Raana Horan's "Titan"...

Ahh...so now we come to it. Raana Horan's New Zealand dominating "Titan".

As others guessed and I incorrectly stated, this incredible truck is not truly a Titan. It does possess a Boatec Titan body but the underpinnings are decidedly not Titan-esque. Regardless, it is currently at the top of its class in New Zealand and certainly creating an incredible impression on all who see (and hear) it race...

Here I will quote Raana directly in describing the truck...but feel free to let me know if you have any questions about his setup or build and I will try to dive more into it with him...

We currently race two vehicles both essentially Nissans.

The winch truck and our original offroader racer big black were pure Nissan, the latest Big black II is predominately Nissan but unfortunately we had to add some other GM bits in to make it work.

We basically cut our teeth on the first two vehicles giving them absolute abuse and tuning until we knew what worked and what didn’t.

The Titan truck is based on a trophy truck custom Mike Connor , Greg Price kiwi designed chromoly space frame with Titan body and Nissan engine, diffs etc

We originally were going to fit our modified Nissan auto box to the truck but the size of the box was too big , too heavy and too long plus with the power we wanted to produce the transfer box wasn’t going to be strong enough so they were substituted for a turbo 400 and hummer transfer but other than that we have kept Nissan were ever possible including factory mag wheels that we have modified to beadlocks.

One of the things we have been surprised with is the strength of the Nissan motors , my bother in law works in the dyno cell most days as a job with various local race engines many of them Nissan and for us we essentially haven’t changed the bottom ends of the Nissan engines much, we have played around with both petrol and diesel and have got some great power figures - see the torque figures below BB II and the engines have remained very reliable and to be honest a cost effective race engine within our budget.

We believe we have another 10 – 15% to screw out of this engine but we don’t need any more power at the moment so we are leaving it as it is, our main teething issue has been keeping our transmission fluid cool enough so it doesn’t damage the box after spinning through the torque converter under power. We have finally solved it but after lunching 5 gearboxes in the process.

Our team is made up mainly of friends and family with all the skills to make it successful, we often have at least 6 people on hand at every meet for support plus of course the kids.

Basic Specs:

Big Black II

Body: Nissan Titan by Boatec

Frame : Custom designed Chromoly Space frame

Gearbox: Modified turbo 400, low stall converter

Transfer Box: Hummer H1

Diffs : Nissan Patrol LSD front and rear

CVS : Chromoly Chev 2500, Custom shafts

Engine:

Supercharged Nissan VH45DE V8

Ported heads

Mild cams

Ross race pistons + Rings

Balanced crank

Supercharger : Over driven Eaton M112

Engine Tuning : Brent Reedy (Bro in law) Tuning and Performance Hamilton – Dynopak 4000 4WD

Power : 480 HP

Torque : 1200nm , 900 ft/lbs !!!!

Computer : Link G4 extreme

Total Wet Weight: 2350Kgs including driver and navigator.

Truck built by Mike Connor Taupo Sheetmetals and Greg Price plus helpers.