Frank - The World Time Attack Nissan S13

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and fellow petrolhead invited me to his house in the suburbs to take some photos of his nearly complete racecar, which he plans to use in the World Time Attack Championships in Australia this year. This car started life as a regular Nissan S13 (200SX), with a standard CA18DET engine. Not exactly much on the performance front...but all that changed very quickly.

Currently, the car has a SR20 engine in it from a Nissan S15, with a huge turbocharger bolted on, making in the region of 500hp. And with the entire body and aerodynamic bits being carbon fibre, you can be assured this car isn't slow. Needless to say, this car isn't anywhere near road legal. Ironically, it still has a licence disc on it - I suggested to the owner he should drive it to a Nissan dealership one day for fun and ask for a regular service (you can see the licence disc in the photo below on the top right of the windscreen).

Eventually, after so many modifications from various different cars, the car earned the nickname of "Frankenstein" - or Frank for short (hence the name in the title). Also, a few people have asked him about the "crazy" decals he has plastered all over the bodywork. The reason for this is - the cars aerodynamics are still in prototype phase, and the decals act as a sort of camouflage. And, what blows my mind is that each one of those decals was individually cut out and stuck on - imagine how long that had to take!

The owner has quite an interesting collection of cars, with about 6 in total now around his property (my favourite being the grey R35 GTR you can see lurking in the enormous custom-built garage below, parked next to a stock standard Nissan 200SX. He also has a BMW E60 M5 parked elsewhere, and a few others - tough life).

Shooting this car was quite an adventure due to the incredibly limited space, but I made the best of what I could. The night time photos certainly worked the best in my opinion, whereby I used a 20 second exposure and my handy light wand to "light paint" the car. These photos already caused quite a stir on Facebook when they were posted on the aerodynamic manufacturers page (attracting over 500 comments and about 1,000 shares), with a very divided opinion between love and hate. But hey, it's built to be a race car...not a work of art.

I figured some of these photos would be useful for the #vehiclephotography contest hosted by @photocontests, so enjoy them, and let me know what you think. Obviously, all photos are my own original work.

Equipment used:

Canon 6D
24-105 f4 L Series Canon lens
Generic Manfrotto tripod
Yongnuo YN360 light wand (used for light painting)
Lightroom CC for edits