Sasha Anis's Hybrid 350Z Added DRS and Ran With the Unlimited Pack at Watkins Glen

Most cars in GRIDLIFE's Unlimited class make their speed the conventional way: big power, big wings, sticky tires. Sasha Anis's Nissan 350Z adds an electric motor between the engine and the transmission, a stack of BMW i8 battery modules behind the driver and, as of this summer, a drag reduction system on the rear wing. At GRIDLIFE's late-July visit to Watkins Glen it finished second in the Unlimited Podium Sprint, despite arriving down on power.

GRIDLIFE's report from the Summer Apex Festival lays out how hard the weekend was on all three of the cars expected to fight for the top spot, and how the 350Z, nicknamed KELS, got through it.

A weekend of overnight repairs

The Glen had not hosted GRIDLIFE since 2023, when rain limited competitors to a handful of dry heats, so the record book was soft. Track records reset in every TrackBattle class, according to the series, with nearly every class record falling in Friday morning's opening session.

The list of new marks shows how much faster the field has become. Joshua Halka reset the Street record at 2:03.354 and clinched the 2026 title. Dewey DeWitt, who broke an input shaft in his Subaru's sequential transmission and raced the rest of the weekend with an OEM six-speed, still reset the Street Mod record at 1:58.357. Peter Granberg's K24-swapped BRZ set a Club TR mark of 2:05.432, GRIDLIFE reported.

The Unlimited fight was supposed to be a three-way battle between Allen Patten, Mike Dusold and Anis. Patten's Louis Gigliotti-built C7 Corvette suffered tire failures early, then the team found rod-bearing material in the oil and replaced the engine overnight. Dusold's 1967 Chevrolet Camaro hit 192 mph in the backstretch speed trap on the way to a 1:43.839, just over four tenths ahead of Patten's best.

Anis had his own night shift. A broken transmission on Saturday forced an overnight replacement before Sunday's Podium Sprint. GRIDLIFE also says the hybrid was still slightly down on power after an electric motor replacement several weeks earlier.

DRS on a Nissan

The fix for the missing power was aerodynamic. Anis added a drag reduction system to the rear wing, which GRIDLIFE says helped offset some of the deficit. The 350Z reached just over 160 mph on the backstretch, roughly 30 mph short of Dusold's Camaro, but its cornering speed let Anis close the gap through the rest of the lap.

His best lap of the weekend was a 1:46.050, just over two seconds behind Patten. With Patten's Corvette sidelined for the Podium Sprint, Dusold won it with a 1:46.329, Anis was second with a 1:47.045, and Jake Ertel was third at 1:53.126.

How the hybrid works

The car's background comes from an earlier Hagerty feature, which describes KELS as it stood when that story was written, so some numbers may have moved since. Anis bought the 350Z in 2008, already a race car, and raced it in Grand-Am before turning it into a development project with Jim Wolf Technology. He kept the VQ V6 naturally aspirated, partly for weight and partly to chase the sound and response of mid-2000s GT2 cars. The engine grew from 3.5 to 3.7 liters with a VQ35HR head, then to 4.2 liters with 14.8:1 compression, Hagerty reported.

The hybrid hardware came next. According to Hagerty, Anis fitted a PhiPower electric motor, the kind of unit used in Formula E, between the V6 and a magnesium-cased Xtrac 427 transmission. Six battery modules from a BMW i8 sit behind the driver's seat, and a Cascadia Motion inverter takes the place of the passenger seat. The system promised 200 hp for about 200 pounds of added weight.

Anis told Hagerty he had only extracted 150 of those 200 electric horsepower because the little motor needs more voltage than the i8 modules supply, and he was designing his own high-voltage battery. Total output at the time of that story was 670 hp.

Software is the secret weapon

Anis runs a tuning shop, Mountain Pass Performance, that works on Teslas and other EVs, and the car shows it. Hagerty reported that the main MoTeC M150 software handles the engine while Anis's own code manages the battery, torque requests, traction control and the paddle-shifted transmission, plus an independent four-wheel steering system that reacts to driver inputs, speed, torque and yaw.

A ten-position rotary knob picks the hybrid's behavior. The time attack modes dump the motor's full output over a three-lap sprint with reduced regeneration to delay overheating, a charging mode recovers the most energy on cool-down laps, and a third mode balances charge for longer running. That three-lap logic fits GRIDLIFE's sprint format almost perfectly.

Why it matters beyond one car

Hybrid systems are no longer just for factory prototypes. KELS is a privately developed car using salvaged production battery modules, a racing motor and homemade control software, and it is running with LS-powered Camaros and Corvettes in one of the most open time attack classes in the country. Its weakness at the Glen was top speed, which is exactly the problem that more voltage, and now DRS, are meant to solve.

Anis also told Hagerty why the car looks the way it does. "We didn't want the busy front end of a time attack car with the wings and canards," he said, explaining the GT300-inspired nose. On a fast track like Watkins Glen, that cleaner shape and a wing that can stall itself on the straights may matter as much as any battery upgrade.