'Quail's ultimate 240Z

[LandQuail]

Here's what 'Quail has to say about fellow Arkansan Terry Oxandale's 240Z — click the photo:
Today in Photos

Here's what Terry Oxandale has to say about it — please explore, especially the street modifications:

http://www.fototime.com/ftweb/bin/ft.dll/pictures?userid=7DC317B08EDB4B2EA837F708D07C9769&a lbumid={3CEF2C28-3C52-4815-BB6C-C63C07278985}

Terry described building his 'Z' as a "divorce recovery project.' Just think about this: He made every inch of bodywork except the roof by himself, using whatever bullshit he could find to make the molds — he made the signature 'Z' headlight mold out of a type of cardboard tube used for forming concrete, for instance. Utterly unbelievable.

Here's what I wrote and published in my newspaper about it:

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Terry Oxandale's Datsun 240Z was one of over 100 cars entered in Saturday's fourth annual Motorsports Authority Car Show. " Modified" doesn't describe Oxandale's Datsun; it's more of a reinterpretation of the clasic design. Every inch of bodywork except the roof was penned, crafted in lightweight fiberglass and painted by Oxandale. He closely followed the flowing lines of the original steel bodywork, icluding the Z's signature headlights, adding flared fenders in the style of the Datsun 280ZX GTU race cars campaigned in IMSA championships throughout the late 1970s but more gracefully executed. Those fenders house tires over a foot wide at all four corners. Gone is the 2.4 liter inline six cylinder engine the car was born with. A Ford V-8 stroked to 383 cubic inches lives under the hood now, powering the rear wheels through a Borg-Warner WC T-5 transmission and limited-slip differential. Oxandale's one-of-a-kind 240Z was built as pure racecar, but has now been modified for street and SCCA autocross use. For more photos from the show, visit spotted.thecabin.net
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Check out his website, listed above, and shoot Terry an E-mail telling him what you think.

'Quail thinks it's got to be the best 240 Z hot rod in the world.

[Auxin]

Wow, it reminds me of a shelby with that paint scheme and body. Definitely the ultimate 240z. It also looks a bit like a bristol fighter from the side shot.

[Auxin]

Oh and quail, why are the images so tiny?

[LandQuail]

Oh and quail, why are the images so tiny?

Because I'm an uneducated Hillbilly — hold tight a moment...

[LandQuail]

There. Much better.

That's a Ford 383 cubic-inch "stroker" engine nestled far back in the 240Z chassis. It's fitted with what I was told was a camshaft out of an engine built to compete in Ford smallblock torque dyno competitions.

In other words the camshaft, like the rest of the car, can fairly be called a one-off. Oxandale told this old 'Quail that yes, his engine does have a nice flat torque curve. Über brilliant on the part of Terry Oxandale.

The best 240Z hot-rod in the world? Almost certainly, and it came from Arkansas.

[clutch-monkey]

wow, impressive work. i bet it's shit-your-pants scary to drive.
sorry quail it wouldn't be my favourite 240Z though, i prefer them with I6's

[IBrake4Rainbows]

Can I just say.

OMG do want.

that is all.

[LandQuail]

wow, impressive work. i bet it's shit-your-pants scary to drive.
sorry quail it wouldn't be my favourite 240Z though, i prefer them with I6's

Point taken. An unmolested 240 is a very, very desirable thing and that 2.4 liter I-6 was a great engine. I've still got my eye out for a good 240Z, which I expect to someday blossom in value like Mopar musclecars have in the last five or six years.

Oxandale is a racer, though. He wanted more power than the engine the Z was born with could feasibly churn out.

There are a few very, very expensive ways to get big power out of a 30 year-old Japanese inline six, and many, many ways to get big power cheaply out of Yank engines.

Oxandale didn't wrench that straight six out of the 240Z without considering all his options. He decided that there was no feasible way to meet his power goals with the original engine, and plucked it out.

Simple as that.

He also said it's actually quite tame on the street. It's optimized for autocross work now which means setting the LSD to be loose enough not to provoke catastrophic understeer in tight corners but tight enough to prevent excess inside wheelspin elsewhere — that's the recipe for a good streetcar diff, no? The springs are stiff, but not overly so. In fact, I'd dare say they're not significantly stiffer, pound-per-pound, than this 'Quail's stock 2004 Subaru STi suspension.

Shit-your-pants scary? Probably not. It's not a daily driver, but Oxandale drives it very, very often. This 'Quail's seen it on the streets of Little Rock a few times, actually. It's beautiful to see it rumble by at night, when the reality that it is a legal streetcar in Arkansas hits home the hardest.

[clutch-monkey]

i agree, all in all it's an impressive package with a capable engine, quite a few people here throw in RB25/26 engines from skylines... one example kept the AWD too, which seemed to defy the point to me, but all very fast and with the classic shape

[P4g4nite]

I saw quite a few incredible es-san-oh-zed-o's in Japan, some of them had Skyline RB25DET's in them.

I think this car is an amazing piece of work, but, there isn't really much 240Z left in it. It's obvious they wanted a Cobra Daytona but for some reason started with a Z...

[faksta]

Viper'd Datsun... For me it's like this - Viper from the Z. It looks interesting and I can only imagine how does it sound... Cool

[LandQuail]

I saw quite a few incredible es-san-oh-zed-o's in Japan, some of them had Skyline RB25DET's in them.

I think this car is an amazing piece of work, but, there isn't really much 240Z left in it. It's obvious they wanted a Cobra Daytona but for some reason started with a Z...

Is it the ultimate Zed?

No, Paganite blew my cover. There are Skyline-engined 240zs that are better.

But I said this was the best hot-rod 240Z, and I stand by that claim.

This car was the work of one guy — one petrolhead — with a little money and a lot of time. All those lovely curves were penned by his hand and he made them into glassfiber reality via the sweat of his brow. The powertrain was similarly conceived, engineered and executed by one man.

70 years ago, Americans were doing the same thing to Model-A Fords, and that was the basis for the understood hot-rod movement in America today.

But in the late 1960s, the hot-rod culture made a tragic shift from substance to style; gone were the Bonneville belly-tank speedsters and chopped-down top-speed specials. In their place came the shapely, but dynamically inept high-boy designs we see today.

Oxandale's 240Z is an American hot rod in the classic sense. He took a modestly fast car and made it into something that has the potential to challenge the best sportscars in the world by improving the chassis and dropping a bellowing, flame-belching V8 engine into it.

Give Oxandale a few months to sort it out, and I'm sure he'd be more than willing to take on any of the Skyline-engined 240Zs at the drag strip.

Skylines have always had great engines, but even the 3.0 liter RB30 tuned to its streetable max would have to breath pretty hard to match a supercharged American V8 at the dragstrip, and that same big-displacement, pushrod V8 wouldn't be at an appreciable disadvantage around a proper racing circuit. Just ask Enzo Ferrari or Carroll Shelby about that one...

As for the chassis, well, I really can't see where Oxandale's 240Z could be improved upon. He's got a rollcage integrated in to the chassis from the firewall back that's deeply well-engineered — there just plain can't be much flex there. Up front, the engine-cradling subframe basically just locates the engine and front suspension to the rear pseudo-spaceframe.

The chassis looks hard as a rock, which is probably why he can get away with such (comparatively) modest suspension settings.

To look at Oxandale's work up close is to take a course in racecar fabrication. None of the welds looks pretty, but each and every one looks unbreakable. The bodywork is constructed with the eye of an artist, but the underlying structure clearly shows a creator more concerned with function than form.

Did Oxandale want a Cobra Daytona? Well, he certainly came up with the obvious engineering/design solutions and the end result does look similar. Keep in mind that Carroll Shelby has never claimed to be anything more than a hot-rodder.

Also, if this 'Quail wanted to make a machine to toast bread it would also look and act like a toaster, and it's 'he,' not 'they' when talking about Terry Oxandale's 240Z.

Oxandale's 240Z is, in short, the essence of an American hot-rod. And the execution is nothing short of brilliant.

[NSXType-R]

That's really awesome.

But he chopped a 240 to get the results he wanted right?

Or did he build it all from scratch?

I would have preferred it to be stock, but I like the results he got from it. It's better than the people who modify old Japanese cars like crazy and put chrome on it where it doesn't belong. That annoys the heck out of me.

[LandQuail]

That's really awesome.

But he chopped a 240 to get the results he wanted right?

Or did he build it all from scratch?

I would have preferred it to be stock, but I like the results he got from it. It's better than the people who modify old Japanese cars like crazy and put chrome on it where it doesn't belong. That annoys the heck out of me.

He chopped a 240Z.

To the bone.

[whiteballz]

Who puts chrome on old japanese cars?