It burned into my mind before it ever reached my ears. The howl of twin-turbo Toyota JZs and Nissan RBs, Japan's powerhouses of the Bubble Era. Long before I ever so much as saw a JZX100 Chaser or a Skyline, I knew that six-cylinders was the sound of power, the sound that turned tires into smoke, the sound of drifting. And then I actually went drifting., him running a turbo KA, the nondescript 2.4-liter four that came stock in the 240SX ... and the Nissan Hardbody truck.
The relative simplicity of the four-cylinder Nissan FJ20, the genesis of modern Japanese high-performance engines.And the relative complexity of the Nissan RB20, with the same displacement as the FJ20. This is the smaller-displacement sibling to the bigger RB25 and RB26 monsters.I get it. I do! When I was a kid, the cars I wanted to drive, the cars I wanted to take on white-knuckle dream drives over mountain ranges and out across endless deserts for all had straight-six engines.
, the S38 engine's six individual throttle bodies opening as I sang down the front straight, a dream played out in real life. It was glorious. But if I can dip farther back into my history, I can recall also driving a brilliantly prepared BMW E30 M3 at Lime Rock Park, its S14 four-cylinder giving no sense of grandeur or refinement of any kind. It was loud and gruff and felt impossibly crude in comparison to the bigger M car of its day.