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Ive done my share of taking apart and I cant think pf what you could be talking about... Maybe its a leftover piece of the car that smashed into yours...
Otherwise, the only other thing I can think of being there would be a steering bump stop. Or some kind of sway bar bushing. Would be great if you could take a photo of it in the frame. Otherwise we are all just guessing here.
It's a chassis counterweight. The front one is exclusive to the ZR whereas all Zs have two additional counterweights towards the middle (near trans mount or incorporated into it) and rear of the chassis on the opposite side as the front one.
Do not recommend it's removal - but it won't hurt anything too badly - as it is there to "correct" the chassis harmonics so as to isolate the car from inherent road noise, bumps, grinds; and, due to a change to a more "natural" or "neutral" harmonic frequency, it also helps to reduce chassis flex and helps a bit to smoothen the ride.
Work your intake around it.
Not sure it if this was an intended design element or "a fix to a funk up after the chassis was built and tested"; but it was put there by Nissan Engineering so you can trust it (at least to a degree and moreso than home hacks who think they know better.)
EDIT: It should be noted that this is NOT exclusive to Nissan or 350Z or even just cars. All (or many) mfgrs use such "tuned mass dampers" in a wide variety of vehicles, machinery, etc. Nothing unusual about them.
Nahhhh, I commented on this same one a couple years ago (I think in the threads noted above somewhere) after doing some research on "the big black box".
But I remember this as a young man.... my dad was a Naval Engineer and on one of the tours of a particular battle wagon he'd overhauled, he gave me a lesson on "harmonics" (owing to their use of same in ships and their subsystems), explaining it in as close to layman's terms as he could. Like anything else, none of it made sense until I was in college and took physics (or some such) where frequencies and harmonics came into discussion. Then, be like..... "Ohhhhhhhhhhh, nowwwwwwwwww I get it."
And Pops didn't think I was listening.
Now every time I see a tuning fork (not s'much anymore thanks to digital tuners), I think of Pops. Hahaha.
Big rubber block.. What does it do?
