NICOclub Staff – 2_Liter_Turbo

Staff Bio >> Steve (2_Liter_Turbo)

SR20 Forum Moderator
240sx Forum Moderator

Hey there, my name is Steve Maxey. I grew up around cars, knowing how to work on them since an early age due to my Dad being an auto body expert as well as a backyard mechanic. However, the funny thing is that I wasn’t an “enthusiast” until I was about 18 or 19 years old. Before then, I simply worked on cars out of necessity since I drove an ’83 Honda CVCC wagon as my first car!

I originally became enamored by motorsports and modifications due to a few coworkers and friends being heavily involved with racing in the mountains with their Hondas and Acuras. So naturally, I bought a Honda as my first enthusiast car (knowing how to work on them helped as well), a ’97 Honda Civic EX. Six months later, I rode in a buddy’s ’89 240SX with an SR swap (not as common in 2003 as it is now, at least where I lived), and was instantly swayed over to Nissan. I bought my first 240SX later that year and signed up on NICO the following year!

Once I was full swing into cars, I knew that I wanted to be involved with them as a career. I originally was thinking about becoming a mechanic, but after my Dad explained to me that doing what he does made him lose any desire to have project cars of his own, I knew I had to do something a little different. I settled on going to school to become an engineer so I could design car parts. How cool would that be!? So I headed off to college at the ripe age of 21 (yeah, I was a little late to the party) with my stock Nissan 240SX and aspirations to be awesome.

While in college, I did what I could to my 240SX as I focused on school as best I could. After working hard for a summer after my first year in school, I was able to save up enough cash to buy my S13 SR20DET front clip. This is actually the same exact engine that I currently run, I’ve had it since 2005! I thought I was the most awesome dude in my town (not hard when it’s a town of 14,000 in the middle of nowhere)!

Over the next four years (yes, I did a four year degree in five years), I went from a stock SR’d S13 coupe with a VLSD and steel wheels to a lowered car with a 346whp twin scroll turbo setup that ran a best time of 11.95 at the local drag strip.

From the time of my first engine swap, I started to always keep a second car for the winter months (where I lived it snowed for 6 months of the year), so I would have a different daily driver every year or two. Due to this, I actually had a number of other neat cars from a B13 Sentra SE-R, Integras, an AWD turbo celica, and others. When in college, I participated in all the affordable motorsports I could, including drag racing, drifting, and auto-x. My college years were definitely awesome, and where I became heavily involved with the local motorsports and Nissan scenes.

After graduating with my Mechanical Engineer’s degree, I set out to get my dream job. Well, reality check, that wasn’t so easy! I spent 10 months trying to get a job that fit the bill for what I wanted to do, but for a fresh grad, that’s not so easy. So I ended up taking a job in the aerospace industry as a design engineer for a small company that puts spray systems on helicopters.

During this time, I decided to take my original SR (which now had 200,000 miles on it) and do a full build. The engine still ran great, but I wanted more power (it’s a drug, ha ha)! So using the help of a local machine shop and a local dude who had a ton of experience building SRs, I built the engine from the ground up (not without some hiccups, see my build thread for details!). After the final iteration of the build, the motor puts out great power and is ridiculously reliable! I abuse it like crazy and never have engine issues.

Anyways, I moved to another job with a consulting company working with automotive OEMs and tier 1 suppliers. I wasn’t doing engineering work here, it was more managerial consulting, but it introduced me to the industry as a whole and eventually led to my following (and current) job where I now design suspension parts for cars. So it took a few years, but I eventually ended up where I wanted to be!

I still have my SR20 race car project (currently switching to an S14 chassis) and my daily driver is a SR20VE swapped Infiniti P10 G20. I also just recently purchased one of my dream cars since I first got into Nissans, an R32 GTR! After all this time, I am still on NICOclub, and love helping out others as much as I can in the industry and scene. I will always have my SR20 powered 240SX project race car, I have a personal connection to it after all these years, so I’ll be on NICO until the end of time… well, my time at least, ha ha!