If you want to turn your Nissan Frontier into a badass street truck, here’s some inspiration.
Among the hotly contested midsize segment, the Nissan Frontier is about as honest-to-goodness an option you can manage if you just want a truck. Something practical, something useful and something without hybrid systems or turbochargers to maintain — that’s what you get with the V6-powered Frontier. Some folks do want to go a little berserk with their rigs, though, and that’s where SEMA builds come in, since they’re the poster children of wacky styling and crazy performance.
As it happens, the Nissan Frontier Tarmac concept is playing to that crowd, offering up a rear-wheel drive drift machine with some serious gusto. Forsberg Racing collaborated with the automaker once more to create this truck, taking your base experience up a notch or ten. The Tarmac brings a supercharged VQ38 engine, for a start, offering up more than 440 horsepower rather than the Frontier’s standard 310 hp. You also get another 119 lb-ft of torque, bringing the total up to 400 lb-ft. To that, Chris Forsberg and his team and the folks at Nissan Motorsports added in a prototype carbon fiber cold air intake, as well as a custom Nismo exhaust system.
The Nissan Frontier Tarmac concept gets a custom Nismo suspension setup too, with adjustable coilovers, remote reservoirs and a lowering kit that drops the truck anywhere from four to six inches. For braking, this truck gets custom 15-inch two-piece slotted brake rotors, with front and rear calipers from the Nissan Z Nismo. In fact, the rear end gets dual calipers, with the second connected to a custom hydraulic handbrake specifically for drifting. Around the 20-inch wheels measuring 10 inches wide at the front and 12 inches wide at the rear, the team fitted Yokohama Advan V107 tires (275/40-R20 at the front; 315/35-R20 at the back).
Carbon fiber abounds throughout the Nissan Frontier Tarmac concept, from the hood to the fenders, bedsides, roof and mirror caps, tailgate spoiler, tonneau cover, splitters and diffusers, steering wheel and interior trimmings. Apart from the exposed carbon fiber, the Afterburn Orange of the Tarmac is further accented by ever-so-fashionable LED underbody lighting. Inside, the truck gets Recaro Sportster CS bucket seats, orange seat belts and matte carbon door scuff protectors.
Now, are you actually going to be able to buy something like this drift truck yourself? Of course not — but here’s hoping Nissan may come over all generous and offer the VQ38 supercharger kit and some of the other street-focused Nismo gear as accessories if you do want to soup up your Frontier, in the spirit of the supercharged Frontiers of yesteryear.
We’ll have more coverage of the Frontier Tarmac alongside a ton of other SEMA builds from Las Vegas next week, so stay tuned for that!
