djr81

So when, exactly were the good old days? I can't remember a time when F1 was anything other than riven by politics & decisions made by the FIA anything short of ludicrous. Remember Mosely, for all his faults, replaced a bloke that was far, far worse. If you hadn't noticed the WRC is down to two manufacturers, Loeb is the only one who wins anymore & touring cars ie the WTCC is in the toilet. The only hope on the horizon is sports cars & they never really capture the mainstream. Capping costs in motorsport stops companies like Ford from dropping out. They don't like sinking tens of millions into motor racing (or more eg Honda) simply to make up the numbers. Having said all that Bernies latest brain explosion about who wins most gets the championship is rubbish. Throws away 50 years of tradition & makes a mockery of the constructors championship & any teams results if they fail to win a GP. All they had to do was increase the number of points for the winning driver relative to P2. Same effect. The shame of it all is that those in control of motor racing feel they need to stir up controversy to keep people interested. The worry is they may be right.

Go metric man, its not 1965 anymore. 650lb/in approx equals 11.6kg/mm. Kinnard in otherwords. I'd guess the rears would be about 550lb/inch. Does your avatar show the car with those spring rates?

Good info. So does Unique have any PSS9's left? One crucial question is: What spring rates are you going to run?

If you weren't paying attention and missed the road tests & comparisons of the R32 GT-R in Wheels magazine circa 1991 then the good news is they have been re-published the second time round. Go to www.wheelsmag.com.au Then type skyline gt-r into the search bar. You will get three pages of articles about the various models of GT-Rs. Worth a read.

So its: Super street Front 5kg/mm, rear 4kg/mm Mono Flex 7/7 Ultimate Spec Circuit Master Super Racing 12/12 What then are the RA/RE's? The Bilsteins appear to be happy on a GT-R with a 5kgmm/4kgmm spring rate but I do not know how much higher you can go on spring rates without them being revalved. AFAIK the damper rates for 5/4kg springs are the same as those for the Whiteline springs. I have those rates somewhere & will dig them out.

So if I am reading the literature correctly ( ?) the Tein range works out something like: Super street Front 5kg/mm, rear 4kg/mm Mono Flex 7/7 Type flex 8/6 - (Type HT?) Ultimate Spec Circuit Master Super Racing 12/12 Ofcourse I could be hopelessly wrong as these blokes appear to have more product designations than I have had hot dinners.... http://www.tein.co.jp/e/products/index.html http://www.greenline.jp/catalogue/bccatpar...gory=suspension

100mm

Can anyone recommend a shop to re-valve my Bilsteins? I am considering increasing the spring rate (Not to anything like those listed above) but am a little wary of the local Bilstein outlet as I was not all that convinced by them in a recent phone conversation. I'm in WA.

The problem is that the amount of work needed varies depending on what type of event you do, how much experience the driver has & any number of other things. The three best bits of advice are: 1. Make sure the car is in good repair. Don't go to the track with dodgy stuff or with things needing to be finished, bedded in etc. Sort it out before you get there. 2. Read the regulations & follow them. 3. Go out there & have fun. No one ever learnt how to drive sitting on the lounge at home. Equally very, very few people set the world on fire on their first attempt.

This stuff makes me cry. Mine is still full weight ie stereo, interior etc with just a few things done to help matters eg HICAS. Front is 905kg Rear is 685kg. Which gives a distribution of 57/43. I should point out that I weigh 100kg with helmet etc. Sorrt of explains why the things understeer so hard.

Yeah proper bolt shops are so much better than hardware shops. For next tme, get yourself a thread gauge. Eg http://www.irwin.com/irwin/consumer/jhtml/...IrwinProd100450 This will tell you what pitch etc the bolt thread is. Nissan appear to love non standard 1.25mm pitch bolts for all sorts of stuff. A 'machine bolt' is simply a bolt with the thread all the way to the head. Sometimes they have cup heads on them (for allen keys) sometimes hex heads. Mostly they have a higher strength than normal bolts.

It is somewhat reassuring to see that the NSW arguments/politics etc are much the same as the ones over here in WA. Some of the anomolies are head scratching & historical based eg Supra in a different class to GTS-T Skylines. Some of them are annoying - our AWD class is an outright class so anything goes even your street driven GT-R. Some of it is CAMS induced silliness eg no open wheelers on temporary hillclimbs but they are allowed on permanent ones. Never mind the fact that the temporary ones are safer in some cases. Anyway you will see that the outright winners are variously, wings & slicks open wheelers, sport sedans & track day specials. We even get some bloke turn up in a Formula Holden every now & then. Depending on the circuit there is usually approximately a four second gap to the tin tops. http://www.natsoft.com.au/cgi-bin/results....03/2009.COLI.Q1 www.speedeventseries.com

Ahh, PWR. Love them to bits. I went through the same, um , level of customer service. The intercooler doesn't fit I said. Your car is wrong they said. No it fkn isn't I said. Well send the thing back to Queensland & we will fix it for you said the nice people at PWR. Needless to say it got fixed locally. PWR.

ABS, left rear, right rear, left front, right front. Go for a drive. Maybe have to do it again. Shims, personally I don't use any. They are there to prevent squeel. You can use some paste instead if you don't have them. At them end of the day squeel is more about the pads than the shims. Favour time: Any chance of taking a photo of a Sumitomo calliper pad next to a Brembo equivalent?

Bleed nipples are at the top to let the air out. Pads are Endless.

For my 10 cents worth - I have Bilsteins & Eibach springs on an R32 GT-R. The car handles fine & is quick for what it is. If I get sick of the spring rates I can easilly replace them & as you say get the Bilsteins revalved. I have never felt the need to adjust the damper rates or change the ride height for the road. Essentially what most people do is set it up for the circuit & live with it on the road. Reason being to do it properly you need to do a wheel alignment every time you change the ride height/camber or indeed just about anything other than the damper setting. There are, however, a number of other items that are just as influential to the cars handling - namely upper front link (for camber & to remove binding if you decide to run castor rods with rose joints), LCA's, sway bars, neg camber on the front end, attessa system, HICAS etc etc. These are, as I said, just as important & it would be well worth your while to include them in your consideration. Bottom line: Bilsteins are good. If the price is good & service is good then you can feel comfortable buying them. Oh and don't get talked into running stupid (high) spring rates.

Nope, that is just the life of a tyre on a car on a track. Usually the clearance problem is at the back.

Well even if they are not running light you would expect them to come out & put their best foot forward as there is no signage on the thing other than a mandatory Bridgestone sticker. Wonder how much coin Bernie kicked in? Doubtless like everyone else on struggle street they will be hard up to find the cash to continually develop the car. Then there is the whole KERS nonsense to worry about...

I am not sure I quite agree with worrying too much about what the tyre looks like on the rim when it is static. Here is a photo of my car & me generally showing ineptitude in trying to drive it. A too quick corner entry causes understeer which is less than inspiring but may, perhaps, be illuminating. Check the sidewall of the tyre. It is a 255 on a 9". Fit is perfect imho. But with a 22 offset & any lowering of the suspension it will scrape the rear guards unless you get them rolled. Oh there is three and a half degrees negative camber on the thing too....

The concern is not that you will set any records but that you will bin the car. PI is not a good place in the sense that you can have monumental offs. Driver trainings worth relies on the quality of the instructer & the ability of the student to understand/implement the instructions. As for your last idea. No. Look, the car will understeer but it mostly affects the point at which you can begin to apply power. It really has little affect on cornering speed. It is not that much of an issue on corner entry. Oh and make sure the brakes are up to scratch too.

Pardon my ignorance but is the 2.7 litre a stroker? My bad memory says it is just an overbore.

What tyre pressures you run is heavilly dependent on how many laps you are running, how hot it is, how heavy your car is, what compound the tyre is what the suspension set up is, whether it is the front or the rear of the car & whether it is the left or right hand side. For sprints, hillclimbs etc the objective should be to get the things as near as you can to working temperature when you need them to be working. Loosely the lower the pressure the faster they will build temperature in the tread face. The problem being, however, that under pressured tyres offer less grip which hurts lap speed. So, as ever, it is a compromise. Nitrogen? Well when you do a track day you let air out. So you will need a refill everytime you go to a track day. To be perfectly honest much of what is said about nitrogen in tyres is a load of bollocks. Air is 80% nitrogen anyway. Just try & use dry air.

The problem is you are a bit stuffed either way. If you run a road tyre then they will quickly be ruined by an R32 - the fronts because unless you run large amounts of -ve camber the tread blocks get chamfered really quickly & the rears because they will just get bagged up. If you run an R compound you wont get anything like the full benefit simply because you are learning. Perhaps worse you will heat cycle them a little to take the edge of their perfornamce at a later stage. What I would be worried about for someone lacking experience is making sure they get properly warmed on the outlap such the one end doesn't some in quicker than the other. Then you start worrying about pressures..... Given the hp & the circuit I would prbably lean towards the RE55's. No you wont get the full benefit from them but then again it takes more than one set of tyres to learn how to drive a car. On the other hand if people start out on skid pans/kharnas or generally more restricted stuff road tyres would be the go. Maybe the solution is to get half pregnant - or in other words go for some Falken or Federals. Atleast then you get the predictability of a stiff sidewall without the extra grip of a proper R compound.

The shock absorbers are probably the MOST critical components.

Well I sort of agree. BUT If you are even having half a go then you will quickly destroy road tyres on the track. In fact their life expenctancy is often worse than a proper R compound. When you add in the fact that they are utterly hopeless on a circuit I would advocate changing them out as soon as you are even half competent. There are a few points I would like to emphasise: 1. Irrespective of how long you have been driving on the road you still need to learn to drive on a track. One of the fundamental problems is that very few people have the knowledge to understand or the vocabulary to articulate what is happening to their car through a corner. To help fix this I would recommend reading some books on the basics of car handling, setup, tyre behaviour & driver inputs. Carroll Smiths stuff is good if somewhat complicated but htere are plenty of alternatives. 2. Get some training. 3 Please understand that your car will not be set up & you will not be quick when you start. So be polite to other track goers. They will understand you are learning & accomodate you in doing so. But only up to a certain point. 4. One of the fundaments of improving on the track is to get sorted in your head such things as braking markers, turn in points, cornering lines etc etc. If you are not lapping consistantly it is very hard to improve. So set some markers etc then, as your confidence grows, move them forward slowly. This will help avoid you spinning/binning your car. 5. Don't turn up to the track needing to heat cycle tyres, bed in pads, run in your motor, test the new radiator etc etc. Equally don't front with tyres out gear eg worn brakes/rotors, sloppy bushes etc etc. There isn't much excuse for it & it can put your car & your fun track day at risk. Being prepared also has the added benefit of reducing stress. 6. Cooling stuff down is just as important as warming things up.