Liberty Walk GTR – Another First

Our very first Liberty Walk project has been many months in the making. Since the inception of ReinART.Design, we knew we were going to be creating this car.

In recent years, Liberty Walk, birthchild of legendary auto enthusiast Wataru Kato, has been making waves all over the tuning industry. Known for its radical widebody styling, they have been one of the pioneers in starting the whole over fender trend that is taking over modern car culture.

Liberty Walk was established as a used car dealer by Wataru Kato when he was 26 years old. The business was first operated in a small vehicle lot where Liberty Walk could only exhibit 3 cars. Currently, the shop expanded to a location where 20+ custom cars are available for display. The custom cars achieved popularity from many viewers so the shop name is highly recognized to represent Japan.

With a large following in Japan, it would only be a matter of time before the rest of the world got a taste of what Liberty Walk had to offer.

This year at the 2015 SEMA show in Las Vegas, Liberty Walk and their widebody kits absolutely stole the show. Their sky blue Aventador and 458 that they brought over from Japan had people in shock and ogling over the widebody goodness.

For ReinART.Design our very first Liberty Walk car would be a 2011 Nissan GTR with just over 3000KM on the clock. It all started out as a fiberglass body kit and a set of custom 20″ PUR Forged LG04 rims that came with custom offsets that were designed to perfectly fill the new wider over fenders.

After receiving the car, the first course of business was to get the stance right. We installed a set of Airrex air suspension to help us get the slammed look that would be needed. I truly believe that an air suspension or at least a front lift kit is essential to achieving the best look possible for any car. If you want the wheels to sit flush with the body, then you need to be able to lower the car enough. However you still want to be able to drive it and clear bumps and steep ramps. That’s why having the on demand height adjust-ability is crucial to making it all work.

Now with our suspension set up, we needed to find the right voice for a beast like this. We wanted our car to sound like no other Nissan GTR. To accomplish this, we contacted our good friends at Kline Innovation to build us one of their Inconel catless turboback systems.

For those of you who don’t know, Inconel 625 is an alloy that is lighter and stronger than titanium. With its great strength, exhaust makers are able to use thinner piping while still keeping its structural strength. What this means is that Inconel exhaust tend to have a higher pitched resonance, something that we all associate with high revving race cars.

Why do F1 race cars sound the way they do? Because they also use Inconel alloy for their exhausts as well.

Our particular exhaust system came fitted with a set of carbon fiber tips. The welds on this Kline exhaust are some of the nicest we have ever seen.

Now that we had a new catless downpipe and exhaust installed, we had to make the most of it with a new tune from COBB Tuning. For this we used their tried and tested COBB Access Port V3 w/TCM. This in car flash unit not only allows the updating of the ECU mapping, but also the transmission software as well.

On the Nissan GTR, a huge bottle neck in the engine is the injectors. A slight tune is more than enough to max out the capacity of the stock injectors. To help us out with the fuel situation, we installed a set of 1000cc Injector Dynamics injectors along with a COBB Tuning Big SF Intake to get it breathing a bit better.

With the new performance modifications running on Map 3 at 18psi, this car is now pushing high 600’s in the horsepower department.

The time finally came when we built up the courage to carve apart our mint 2011 GTR. With only 3000 KM on the dial, it definitely felt scandalous to put the saw to the fender. Nonetheless, it was an essential part that had to be done in order to fit the massive new wheels.

After going through a number of saw blades, we finally had all 4 fenders cut and were ready to test fit the kit on the car. The freshly cut fenders were then sealed up to prevent rusting and corrosion.

In a general sense, the quality of the Liberty Walk kit was pretty good. Very little modification was needed in order to get everything fitting as it should. Everything seemed to line up quite nicely.

Our car would sit like this in its black and white “Panda” state for a a few weeks while we waited for it to go to paint.

After spending 3 weeks at the body shop, Hong Kong’s first Liberty Walk GTR was born. All that remained was to apply the customary Liberty Walk graphics and various other stickers.

Months of waiting all came down to this. Our completed car was revealed during a Sunday Morning Drive at the break of dawn in Big Wave Bay, Hong Kong. Despite having a number of other super exotics in attendance including a Pagani Huayra, there was a regular crowd of people around our Liberty Walk GTR. Is Hong Kong’s tuning scene ready for something as radical as this? It remains to be seen. I guess we will know better when we finish our next Liberty Walk car in a few months time. 😉 Stay tuned!

Thanks go out to Step for Stance Auto Party and all the great photographers who helped us get these amazing shots.