djr81

As it happens I did a track day in the wet last weekend. On RE55's. They were new though. To be honest they are fine - even to the point where there are puddles on the track. Just try & drive around the said puddles as you can get aqua planing at spots you don't want to. Corner grip is pretty low & your biggest issue will be having a lose under brakes. Just keep it straight & everything will be fine. You can be confident that your times will be ok as most people who take road tyres wont be going hard & anyone on R compounds will be in the same boat as you.

Dunno. Mostly motor racing expertise comes out of the UK & Italy. Even then it is mostly England. It is about the only thing the Poms do well. Although looking at the scores from the cricket last night I should watch my words.

I agree with you with regard to Toyota. Honda I have always regarded as being the best of the Japanese manufacturers at design & manufacture. World class. Look at their record in bikes as an example. I think the problem is that there is so much money needed to be tipped in by the car companies (ie engines & cash) that they think there is better value in doing it all themselves. I guess it has worked ok for Renault but Mercedes Benz has done the best of anyone.

Yeah I am yet to be convinced it is a bargain for some. Toyota is the classical example. Say Glock & Trulli come good & wipe the floor with everyone. Are you going to merch up then head down to the local Toyota dealership & buy yourself a Camry Sportivo? Nah, me neither. On the flip side is Ferrari who can trot out any number of crap F1 cars & yet make squillions selling Ken & Barbie "Ferrari" Motorhomes....

Sounds for all the world like something is binding in the front end. Get it up on a hoist & have a look.

There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to reduce the amount of money manufacturers have to tip into the sport to keep their teams competitive. Think about any or all of them. Can you really see Toyota wanting to keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year just to trail around with the Force India mob? Or the same for Renault? Or BMW? As far as public pronouncements from the F1 teams & the FIA there is a simple rule to apply: Nothing is as it appears & almost none of it is even remotely close to the truth.

That is a bit harsh. How about some tennis, JPM style?

What you don't already when the tacho goes past 10k?

Some other facts: All gases will increase in pressure when the temperature increases. But in the absence of an increase in temperature no gas will continue to "grow" as you put it. In terms of their respective constant volume specific heats - that for nitrogen is 744 Newton metres per kilgram Kelvin & air is 720 Call it 3% differential. By your logic if nitrogen does not pass through the tyre & other gases do then all I need do to get nitrogen filled tyres is put some normal air in them & wait. Dry is good. But you don't need nitrogen to get dry air. The difference between dry air & nitrogen is minimal. Air is approx 80% nitrogen anyway. If you are filling your tyres from bottled gas it is easy to use N2 as air. But who in the real world has anything other than oxy, acetylene & maybe argon sitting around in bottles? Getting the pressure correct is fundamentally more important than anything. Figuring out what pressure to run at is the hard bit, not what gas to put in the tyres.

The thing that amused me most about the British GP (other than Eric Cantona swapping merchandise with Alonso - look it up) was that other than Ferrari all the factory teams got smashed by their respective customer teams, ie Brawn belted McLaren, Red Bull belted Renault, & Williams smashed Toyota. So is it back to the olden days when the manufacturers only supplied motors & money? The McLaren was horrible. No high speed aero. Made Hamilton look like a muppet & his team mate worse. I am sure LH is massively motivated to race for 15th place. The other "highlight" was the confession that basically everyone had chucked their KERS in the bin. More brilliance from the FIA. Think about it - all the teams that invested in KERS got owned by it. BMW particularly. Atleast it gave the three competent independents a chance to shine.

There is a reason why every police occifer in WA sounds like Reg Hollis.... simply put very few locals want to be in general duties and/or trafiic. Largely they come here from the UK because the weather is better and there are fewer stabbings. But back to the topic: The almost inevitable result of going on a cruise is that you will be tarred with the same brush used for the spanker ripping skids. Fortunately there are enough well organised events (sprints, hillclimbs, even drifiting if you can stomach it etc etc) to allow people to enjoy themselves without those same idiots turning up to ruin the day.

I may be a bit dim, but the chassis number starts with KBNR34.... which makes it an R34?

If it does go ahead (it won't) it will, like every break away series that has ever been, result in a divisive, weakened pair of second rate "championships". What will happen is that a compromise will be reached. I just hope that Williams & Force India screwed the FIA for all they are worth before they signed on. As for Nissan - it will never happen. Renault owns Nissan & Renault can barely afford to be in F1. The expectation is that one or more of the manufacturers will be gone at years end. There is a lot of money on that manufacturer being Renault. Toyota is prbably close to leaving too - too much money for no results. They should go back to rallying (just without the cheating).

A couple photos from a weekend in Albany. Sunday (in town) the weather was horrible. Monday was nice.

This has been done to death a million times. But anyway. There are two key mechanisms for dissipating heat from an intercooler: conductivity & emissivity. Both are obvious in the way they function. Painting an intercooler black improves the heat transfer due to emissivity but lessens it due to conductivity. Conductivity is by far the more influential of the two mechanisms which means you degrade the performance of the intercooler if you paint it. On the upside it helps stop it corrode from salt etc. So don't paint it if you want it to work at its best.

Why are you short shifting?

No it doesn't. You should be in no doubt as to whether the ABS works or not. You feel the pedal pulsing & as often as not hear the thing working. Find yourself a gravel road & hit the brakes....

They are stock on all R32 Gt-R's. They sit immediately behind the lower spection of the front spoiler & bolt to the undertray. They stop short of the front end of the castor rod & do not by any means channel air all the way to the brake rotor. The Unique air deflectors attach to the castor rod & essentially take the air from the Nissan parts shown & channel it to the brakes. You need both to do a half decent job. Or some ducting of your own which is massively cheaper. From memory the Unique stuff is about $300 - how much are the Nissan bits from RHD?

http://www.raceofchampions.com/ But Sebastien Loeb usually wins on account of him being a far better driver than any of the F1 clowns.

Yes it does. But it can only do so when the manifold is under vacuum, ie off throttle. The likelihood of a lower octane air fuel mixture (which is the effect oil has) in that circumstance causing engine damaging pinging is, IMHO, nil. This is very different from the oil that goes off the lower side breather which goes through the intercooler & can cause damage to your motor. It is this oil that also pukes out the bovs & stinks up the turbos. The advantage of retaining a pcv is as you said - it lowers the pressure in the sump. This, in turn, means less windage & less propensity to froth the oil.

Pardon my ignorance but how is the oil from the head of the motor going to have any more/less fuel contamination than that in the sump? Additionally removing the PCV from the motor is one of the best ways of increasing the amount of oil going into your catch can. That, combined with the illegality of doing so makes me question why people would ever want to. CAMS don't much like the practice either - they insist a large catch can volumes in the absence of a PCV. For my 10 cents worth a better arrangement is to retain the functionality of the PCV & install either an oil / air seperator (eg a Nismo unit), fix the problem at source (eg Mines cam cover baffles) & or plumb in a decent catch can (ie with a capacity bigger than a can of coke).

They clip in or should do. But yeah you can just Sikaflex them in place. Make sure it is done neatly as that stuff can be hard to get off. Question: How much are the bits ex Nissan?

Sounded like a recommendation. Teh Baron is right. There is no good reason to use different tyres front & rear. There are a number of good reasons not to.

Gees mine wasn't even that complicated. Give me one for a stock R32 Gt-R I said. So they did. Sort of. I mean, to be fair some of the dimensions were correct. I got it fixed locally as I ran out of faith that they could get it right. Admittedly I didn't want to wait for it to go back & forth to Queensland from WA & I got the hump after they told me my car was what was wrong. So I dunno. They do some good work but their quality control as far as building the things as per the drawing is well, forum rules & all that.

Camira, indestructible. In the same sentence. They were badly built, with a litany of faults. Most were so hopelessly underpowered that thrashing the bejeesus out of them was the only way of keeping up with the rest of the traffic. Plastic quality & build quality are not the same. For that matter "flimsy" is mostly a perception. How did you measure the quality? Overwhelmingly the more recent the car the better its build quality. The VE is streets ahead of the VT. Just like the FG is ahead of the AU.