- R35 GTR drag racing records are hotly contested all around the world.
And we're here with Tony from T1 Race with this R35 behind us that currently
holds the record for the fastest GTR with stock location turbos.
It's run as quick as a 7.01 at 207 mile an hour producing somewhere in the
vicinity of about 2280 wheel horsepower on Tony's hub dyno.
So we're here to find out a little bit about what goes into making a car like this so fast.
So first of all Tony I just want to talk about this stock location record.
At the moment we're seeing records pop up left right and centre for R35s.
But that stock location one is no joke.
And the reason for this is it's really hard to fit decent sized turbos in that
stock location.
So what are you running in this car in the way of turbos?
- This car has an ETS turbo kit, they call it the Pro 2100.
They're Precision 7675 gen 2 turbochargers.
- So that's still a reasonable size turbo, what would that compare to if you
were running a front mount kit where you're really not restricted on room,
what would you choose for this sort of setup?
- Somewhere between 80 and 86 millimetre compressor and you would
go to the large frame T4 instead of the mid frame T4 housing.
So a lot more turbine options.
- And you're restricted here really just with the room with the chassis rails
and the engine block in that stock location?
- Yeah so you've got the engine block and the differential and the frame rails.
And then as far as, if the turbos are up front, you'd have nice ram air inlet,
where you've got three foot long pipe, so we've got some inlet pressure drop.
- So in a comparison to maybe your own car with a front mount turbo kit,
this at around about 2280 wheel horsepower, what sort of power levels are you seeing
out of your own car?
- The highest that I had on the dyno was 2600.
With the power that it was making on the track, I estimate 2800 or so.
Some of them are making more than that, we've got some well over 3000.
- I just wanted to get an idea of how much of a power restriction that stock
location is.
However 7.01 and from what I understand it's done a bunch of 7.0s at this point,
is it safe to assume we are gonna see a stock location turbo GTR into the sixes?
- Well that's our hope.
- Now in terms of the rest of the package, obviously the turbos are only one small
piece of the entire puzzle so let's just go through broadly what's done to it.
So can we talk about the engine setup, what are you running in that regard?
- Yeah this is what we call our stage six 3.8 litre engine.
It's factory displacement, it's a factory cast block, it's got a Sonny Bryant crank,
it's aluminium rods, I think we have Manley pistons in this one.
And then our CNC cylinder heads, Tomei cams, AMS intake manifold.
And then 12 Injector Dynamics injectors, you gotta have those.
- Of course you gotta have Injector Dynamics injectors when you are
Injector Dynamics.
Now I just want to dive into that block, these days we are seeing more and more
of these GTRs being fitted with billet blocks.
And 2280 wheel horsepower on a stock cast iron block's no mean feat.
Where do you see the limit for the cast iron block and where do you have to
switch over to a billet block for liability?
- Cast aluminium block.
- Sorry my bad cast aluminium.
- It's not 1990 anymore.
When we started doing these, started building this engine in 2010 or so,
coming from the Honda's where we had to sleeve all the blocks,
otherwise it would crack the sleeves.
And this is all aluminium and we looked at it and went, there's no way this is going
to work right so we jumped right in and started sleeving 'em.
And we had nothing but problems, block failure after block failure.
It removes so much material out of the block.
So finally we took a couple of steps back and said you know we've never
actually had a problem with the factory liner or anything with the factory block.
So let's go back and let's see where we have a problem, and we haven't found
that point yet.
I've run this same engine on my car with the 80 millimetre turbos,
75 pounds of boost and I don't know where the limit is yet.
- That's impressive because I think a lot of people would assume that that's
just unattainable with the factory block so good work on that achievement.
At that sort of power level though, I think a lot of people also assume that
if you put the best of the best into these engines, the Sonny Bryant crank,
the good quality rods and pistons, then you can run 2200 horsepower and
run it all day long and everything's gonna be fine.
And clearly that's not always gonna be the case.
What sort of reliability and maintenance schedule do you have for an engine
of this sort of power level to keep it running?
- At this level the crank is kind of our weakest link.
And we've got the best of the best building the best that they can,
and there's just physically no room in the block to make things bigger where
they need to be bigger.
So I think the cranks actually crack pretty early in the life of the engine.
And we don't see it until we take 'em apart.
We've had engines apart way sooner than normal for other reasons and
found the crank's cracked and it's hardly been run.
Before we had our head gasket issue sorted I went over a full season on a block
in my car, just changing head gaskets.
And I never took the block apart 'cause I knew what I was gonna find.
And I figured let's just run it and see how it breaks.
I finally broke it, that's the only crank I've broken and it ran a full season.
And I think that they'll go a long time but it's hard to bring yourself to put
a cracked crank back into an engine.
- I 100% agree, we actually saw that with our own 4G63 drag engine program
and I agree, I think they do crack quite early but that in itself may not be
a problem but of course as you say, when you pull out a crankshaft,
and you see it's got a crack in it, it's just about an impossibility to go
and refit that part where you know that it's faulty.
And chances are it may do the rest of the season but that's a pretty expensive
and difficult risk to take.
Alright talking about the rest of that engine package as well,
you've also got a dry sump system on it, is that a necessity for drag racing?
- Yeah at this power, so there's a lot of aeration and foam in the oil in the factory
system, we make a deeper oil pan that helps a lot but the oil pressure still,
at high RPM you'll see the oil pressure start to flutter a little bit.
And it's not that we don't have enough oil pressure, it's that there's air in the
oil and so that's a problem.
And the main bearings will put up with if for quite a while at lower power level.
At high power they don't tolerate that for very long.
So in my eyes, anything over about 1600 horsepower, I require a dry sump.
- Now another aspect with this car is that you are running a removable front clip
and the whole front end is completely closed in.
So obviously got something that is dedicated now to drag duty which
is just fine.
Problem with this of course is you've got no air flow for a traditional air
to air intercooler so you're running water to air here.
Can you talk to us a little bit about the advantages with a water to air application,
intercooler application for drag racing?
- Sure so you get the obvious aero advantage by being able to block off
the front end.
An air to air intercooler is almost always just this big brick.
So placement can kind of become a problem.
We do have a lot of room on the front of these cars but 1000 horsepower air
to water intercooler is this big and the air to air is huge.
So we can save weight, we get the air significantly cooler.
On a day like today, an air to air's gonna do pretty good 'cause it's a little chilly.
You go race in the middle of the summer and the air to air's gonna see crazy
temps and ours aren't really gonna change.
So it has a lot of advantages, it's obviously more hassle but it's worth it,
it's a race car now.
- In terms of that are you running a ice water slurry through the intercooler
as opposed to just plain water?
- Yeah on the dyno I usually don't even bother to put ice in it.
Because you can do a few pulls and it's still almost room temperature and it'll
keep the air temps below 120 degrees or so with just water in it.
Obviously if you keep running, the water will get hotter and it won't do it as well.
But on the track we put ice in it, we'll see usually starting air temps
of 70 degrees or so and then by the end it gets up to about 100,
so works really well.
- Now I just wanna go back to something you mentioned a little bit earlier as well,
you talked about until you fixed your head gasket issues and of course coming
from an import drag racing background myself, head gasket integrity on these
small capacity turbocharged engines, kind of is their achilles heel.
You're really limited by how much boost you can put into it while still holding
the head onto the block.
So are we allowed to know what you've done to fix that or is that T1
secret source?
- Yeah that one I'm gonna keep in house right now.
- I can't really blame you for that.
- Alright let's move onto the rest of the car and the key with the R35 chassis of
course is that GR6 transaxle on the back.
And that's a help and a hindrance because at the sort of power levels you guys
are now running they can be a little bit challenging from what I understand.
Can you talk to us about what goes into building a transmission that's reliable
at this power level?
- Yeah the fact that it can even happen is impressive.
We still have the factory castings, the factory configuration, they're just
upgraded gears so you've got an upgraded differential, still a factory rear ring
and pinion right now.
All the gears are upgraded, more front wheel drive clutch discs,
upgraded input/output shafts, if it's in there and it turns, it's upgraded.
And for the most part it does a really good job.
As the turbos get bigger and bigger, and the tires get bigger,
our power band's shifts to the right, we get into a situation where it gets
harder and harder to launch these cars because we have to spin the tires
so far out because we don't have good modulation to be able to slip the clutch,
the distance it would need to be slipped.
So it's not super ideal for drag racing, and you'll see the cars in the GTR class 2
have really small turbos and those things are dead consistent.
We've got a car that makes 1400 horsepower, runs 7.70 in that class.
And the car goes a 1.21 60 foot on 17 inch slicks every single time, no problem.
It's hard for me to get this thing to do that.
So there's that and then we've also got the gear ratios could be better.
So our RPM drops are pretty big for the big turbos, that's one of the big
things that I went with the seven speed in mine.
So it's a small engine and big turbo so we wanna keep that power band narrow.
- Now as well as the actual internals of that gearbox, the upgraded parts that
you've just mentioned, a lot of it does come down to the programming of
the TCM or transmission control module as well.
So in this car you've got the added complexity, you've got an ECU controlling
the engine management, you've got another transmission control module
that you can also program and then there's also the communication between the
two of them.
So can you just talk to us about that transmission control programming,
how critical is that?
- Nissan did a really good job with everything, everything works well
on its own.
You can get in there and manipulate things and we're able to increase clutch
pressures now which is good because a year ago we were all driving through
the clutch and there was no more room for clutches.
So we've got five or six bar more clutch pressure now, that hasn't been a problem.
Silly things like the launch, consecutive launch limit, Nissan doesn't want a
warranty your transmission if you're gonna go launch it 10 times in a row
in a parking lot.
So we're able to get those limits out of the way and raise temperature
thresholds and what not.
But it's a constant battle and it's something that every day that goes on, there's more
and more of a need for an aftermarket transmission controller.
Motec developed one a long time ago with Dodson and the project never
really got finished and we're pushing really really hard to get that project
going again because every car here that makes 1700 plus horsepower would
benefit from it.
- So just the advantage there in getting away from that Nissan based architecture
and having complete control over the way that transmission's controlled.
- Yeah same with the ECU, they do a great job of allowing you to remap things
in the ECU but at the end of the day, you're limited and there's stuff going
on that you don't know about, you don't have control over.
- It's safe to assume that when Nissan developed the R35, they probably never
envisaged tuners out there around the world making 3000 plus wheel horsepower.
So it's no real disrespect to Nissan in the first place.
- Not at all.
- OK let's move on and talk about the engine control unit, so you're running
a Motec there but can you talk to us a little bit about the complexities of
tuning an engine at this level and what goes into making it reliable and work
for a drag application?
- Yeah so 10 years ago when we were playing with fuel injection, it was pretty
basic, you tune the engine on the dyno and it's pretty much done.
It probably did boost control and some little stuff.
The complexity now is significantly more, in a good way.
We have so much control over everything so you've got all your normal stuff that
you're used to, your cam timing and knock control and tuning the engine,
and then you've got the communication of torque from the engine computer
to the transmission computer.
And then you have the transmission computer also communicating back
to the engine computer when it wants a torque reduction for shifts.
So it's two way communication with everything on that.
It integrates into all the factory modules on the car, ABS, it's getting everything
over CAN, you literally don't know that there's an aftermarket ECU in a car
that's this advanced with so many computers and everything,
it's pretty neat.
- Yeah I think that's something that's easy to overlook is that complexity and basically
if you just take that factory Nissan engine control unit out of here and put in
any aftermarket ECU, that'll be fine to run the engine but the transmission not
gonna know what's going on, you're not gonna change gears, so it's important
to understand that that Motec ECU is actually specifically based for the R35
package to make sure that all of that two way communication still works.
Now one of the things I'm interested in talking here a little bit about is the
way you can manipulate the torque output from the engine as the car
goes down the drag strip because obviously putting all of the power
straight to the track in first gear is just gonna end up smoking the tires,
so what are your options there, what are your control strategies?
- Personally I use a combination of a timer and gear based torque control.
You can do output shaft based torque control, you can do vehicle speed,
you can just have a switch, so there's a lot of options and there's a lot of
different ideas of what's best.
But I find the gear is the best because at the end of the day, the second the
car changes a gear, you have a change in torque to the tire.
So if we do speed based, a lot of people use speed based because of a past
of using boost versus speed.
And you do wanna use boost versus speed but really what you're doing by
doing that is keeping torque flat.
And so this is already doing that, you're just telling it the torque,
it turns up the boost relative to speed.
So it does all the hard work on its own.
- I think for those who aren't following that as well, you gotta understand that you've
got the torque coming out of the engine but as it goes through the gearbox,
that torque is multiplied and what we're trying to do is manipulate the amount
of torque being produced at the wheels and it's that interaction at the wheels
that is really gonna limit how much traction we can get there.
Now another aspect that I actually wanted to come back to which we haven't talked
about yet which is a little unique on this car is that you're also running
a nitrous system.
So can you tell us why you've added that nitrous system and maybe just
a little bit about how that works?
- So everybody knows me, I've never been a big fan of nitrous.
The reality is it can work well if it's all done properly.
The M1 has a really neat nitrous program and everything's accounted for,
everything works right.
We're turbo limited and we run 47 hose.
- Just need that little bit extra to get you into that six second zone?
- Yeah and you know I played with it a bit on the dyno and it works,
it works really well and I see the likelihood in the future of going up and up and up
on the jets until something happens.
- At the moment the system hasn't really been tested yet so we'll see how it
goes I guess this weekend, but what size jets or how much horsepower is that
nitrous adding?
- I've only got 100 horsepower in it right now.
I brought all the jets but that's all we're running right now.
- Alright look it's been great to get some insight into the car Tony.
We hope that we see a six second pass out of it this weekend.
And for the future, once that six second pass is under its belt, are you gonna
go front mount turbo kit or are you just gonna see how far you can go?
- I'm not sure, George has had a lot of ideas about what he wants to do,
potentially putting a different trans in the car and kind of going the
direction of my car but not as extreme, kind of a full chassis, rear wheel drive,
different trans.
I dunno, this car may stay in this class and we may build a different one to
do that, I dunno, we'll see.
- Alright well best of luck for the rest of the weeked, thanks for the chat.
- Thank you.
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