Ihtisham's - Sleeper Nissan Micra K11

Check out this Sleeper car, the Nissan Micra with some serious horsepower with its engine swap!!

Ihtisham's - Sleeper Nissan Micra K11
Sleeper Nissan Micra K11

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Hello! My name is Ihtisham and I am a car YouTuber at ‘Rauf Cars’

 Rauf Cars Youtube channel


My project car is a bit unusual. Its nickname is ‘the £80 Micra’ - it’s a sleeper Nissan Micra K11 n/a screamer that revs to 8000rpm! It’s a road-legal go-kart!

CURRENT BHP - 135BHP
0-60 - 6.0 SEC

It’s a rapid little thing that weighs around 800kg, and the best bit is that it looks pretty much standard so it shocks a lot of people!

I have done some handling mods - lowering springs and an anti-roll bar. Visual modifications have been kept to a minimum to go with the sleeper theme - it still has wheel trims! (haha, OMG!)

All the progress for the car is on my recently started YouTube channel - Rauf Cars - where I share with you how our first step with the car was to spend £30 to get the 0-60 from 15.5 sec down to 9 sec, amongst the rest of the progress with this car! The channel also features 0-60 runs, dyno runs, tunnel sound tests, fitting of performance parts, and general entertainment surrounding cars!

Engine swapped Nissan Micra    

This car is somewhat famous in the Micra world due to its YouTube channel! it is actually my first car. I bought it for a grand total of £80, hence the name! I actually kept the car pretty much standard for the first 3 years of owning it. It started out as the 1.0 with a laughable 59 Japanese horsepower, enough to send this beast from 0 to 60 in 15.5 seconds! So it wasn’t fast by any standards.


I then had a vision for this car. Micra’s are often mocked for their ‘granny car’ and ‘pizza car’ reputation, so I thought I would try to break these stereotypes! Most of the work on the car has been done by me and Slide Motorsport, a professional custom auto shop in Yorkshire, that specialises in working on Japanese tuner cars - Skylines, Silvia’s, Supra’s, and one Micra! They also regularly do 2JZ-powered E30’s!

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The modifications on the Micra started with an engine swap from the 1.0 Micra engine to a 1.4 Micra engine; a complete plug-and-play engine swap! Putting the 1.4 engine on the original 1.0’s short ratio gearbox and using the 1.0’s lighter flywheel gave an unexpected boost in acceleration! The best bit is that the 1.4 engine cost £120 and I sold my 1.0 engine for £90, so it cost a grand total of £30.

Nissan 2jz engine

Next, I installed some performance camshafts, 4-2-1 exhaust manifold, exhaust system (requested to be as quiet as possible for the sleeper theme!), bigger injectors, and a lightened flywheel. We managed to run all this on the stock ECU, but to make it more reliable, we got the ECU remapped by Tornado Systems, the only company in the UK that can remap Micra K11 ECU! At the dyno, we got 125bhp and 105ft-lb, 105bhp and 86 ft. lb at the wheels. At this stage, the car was doing a 0-60 of around 6.8 seconds.

Nissan Micra in the garage awaiting its engine swap

If you enjoyed this Car why not read this ONE HERE

The car is not much of a looker but that’s the whole point - looks can be deceiving!
More recently, I created a bolt-on bike throttle bodies conversion kit for the Micra. Slide Motorsport fitted this in recently. The car sounds EPIC! The bike throttle bodies usually give around 15-20bhp on a 1.4 Micra, so a total of 135bhp is a conservative figure! It does 0-60 in 6.0 sec dead now with the potential to squeeze more power of it once we get the ITB’s running better, as it leans out at high RPM! Would really like to see a 0-60 in under 6 sec once it's set up properly!
The next step with the car, after getting it running better on the ITB’s, is to do some headwork to raise the compression, as the car has a laughable compression ratio of 9.5:1.

The total budget for this car was £2000, and we are nearing the budget! Subscribe to my new YouTube channel ‘Rauf Cars’ to stay tuned as we are looking to grow this channel with features of other’s project cars, track days, Euro road trips, and of course more of our own project cars!


My main car group where I get a lot of advice from is Micra Sports Club.

My dream car is an Aston Martin DB5! Thanks for reading!

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