Unless you're rocking serious flow these days, dream cars somehow remain just that: dreams. And until you cash in with that winning lottery ticket, most are stuck with more realistic dream cars; the kind that three minimum wage jobs and a steady diet of ramen noodles can afford. Vaughn Gittin, Jr. knows this kind of dream very well and sees it realized as his daily-driven Nissan 240SX S14.
"JR" always saw the S14 as one of the strongest S-chassis, a drift car for the dominant male, and it was always the hotter commodity against the S13, which made the S14 too expensive for this baller on a budget to afford. So he did the next best thing: He went out and bought the Pamela Anderson sex tape instead.
Alas, this was a few years ago and we fast forward ourselves to the present. After six years of drifting professionally in a S13 and Falken's Mustang, Vaughn decided he was ready to build his dream car. He purchased his unicorn, an S14 that had already been swapped with the ever-so-popular SR20DET for mere chump change at $7K. It was a decent car, he decided, and would be great to use as his East Coast practice/demo car since his infamous S13 and Falken were being housed on the West. The S14 was delivered to his house by the seller the night of one of his notorious Drift Alliance parties. "I jumped in the car, did some burnouts down the street, and cut the kid a check," says Vaughn.
Excited to begin work on this bad boy, Vaughn took the car to his shop in Baltimore, Mid-Atlantic Motorsports (AKA MA-Motorsports). Vaughn and the rest of the boys at MA came up with a game plan that started simple-put a new cage in it, slap some paint on it and run it like they stole it. Being the patriotic American that he is, not to mention the only American to win a D1GP event back-to-back, Vaughn stuck with an American theme when it came to painting his S14. To prep the car for paint, the interior and engine bay was gutted before it was sent away to the paint shop. Once the car was painted and the Origin bodykit installed for its big ugly duckling to beautiful swan makeover, Vaughn looked deep inside the car like Dr. Phil digging deep into the mind of pregnant 17-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, realizing that it was horribly built. "It just wasn't something I would be proud of if I had left it unloved," says Vaughn. Now it needed more than just a paint job; it needed a full-blown rebuild.
Not only did JR decide to paint his S14 our nation's colors, but he wanted to prove that this car could run hard by using as many American-made products as possible, which make up roughly 80-percent of the parts used in this Japanese car. He says, "I just wanted to show that American aftermarket companies have come so far to build quality parts that rival the Japanese products known best." The crank, bearings, rods, pistons, valves and valve springs-every internal part-were made in the land of the free and the home of the brave. The ECU of this patriotic piece was made in the 10th state admitted into this country, good ol' Virginia. All of the metal fab work was handmade at MA-Motorsports in Maryland, where the crabs are aplenty-and I'm not talking about the kind you got from the "escort" you were with last night. So with all this American pride set in place, Vaughn sketched out a new game plan to build the lightest drift car possible while maintaining the highest level of safety. With Vaughn as the captain of the vessel, he decided it would be used for both drifting and time attack, so he needed the car to be safe for high speeds but also nimble for good handling. He says, "Ray 'Master Shake' Shake of MA, the man responsible for tuning the Electromotive TEC GT, gave me a simple recipe for cooking up this car: powerful, lightweight and great traction-which are the keys to going fast. The rest of the work would be fine-tuning both the car and driver to extract the full potential of the two and make the man and machine work together as one."