Sam Clothier Built a Drift Car Out of Three Morris Minors and a Bin of Nissan Parts

The usual drift car shopping list starts with a Silvia, a Skyline or an AE86. As those cars get pricier and harder to find, people have had to get creative. Sam Clothier got very creative. His drift car is a 1950s Morris Minor van with a turbo Nissan straight six and not one piece of British Leyland left under it.

Street Machine's Kian Heagney ran the full feature online on Oct. 24, after it first appeared in the magazine's September 2026 issue. It is the most fun drift build we have read about all year, and the engineering under the rust is better than it has any right to be.

Three Morrises make one

Clothier works at Street Race Solutions in Toowoomba, Queensland, where he spends his days on Skyline GT-Rs. The van came together from three Morris Minors. He told Street Machine he started with a pickup cab and front end, then did a deal with an older guy for a pile of parts that included longer coupe doors. The rest came from a van that once delivered bread around Toowoomba.

Those longer doors were needed. The body is now 150 mm, about 6 inches, longer than a stock Morris, and Clothier said even then it was a challenge to fit himself in comfortably.

A one-off chassis on S13 bones

Underneath is a one-off chassis built around Nissan S13 front and rear subframes, the drift world's go-to hardware. Clothier told Street Machine the car is the same width as an S13 but about 120 mm, roughly 4.7 inches, shorter, so it is fairly snappy when sideways.

Up front are BC Racing coilovers, 40 mm extended S13 control arms and GKTech adjustable caster arms. The point, Street Machine explains, is steering lock: more angle means less chance of spinning when the car is pointed the opposite way from the corner. The wheels are Nissan 15x6 alloys from the Australian-market R31 Skyline Ti, which would have been polished back in the '80s.

RB25 Neo, E85 and a rear radiator

Power comes from an RB25DET Neo, the last version of the RB family, found in non-GT-R R34 Skylines and the C34 Stagea. Clothier told the magazine Neos are among the best RBs in stock form, and this one proves it: it makes 517 hp at the rear wheels with only head studs and an aftermarket head gasket inside.

That matters more in drifting than in drag racing. As Street Machine points out, a drag car's pass is over in 10 seconds or less, while a drift car sits at high revs for long stretches, so every drift engine gets a reliability test by default. A mostly stock Neo surviving that at more than 500 hp says a lot about Nissan's last RB.

A Pulsar G30-660 turbo runs anywhere from 16 to 24 psi depending on the track, on straight E85. A Haltech Nexus R3 manages the engine, and a Tremec T56 six-speed puts the power down, with Clothier rowing gears and clutch kicking.

Space in the nose is tight, so the radiator lives in the back: a Mishimoto core with AU Falcon electric fans. Clothier told Street Machine it still runs the original mechanical water pump, not even a new one, and the hottest he has seen is 90 degrees Celsius, about 194 Fahrenheit. He credits the big 32 mm hardlines running the length of the van for shedding heat. A bigger PWR intercooler sits up front, and a fake toolbox in the back hides the fuel cell and fuel system.

The angry face button

The cabin keeps the patina theme, but there is a Haltech CAN keypad with a sense of humor. Street Machine notes that a few of the buttons are just for show, but the one with the angry face turns on rotational idle. Clothier said it is meant to help cool the car by cutting cylinders, with the side effect of sounding gnarly.

Debut, and what comes next

The build took nine months, and the van debuted at Drift The Downs 2024 at Morgan Park Raceway in Warwick. Clothier has been tweaking the setup ever since. He told Street Machine he plans to neaten it up eventually, and that it might get an all-wheel-drive conversion once he is done drifting it, because drag-and-drive events interest him too.

That would be a fitting second act. For now, a bread van with a patina roof and a 517-rwhp RB is one of the best arguments around for building the car nobody else has.