Marv’s Garage: Daijiro Inada’s 150mph pretzel

Daijiro Inada is the man behind Option Magazine, which he launched in 1981. Option wound up serving as the bible for Japanese modified car fans, and it had huge cultural reach the equal to Hot Rod in the USA or Max Power in the UK. A couple of other things Inada kicked off include the D1 Grand Prix professional drift series and Tokyo Auto Salon, just to ram home what a bit-player he is.

He also liked to have a crack behind the wheel, running in the Silver State Classic – a flat-out road race held through the Nevada desert – in 1999 behind the wheel of a Blitz-worked R34 Skyline GT-R. He returned to the Silver State Classic in 2003 looking to Have A Bloody Go. This time with a highly modified Z33 Nissan 350Z built by JUN Auto dubbed the “Option Stream Z”. With the 350Z’s VQ35 punched out to 3.8L and copping boost from a big Garrett T88-34D turbo the Stream Z made approximately 800hp and would run in the Unlimited class, where average speeds were up over 200mph. This was the class where land-based rockets like the Big Red Camaro (we’ll have a look at that in the future), turbo Dodge Vipers, juiced-up turbo Porsches and Callaway Corvettes all recorded average speeds well over 200mph down a sketchy piece of rural desert two-lane highway.

Unfortunately for Inada his 2003 tilt at this particular windmill didn’t quite go to plan when a de-laminated tyre and a mis-shift at 240km/h saw him leave the road and turn the Z33 Nissan into a giant foil ball. Thankfully he didn’t suffer critical injuries and returned with an updated Stream Z in 2006.