Welcome to the first step on our journey towards creating a fast, reliable R32 GT-R that can tackle both street and serious time attack duty. As a privateer team, we do not have unlimited funds to build a wild beast with no limits, so this blog may also help guide enthusiasts that have to work on a smaller budget too! Our goal is ultimately to have a podium-finishing Street-class car at Global Time Attack Finals this November at Buttonwillow (keep an eye open for our upcoming blog post on the FD's first track day at Buttonwillow). Competing with the likes of Amir in his boosted NSX and Jackie in his TA90 will be quite the challenge, but I think the GT-R might be up for the task come November!
The car was purchased "sight unseen" (albeit with tons of photos and some live video) from an owner in Fresno, CA who was unable to register the car due to California's overbearing laws. Fortunately, that's not a problem for us and so I purchased the car despite knowing that it wasn't running properly and had a bunch of missing components. Then it went straight from Fresno to Santa Ana to the good folks at Garage Saurus to get a PPI and recommendation list based on our goals. Woo buddy, the inspections revealed a lot. Rust/oil in the coolant, severely contaminated oil, damaged drivetrain parts, oil leaks galore, damaged radiator, non-functioning AWD, parts hanging by a thread, destroyed bushings, missing essentials... the list goes on. While in their care, the car got some basic maintenance done and had the fuel system routed properly and power steering assembly repaired. They also cleaned up the engine bay quite a bit compared to the photo below from delivery. From there we knew we'd need to have a basic tune setup to address additional issues with the car, as it stands we couldn't drive the car to further test the drivetrain components.
The previous-previous owner had a fair bit of work done on the car by a speed shop in VA and it was also tuned there a year ago. Unfortunately, as mentioned before the fuel system routing was all mixed up, wiring was everywhere, the tune may have been able to produce 500whp at the time, but now it couldn't cold start and idle, fuel pressure was way too high, and the resistor was still intact even with ID1050x's on the car. The competence of the tune and setup was definitely in question and after looking at the logs, couldn't be driven safely. After adamantly refusing to provide the password for the ECU because of "industry secrets" in their tune and demanding instead that we pay for them to remote in and keep us locked out of our own ECU, we decided it was best to just get that junk off ASAP and start fresh. It's a real shame there seems to be such an ego involved in basic tuning, but it happens. At least now we'll have full access and control over every aspect of the ECU! The downside is we have a lot of work to do to get the car to a point where it can be safely retuned.
But let's get back to the good stuff! The car seems like it has a pretty cool history, which unfortunately is largely still a mystery to me. But with the help of some JP carfax reports and our good friend Mark, we found that this car had been serviced by several top tuning shops during its life in Japan. Top Secret, Fuji Dynamics, Pit Road M, JUN, Phoenix's Power, the list goes on and is filled with RH9 shops. Before it departed Japan, it had a Top Secret Drag R motor, dry sump, full fuel setup, and a hilarious amount of gauges. The trunk is adorned with a hard-fought RH9 club badge, identifying it as a 9-second quarter mile street car. I'm not big on drag racing, but there's no denying that it's an epic feat to accomplish. Somewhere during those four years between its departure from Japan and coming into my possession, the Drag R motor disappeared and was replaced with an RB26 equipped with a 2.7L Nitto stroker kit. We're still not sure why it was replaced or how much, if any, of the old motor made its way into this one but we're going to find out soon as we crack into the motor before tuning. As far as swaps go, we think it's a pretty good deal though!
Make sure to stay tuned for part 2 of this series which will detail the parts currently on the car and what we have planned!