The rise of the Japanese V8-powered pick-up in the US has given Americans some fresh engine options for those looking to break away from the pack, and Calvin Nelson’s recent VK56 Fairmont build has raised more than a few eyebrows. 

Just to get everyone up to speed, the Nissan VK56 is a 5.6-litre quad-cam V8 that’s been around for a couple decades. Kelly Brothers Racing used a modified version with a wildly different bore and stroke in their Nissan Altima program when they were racing Nissans in V8 Supercars between 2013 and 2019. The VK56 also powers the superb V8 Nissan Patrol that’s been filling the pick-up queue at local schools all over Australia for the past decade. In the USA, the quad-cam VK56 engine comes in Nissan Titan pick-ups and Armada SUV’s as well as the Nissan NV vans and some high end Infiniti offerings. In short the VK56 is offered in a whole bunch of Nissans and the engines can be had for relatively cheap in the US. Over the years the VK56 has gained direct injection and variable valve timing and is quite possibly the best V8 to ever leave a Japanese factory.

Don’t get us wrong – LS engines are great and Coyote engines are amazing, but they are becoming increasingly expensive, and if you are looking to get noticed they’re hardly the way to go these days. Sometimes you just have to try something different and that’s the way that Calvin Nelson and his father Andrew like to roll with their Nivlac57 YouTube channel. Now there are a lot of youtubers out there who like to build stupid cars with stupid engines for views and these guys are not that. Calvin has a degree in electrical engineering and he loves building budget racecars that go very fast using engines that most Americans wouldn’t even consider. That’s not to say they haven’t played with LS engines; these guys will fit and modify anything that can be bought from a wrecking yard cheap and that includes engines with four, five, six or eight cylinders.

We’ve been checking out their efforts for a while now, but it’s one of their recent builds that have really caught our attention, and that is Calvin’s idea was to fit a VK56 into his dad’s Fairmont Futura coupe. Being a Fox-body platform the Fairmont is very light and it has a decent engine bay, which is great for a large engine like the VK56. 

The guys scored a Nissan Titan pickup cheap, which was cheaper than buying an engine someone had already pulled. The Titan wasn’t running when they bought the truck and subsequent checks found that the oil was so low that it triggered a safety in the ECU which prevented the pickup, with just 123,000 miles on the clock, from starting. What a score! Of course the news wasn’t all good, the brakes on the Titan were non-existent and the engine was in some kind of limp mode, despite starting and idling smoothly, so they swung straight into removing the engine before hauling the rest of the truck off to scrap.

After adding some Boundary oil pump gears and removing the oil cooler, they moved on to the intake system. The factory plastic intake manifold was way too tall for the Futura and featured ultra-long intake runners for maximum low end torque, whereas the guys were after high rpm power instead. So they fitted a short runner, large plenum fabricated alloy intake from Ebay with an LS3-style cable throttle body, and then added a massive Forced Performance 7875 turbo using flipped factory exhaust manifolds. Internally the engine was absolutely stock, other than the pump gears; no cams or valve springs, no aftermarket rod bolts, no ring gap adjustments, just a stock VK56. The ECU of choice was the Kiwi-produced Link G4X XtremeX and the guys even fabricated their own adaptor to mate the factory bellhousing to a Turbo 400, but ultimately chose to use a C3 Performance adaptor when it was offered to them. For backyard hotrodders these guys are legit; they can weld, wrench and wire with the best of them.

After the usual tweaking and problem solving the guys gave the Futura a drive test that saw the VK56 up on boost quickly and smoke out the driveway before they headed to the dyno. They made 667rwhp where they discovered that the turbo was a little small for their needs. After switching out the turbo for a larger Forced Performance 8082 turbo the guys strapped it back on to the rollers and made 707rwhp at 25psi boost before the torque converter started to slip. Those are some pretty impressive numbers for an unopened, bog stock truck engine; remember it doesn’t even have aftermarket valve springs. Try that in your Barra or LS!

From there the guys headed to Sick Week 2026 in Florida, where unlike their home state of Pennsylvania the sun was shining and there was no snow on the ground. The first run of the week saw the white Fairmont struggle to get off the line due to wheelspin and it only ran an 11.63. Wheelspin plagued their second pass as well but the coupe cranked out its first ten-second pass with a 10.76 at a whopping 152mph. They hit the road for next track where the car ran slightly better with a 10.41 at 153mph, still breaking the tyres loose, and by day three they were looking for a solution, which came in the form of a factory sway bar to replace the one they had previously removed from the car. Day three was a drive day, and day four was rained out, so that left them with them the last couple of days to find some redemption, which they did in style. With the second hand rear swaybar on board the Fairmont hiked up the left front wheel at Orlando Speed World and roared to an 8.63 at 157mph which left everyone with their jaws on the floor. No one expected eights from the unopened Japanese V8. Unfortunately the last day at Gainesville saw the Nissan V8 cry enough when a rod bolt let go at half-track and we all know how that ends. However Calvin still got his timeslip and that was enough to complete the event.

Since then Calvin has pulled the engine, and surveyed the carnage, and then he replaced the broken engine with a later model VK56 which has the added benefit of variable valve timing. It’ll be interesting to see if the new engine makes any extra power. Will they take it back to the eight-second zone or will they save that for one of their other projects; check out Nivlac57 on YouTube and find out.