So I finally decided to change exhausts, after 5 years of owning my true dual Bassani exhaust; I never thought I'd do this, and probably wouldn't have if my piston rings didn't decide to fall apart on me leading me down a spiraling rabbit hole of having the engine rebuilt, and upgrading weak-points in the VQ35 factory design. After having a great experience with Nik & George at SOHO Motorsports with my replacement built short block being assembled, shipped, and on my doorstep within 2 weeks of payment, I wanted to see what else might be up their sleeve. I had heard of their exhaust winning 1st place at Z Nationals earlier, and knew 1 person who had it, but was nervously debating between the Tomei Ti Expreme exhaust, and theirs. Only one word, spelled backwards can describe the performance and sound of this exhaust: RACECAR.

Here's the SOHO Y-pipe, mid-pipe, and muffler laid out on the ground just prior to installation. The Y-pipe is 2.5" with a very clean transition into a Burns-level-of-quality merge collector; after the collector, there is a gradual transition from 2.5" into 3." The mid-pipe and muffler have minimal turns, and bends with no resonator equating to less performance inhibiting restrictions in the exhaust. All of the welds are excellent, and I expect will last the life of the car.

New SOHO exhaust laid out in pieces on the ground:


Here you can see the old tarnished stainless steel Bassani true dual 2.25" into X-pipe with 2.5" out through 2 resonators and 2 mufflers. It was dirty, but 100% functional with no cracks, bends, or damage. It's a good design, but has a few weak-points: the stamped x-pipe isn't optimal, and a few more turns for exhaust gases to make near the mufflers.





Here's how the SOHO single exhaust looks installed! It's well placed, and has no issues rubbing on the W-brace, or potentially scraping on the ground (your frame will hit before any part of this exhaust does). Oh by the way, this exhaust is LIGHT! It weighs 27lbs in it's entirety; that's only 9lbs more than the Tomei Ti Expreme full titanium exhaust, and much lighter than both the stock exhaust and Bassani!




From the side, you can see the muffler isn't obnoxiously over-sized like say Agency Power, is more parallel to the ground, and has great ground clearance (lowered car friendly).



If you have a Top Secret (or Amuse/Shine Auto replica) diffuser, minimal modification is necessary to make it fit with the muffler. This is one of the few single exhausts that doesn't require substantial performance diminishing diffuser modification.





Finally, the back to back dyno comparison between the aftermarket Bassani exhaust system (green) and SOHO Motorsports (red) revealed slight gains in whp/wtq of about 2 to 5 predominantly in the mid-range, and a noticeable improvement in the smoothness of mid-range power output. First is uncorrected smoothing at 0, then SAE corrected smoothing at 5.





It's important to note that this car also has JWT C8 cams, 11:1 compression forged internals, DC headers, Z1 Motorsports 60mm test pipes, 5/16" Motordyne plenum spacer, and JWT pop charger (haha yes, still rocking the "POP" charger)... so it's hard to improve over-all power output without dramatically changing the intake manifold side of the equation. After-all, an engine is just an air pump, and only as strong as it's weakest link (intake-side in this case). Given that the Bassani exhaust system had dyno proven gains of about 11whp/10wtq on my old untuned factory VQ35DE engine, and that the SOHO single exhaust showed slight gains over-all on top of that, it can be surmised that the SOHO exhaust is one of the best systems you can install on a naturally aspirated 350z. It's highly doubtful that the greater expense of some the other high quality exhausts (Motordyne, Tomei, etc) will be justifiable with any better results on a naturally aspirated engine. Also, this car was previously dyno tuned at Z1 Motorsports at 289whp/269wtq (dyno measurements vary place to place); the only change was RC440 injectors and a re-tune prior to recording the best Bassani exhaust run, and followed up immediately by an exhaust change, and then the SOHO exhaust run. Tune parameters weren't changed between the Bassani exhaust and SOHO exhaust.

Having 7,000 miles on the previous setup, the most note-able change is drive-ability and throttle response. Low and mid-range drive-ability seems smoother on the Mk1Mod1 butt dyno, and throttle response is slightly smoother.

Here's some before/after videos of the dyno's and drive-by's:

Bassani Dyno:

SOHO Dyno (much louder, camera microphone is cutting out some):

Bassani drive-by after dyno:

SOHO drive-by after dyno (it got dark because the old exhaust was a PITA to remove after 5 years of weather and abuse):

I highly recommend this exhaust for anyone looking for something truly high quality, and wants that true racecar sound that the VQ is capable of making. If you have more specific questions, you can find the owners info at www.sohoturbo.com. They are great guys with a passion for what they do, and will surely answer any other questions you may have! I'll try to get a better video driving past a camera or something soon.

 

How is the drone during regular city driving and highway? Thanks