Who's 280Z is this on Griot's Garage?

tlorber · April 19, 2012

Nice car, but somehow I don't think it sees the road very often.

Rbolz · December 22, 2015

Hi everyone,

Sorry to see this thread a little after the fact (like 3 years after!), but in answer to the question posed by the title of the thread, I'm the guy who owns the 280Z that was on Griot's Garage catalog cover back in 2012.

First off, thank you to everyone for your kind compliments about the car. It's always gratifying to me when people really understand what I was trying to do with this build, and from your comments, you guys totally get that I wanted to strike a delicate balance between modern update and clean efficient design without loosing the essence of the classic Z. Obviously I'm a perfectionist nut case who I'm sure many believe has more money than brains for pouring that much into a not-particularly-collectible 280Z. But before writing me completely off to the looney farm, perhaps understanding the fact that this is the first car I ever bought (right out of college in 1979) and have owned it ever since, will give you some level of sympathy for my psychosis. The car was my daily driver for 20 years, has over 230,000 miles on the chassis, was stolen from me once and recovered two weeks later back in the 80's, I left home in this car, I got married in this car, etc. Also, for reasons I won't bore you with here, the car actually went through a series of restorations/modifications from 1999 through 2011 which accounts for some of the unusually high price tag people may have heard.

As for the seats (since a couple of people specifically asked) I had them specially made for me by Lotus in England. Turns out the 280Z has a particularly narrow floor pan on the drivers side due to a bulge in the transmission tunnel to accommodate the catalytic converter (even on non-cat models like mine), so you need a very narrow seat to fit. After trying a couple of aftermarket seats, I was looking at my Lotus Elise and said "now there's a narrow seat". So I contacted my Lotus dealer and through them ordered the seats, black stitched in silver, with a blank headrest which I had embroidered with the "Z" logo here at a local shop. Although a modern update, I felt like the basic shape of the back of the seat was somewhat reminiscent of the original Datsun buckets. Unfortunately, Lotus will no longer build custom seats for you (unless you order them in a new Lotus!), but here's a link to a Lotus aftermarket web site called British Racing Group that carries something very similar:â€‹

http://shop.britishracinggroup.com/Exige-S-V6-OEM-Sport-Seats-BRG-LOTEXV6SS.htm

Happy to answer any other questions anyone has about the car. Thanks again for not making too much fun of me on the forum!

Robin

SteveJ · December 22, 2015

Make fun of you? Heck. I just want to see more photos of it.

Rbolz · December 24, 2015

As requested, here are some more photos of the car. I've also included a picture of the show board for the car which will provide much of the interesting technical data about the build. Hope you can read it and see the other pictures in large enough scale to see some of the details. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thanks for your interest.