were shooting out of his exhaust. He even bought a pair of Bride racing seats so he could sit in his garaged car and make engine vroom and blow-off valve swoosh noises with his mouth. We can't say positively, but if we made a video documentary of the past five years of his lonely life, we could probably pinpoint to the exact millisecond when it clicked in his giant noggin that he needed to call up Touge Factory and get his car wired right, once and for all. It took a new harness from Phase 2 Motortrend, several hours of re-wiring labor and an AEM EMS tune job, to get Samad's car running legit, A/C and all. Now he's all smiles, showing his car off at Hot Import Nights and slamming around at local drift events.