It started with a plan to repaint the engine bay. Per a Motor Fan feature published September 3, the owner of this well-preserved Nissan F31 Leopard — an enthusiast who keeps multiple Leopards — originally asked for the engine to be pulled so the bay could be repainted. But the pre-work inspection found one cylinder of the VG30DET down on compression, and a cosmetic project became an engine overhaul.
The shop is half the story
The work went to Studz M in Komatsu, Ishikawa Prefecture, whose principal — identified by Motor Fan as Tsuruhara — has previously worked on R35 GT-Rs producing more than 1,000 PS, as well as heavily modified Supras. Pointing that caliber of shop at a 1980s luxury coupe making modest factory power tells you what kind of restoration culture the F31 has quietly developed.
The refresh went deep rather than loud: the wiring harness and various rubber components were replaced with new parts, along with a Trust metal head gasket, an aluminum radiator with an added electric fan, and a custom high-pressure power-steering hose fabricated because the original part is no longer available. That last item is the truest sign of where these cars are in their lifecycle — the parts that fail now are the ones nobody remanufactures.
Why the F31 matters more than it looks
The F31 Leopard spent its production life losing the sales war to the Toyota Soarer, then spent the decades after as the beloved underdog — Abunai Deka hero car in Japan, budget VG-powered style icon in the drift-adjacent scene abroad. Every F31 is now comfortably past the US 25-year threshold, and clean examples are thin.
That is what makes this feature's premise notable: the owner's stated goal was taking a car that was already good and pushing it toward perfect. The same stewardship pattern keeps surfacing in Japan's owner features lately — the Y31 Gloria rebuilt around a manual swap, Tech Art's lifetime AE86 — a generation of 1980s Nissans and Toyotas crossing over from used cars to kept cars, one obsessive owner at a time.