scathing

If you leave the R35 gearbox in manual mode, the shifter behaves exactly like a sequential's minus the clutch pedal. I'm still not seeing the difference that makes it "fun". What's so enjoyable about working the clutch? The shifter itself performs in the same way (if you choose not to use the wheel mounted ones), the new one just happens to work faster. I find it interesting to note that the guys who probably haven't even sat inside an R35 pine for the manual, but those who've actually driven one are completely sold on the idea. And, from the looks of it, these guys have owned old school sports cars and driven them hard, so they're not just poseurs who bought the R35 to show off and only like the new transaxle because they won't spill their Starbucks. It kind of reminds me of Honda fanboys wanting everything to come with VTEC, despite never having driven a sports car with torque. All they've ever experienced are el-cheapo econobox motors and lazy large displacement engines designed back when cravats were cool.

If I remember correctly, the Holinger 6 speed GT-R box is a sequential. So what's the difference between the Holinger and the R35's box, aside from the former having a third pedal and being slower? At least people who prefer the feel of a Double H pattern have some irrelevant reason for liking outdated tech. When driving around town, you can only use 0.000000000000000001% of the R35's capability, so what's the point of owning it at all? You don't need an active AWD "going as fast as the speed limit allows". Nor do you need active dampers. Then you wouldn't have one at all. Around town, the R35 is boring. The car feels so isolated as you roll around, you may as well be in a luxo barge. If you want "feedback" at any speed, you'd be better off buying an Elise. Anything with power assisted brakes or steering corrupts the feeling of the control inputs. Terry, you can always left foot brake. And shouldn't all your limbs be atrophied by now, since your AWD does all your driving for you anyway? Sklled drivers drive RWD.

Tempe Tyres advertises Nittos on their site. Another option would be to use a boost controller that has a "Push to Pass" button to switch to another pre-set. You could run low boost in the first few gears to help you hook up (and around those pesky corners), and then hit the switch when you're on a roll to get your full fat 400rwkW. GReddy offer a wheel mounted switch for their Profec B EBC: or you can use this DIY to make your own. Just watch out for dangers to manifolds.

Go for a set of S-Comps. Something with a treadwear between 100-200. An R-Compound tyre will need a significant amount of heat in order to work, and doing a burnout right before you street race some Commodore will probably be even worse. An S-Comp will come almost on to temperature with regular driving. They'll also last more than a few thousand kilometres on a normal car. You should probably aim for a more drag radial, at least in the rear, if you're only interested in going in a straight line. Nitto 555Rs are quite popular, and were designed as a road legal drag radial. Mickey Thompson has a few street legal radials, but I can't find a treadwear rating on them. Otherwise, go to any S-Comp. Even with stiffened sidewalls for cornering, the rubber compound and tread pattern will still give better grip than your average street tyre. Avoid Falken RT615s as I've found their grip woeful on my NA car. But other ones like Federal 595RS-R or Toyo R1Rs should be right up your alley. The Toyo RA1s might also suit you, but with a treadwear of 40 they won't last too long.

The question is, can you run consistent 13 ETs while only spending USD$2500? Also consider that parts in Australia cost about 1.5-2 times as much as they do in the USA, once we've landed them. They all have to come from Japan or the USA anyway, as the market for FM platform cars is still quite small down here. That gives him an equivalent budget, to you, of around USD$1500. It's easy to get a V into the 13s if you throw enough money at it. I just don't know how doable it is on his budget.

Have you considered turning the boost down when you're not on a dyno?

Did this guy also take advantage of a kid by selling him a car he can only drive for a year, and then he'd have to sell it or stick it in storage for 3?

I am pretty sure in BMI's "350Z Shock" they said that if you just press the button it goes into a failsafe mode. You can power oversteer, but once you tap the brakes the electronics will try to straighten up the car. If I remember correctly, and I probably don't, if you hold it down for 8 seconds it disables the VDC until you restart the car.

Yes, please share copyright violating content on a public forum and expose both yourselves, and the forum administrators, to potential lawsuits. Thanks in advance.

Handling maybe. If you actually want to slide the car, then you should turn it off. If you are pressing on and want to use it as a driver's car, then you will be a little quicker and the chassis should be a bit more predictable.

The French manufacturers have quite a few diesels. But then you'd be buying a French car. Volkswagen also does the Polo has a diesel. But I reckon you'd want DSG, so stick with the Golf. The Hyundai i30 is, I've heard, a brilliant car for the money.

VDC = stability control The VDC unit takes inputs from the ABS wheel sensors, to measure wheel speed, as well as a yaw sensor in the middle of the car to determine how fast you're cornering. It has outputs to the electronic throttle, and your brakes. Through the ABS wheel sensors it can determine if you're wheelspinning. It'll cut power, and possibly grab the rear brakes, to stop the wheelspin. In that way it acts like the Traction Control System on the lesser-model V35ss and Z33s (although the TCS equipped FM platform cars don't grab brakes). While cornering, it uses the yaw sensor to determine how fast you're cornering. It compares it to how fast you should be turning (I'm not sure if it just compares the inner and outer wheel speeds or has a steering wheel angle sensor). If the parameters don't line up, it'll cut power and apply the brakes to bring you back on to what it thinks is the ideal line. So if it thinks you're running wide, it'll grab the inside brakes to pull the car back on line. If you've gotten sideways, it'll cut power and grab brakes in a way that will return you to cornering. It's not the best system in the world. It's overly aggressive, and pretty slow to react. Z drivers who've tracked their car finds that it reacts slower than they do. They'll counter when they don't corner properly, and the system will counter a fraction of a second later. It amplifies the correction, and then they need to re-correct. The system will detect the over-correction, however, and also try to re-correct. etc etc. Hopefully in future versions it'll actually work as a driver aid rather than a driver handicap (like Ferrari's current setup) but I'd leave it on if your car is being operated by someone who doesn't care about driving, but turn it off if you can actually drive yourself.

I'd prefer a Y pipe, since I like keeping my car drivable. Loss of midrange is not ideal for a street car. It'll boil down to the muffling rather than the plumbing. The APS 2.5" true dual has two mid mufflers (or resonators) as well as the rear muffler. APS says that, with the turbos in place, the car is ADR noise legal. While the turbochargers do muffle the exhaust gas, they also do cause a fair amount more of it to pass through the exhaust. When I ran my HiTech exhausted 350Z on a dyno on the same day as another NA 350Z with an APS true dual, there was almost nothing in it when it came to volume. I'd only look at going true dual if I was building on off-street car, or something with twin turbos. Even supercharged, I'd probably prefer the superior scavenging effects of the Y pipe but with a bigger diameter than what you'd use on NA.

The driving style between FWD and RWD is very different. I read a similar comment on the 350Z forums. People who came out of FWD, and used to being able to power through a wet roundabout and riding the understeer, were looping their cars. ABS wouldn't actually save you there since your problems occurred well before you hit the brakes. If you want an electronic nanny you'd need stability control, which I'd guess would be impossible to retrofit.

My advice: Pop a cat-back on it to get a bit of noise to improve the experience of driving your car, and leave it at that. Save up for the GT-R. Take the money you have left over and do some track days. To be blunt, aiming for a specific power figure is meaningless. A dyno can be made to read almost anything the operator wants it to by doing things your average person isn't going to notice is incorrect. Since its unlikely you'll ever get the car to hit your legislative power/weight limit the actual power your car makes is of little actual interest. Make it fun, and save your cash for a better base to tune.

You will gain power in the top end. You will lose power in the midrange. I know several people who've tried true duals and had this issue. The installation of a cross pipe mitigates the problem to a certain extent. But not completely. Compared to an aftermarket exhaust that runs a 2.5" Y pipe into a single mid pipe you'll see a few more rwkW on the dyno that you're not going to feel in the real world, but the car will feel noticably less strong while trying to rev up there.

I just did some more Googling on dyno "coast down" techniques. A lot of places rubbish it as inaccurate (here and here).

Your question about how to hit 225kW from an RB25DE while staying all motor tells me enough about your motoring knowledge. The fact that you're on your P's tells me about your driving experience. I'm making a hypothesis. I would love for you to prove me wrong. At the flywheel or rear wheels? At the flywheel a stock RB25DE is practically there. At the rear wheels, if MissR34's mod list to power output is any indication you're still going to struggle to hit 150rwkW on a low budget. There's not much you can do over her setup without opening the engine. I don't think cams alone will find 15% on a NA car unless you get more RPM. And, being an R34, her engine will be a lot fresher than yours.

I went up on Tuesday: However, there's about 3 spots where they've got these: but, within a couple of hundred metres its back to 60 again.

What time did you guys get there? I drove out to the light house at 4PM, and aside from a couple of randoms buzzing around there was no-one there.

Lots of people have gotten by without ABS, but it doesn't mean they don't appreciate having it there. As an aside, how do you know you're threshold braking to the maximum of your car's ability? Chances are you're allowing a safety margin, as any "competent driver" would for any system without a failsafe, which means you're not stopping as quickly as you could be. Which, on the track, means you're not going as quickly as you can be. On the street, as guys said in the other thread, you're not always 100% focused on driving with no tiredness or distraction. Nor do you always have perfect visibility and consistent conditions to prepare for an emergency situation. As an aside, skills only stay sharp if they're learned and practiced every day. Trained reflexes fade with inactivity. It's a flaw that all humans have. The only way you're going to be able to have lightning quick reflexes and be able to threshold brake / swerve & recover instantaneously over varying surfaces in a range of conditions is to do it all the time. If you're driving like that on the street (where most people in the real world do most of their driving), you shouldn't have a license. Electronics don't have this issue. You don't have to trigger ABS all the time for it to keep working as well as when it left the factory, and maintaining the system doesn't require you to do retarded things on the street. As an aside, why did you buy a AWD car? A driving purist such as yourself shouldn't need it.

FYI the "smartest" thing to do would be to learn to drive. Upgrading the thing behind the wheel is the best "bang for buck" performance mod you can do, and it'll carry over to any car you own in the future. You've got GT-R "badging" on your name but you drive a 2WD Skyline, so if the last movie is anything to go by you're closer to O'Connor than you may think. Good luck hitting 225kW with an old, non-turbo, 10+ year old, 2.5L engine that doesn't have VTAK or some other cam profile fiddling shenanigans. A stocker will make 140kW[/url] so you're effectively asking for 50% more power than a reasonably fresh engine. There's no way you're doing that without cracking open the engine if you don't have boost or bottle. And that's going to cost you more than "a few K" to do.

Not necessarily. Some dynos let you calculate flywheel power, which is about as accurate as the rear wheel power. The dynos will continue to measure after the driver lifts off (I'd assume they have to put the car in neutral). The speed at which the rear wheels spin down gives the dyno an idea of the drivetrain loss, which it can then use to calculate the flywheel power. It's not a common practice in Australia, but I know quite a few UK dyno operators will do this.

From a BBC news article about some fuel cooler scandal back in 2007:

Actually, I was referring to last year. Sure, the economy was in the toilet and people stopped buying new cars, but within the cars sold there was a shift away from the ratio of big cars finding homes in the USA. Since the price of fuel has dropped since that massive spike, bigger cars are moving off dealership floors again. I remember reading an article, that I now can't find, suggesting that Obama increase fuel tax in the USA to inflate the price of fuel. It would direct Americans to buy fuel efficient vehicles again, and provide a source of income in a time when the US economy is doing so badly. Adding tax on something as dear to an American as fuel would probably be political suicide, though.