Part of hot-rodding that has always endured was using whatever was available in the quest for speed. This is why guys tore through scrapyards hunting down rusted Chryslers in search of early Hemis, why many a wrecked Camaro has been pirated to repower just about anything else, and so on and so forth. Using what’s left over just makes sense, especially from a budget standpoint. We’d all like SB2s or R5P7 V8s, but truth be told 99.5% would be happy finding a usable LS or 6.1/6.4 Hemi with the computers attached for a couple of grand instead.

But what about looking outside the realm of American powerplants? We’ve seen what the Toyota 1UZ 4.0L unit can do when properly worked up, and they were found in many a Lexus luxoboat. But today, let’s go hunting for a different beast: the VK56, the 5.6L V8 that powered pretty much every Nissan/Infiniti truck and large sport-utility since 2004. Describing it directly, it’s a 32-valve, dual overhead cam mill that only saw good action in the Nissan GT-R GT1 race car and the Nissan Altima V8 Supercars racing machines. Everything else was a lumbering lump of a truck or worse, one of Nissan’s hippopotamus-shaped large SUVs.

We have to wonder what the weight difference is between a Nissan Armada and a Toyota 86 that’s been gutted for racing. And we really want to know just how much tweaking has gone on with the Nissan mill…this thing shrieks!