Slammed, Supercharged Frontier Is a Collab Between NISMO and a Formula Drift Champ

Trucks are many things these days—fleet vehicles for utility companies, agricultural workhorses, daily drivers, off-road adventure rigs, and even luxury vehicles. One type of truck has been all but extinct since the 2000s: The lowered, souped-up, rear-wheel-drive tire-shredder. Judging by its latest concept, Nissan thinks the muscle truck might be due for a comeback.

Meet the Tarmac concept. It started life as a Frontier Pro-X, the top 4×4 trim of Nissan’s mid-size pickup truck. Nissan’s motorsports division, plus Nissan Design America and a dedicated race shop reinvented the off-roader as a tire-shredding drift missile and brought it to SEMA, the annual industry-only show hosted in Las Vegas.

Designed to showcase aftermarket products, the show has evolved into such a destination that automakers modify their own vehicles with in-house performance parts and show them off at SEMA. If you don’t work in the car industry, you probably can’t make it in the doors of the convention center, but car nuts everywhere drool over the creative builds that debut at SEMA. We’re keeping close tabs on the show, and are sending our own Brandan Gillogly to Las Vegas, so keep an eye on this site.

Back to the Tarmac concept, then. It’s not the only concept Nissan brought to SEMA this year—it also built a traditional overlanding Frontier, a lifted Kicks, a lowered Kicks, and a Z with a body kit—but it is the most extensively modified. Take a peek under the hood:

A carbon-fiber intake! A production Frontier could only dream of such exotic modifications. Nothing is too good for a SEMA build, not even unreleased prototype parts, so the Tarmac concept enjoys a prototype cold-air intake made of carbon fiber and designed by NISMO. Together with the water-cooled, Roots-style supercharger sitting proudly atop the 3.8-liter V-6, the truck makes 440 hp and 400 lb-ft of torque, sending it all to the rear wheels. A regular Frontier Pro X, for comparison, makes 310 hp and 281 lb-ft.

“Twenty years ago, having a performance truck was definitely a cool thing. But today, very rarely do you see lowered, performance truck builds,” says Chris Forsberg, the head of the race shop that built the truck for Nissan. “I haven’t built a lowered truck since 2003. It just seemed fun—it was different.”

Forsberg made his name in Formula Drift, a series that, despite the slides and smoky tires, demands precise car control. Drivers compete in pairs, drifting tandem around a course, and are scored on slip angle, line, and style: essentially, how close they are to each other and how successfully they can slide their car to hit certain points on track. Forsberg raced in Formula Drift since 2004, and won the Formula Drift championship three times, all in Nissans. He’s raced off-road, too, and Nissan likes him so much that it is named a special-edition Frontier after him.

Once the Forsberg shop got its hands on a pickup truck, there were only two directions the build would go: High or low. To create the Tarmac, they dropped the suspension, widened the body, and juiced the powertrain, with an attention to detail brought by their years in drift competition. To go along with its powertrain mods, the Tarmac concept got a big brake kit: custom 15-inch floating two-piece slotted rotors clamped by the calipers from a Nissan Z NISMO. Of course, the interior features a Forsberg-exclusive “Drift Stick” hand brake.

The suspension kit relies on prototype parts from NISMO and includes a set of adjustible coilovers. Forsberg may not have built a muscle truck since 2003, but, from what we can see, he hasn’t lost his touch.

NISMO clearly had a big budget for this build, because even the wheels are prototypes—with carbon-fiber barrels and forged faces, no less—measuring 20×10-inch in the front, 20×12-inch in the rear and shod with sticky Yokohama Advan V107 rubber.

We’d be remiss to not give you a peek inside the truck, because look at those seats! You’d never know Recaro was on the ropes—but who knows, maybe the creative folks at Nissan design scrounged the seats second-hand and did the fancy upholstery work themselves.

Flick through the gallery to enjoy the slammed, carbon-fiber-kitted goodness that is the Tarmac project and, if you’re like us, imagine a shootout between the Maverick Lobo and a production version of this Nissan concept …