Snowman

I got my official delivery date today. It's less than 2 weeks from now.

Needs vortex generators. Better get Mark onto Penno for a set.

What's happened to Russ in all these talks? Is he still coming? And what of the rumours of his off sider coming too in the EVO? It's not like Russ not to talk it up before an event - or is he just concentrating on Super-lap for now?

Interesting thing to have found is a copy of the European Manual for the GT-R which appears to have the same warranty and service data I read in the new 11 page document if anyone is insterested. Can be found here: http://www.mookistar.com/r35/DRAFT%20EU%20...s%20Manual2.pdf The important parts are really covered from pages 5-17. The main thing I have picked up from this second reading is that whilst warranty isn't covered from failures resulting from using aftermarket parts they will still do the "free" services - even including if you mod the ECU. And also seems to say that there will be warranty if the faults are un-related to mods - although it does mention there will be no warranty at all if you mod the ecu. The funny one is that it lists down the bottom that warranty will be returned if the car is returned to its original specification.

Not to mention the # of cars at the end won't be the same as the start unfortunately. So if you want to see the whole field make sure you at lease see day 0.

Do you think?

Not only does my car not have back seats due to the cage but it might also have a slight conflict of interest in movies at this current stage! LOL

Except I don't have any back seats.

It reminds me of the Lambo Super Leggera. The brake pads in them are EXACTLY the same as the brake pads found in the Audi RS4. Lambo charge $2,500 for a set of pads. Audi charge $300 for the same pads. I know of at least one Lambo that goes to Audi for it's brake changes and if Nissan isn't carefull they won't have people using them either. I'm giving Nissan the one strike principle. I will use them to begin with but if I find they even once try and take me for a ride they won't see the car again. Not for basic servicing anyways.

The thing is though that if Ben can do what he needs to do to fix/fit it and it works the way I am hoping then I will have forgotten about it all in a weeks time and I'll just be happy! But I don't think Ben will be hurrying back to get another one from there any-time soon since it's him that has to fix all their problems. It's a shame though as their standard off the shelf unit was pretty nice. But I think if they could actually do these cross-flow units well they'd sell a bunch of them.

Just on the phone. They were supposed to be making drawings and then sending us a copy to sign off before shipping but that never happened. They just made the drawings (apparently) built it and shipped it. Anyways - all the bits that are wrong we can fix locally. It's all just stupid things like the fact that because it is a cross flow there is no bottom tank. So hence the unit is 25mm shorter than a standard one. Only they still decided to put the location pins on the bottom of the shortened unit rather than allowing for the 25mm the unit is now shorter - so it would mean the unit would sit 25mm lower and how we are supposed to get the hoses on is anyones guess. That's just an example - there's about 3-4 things that need fixing but we can do it here rather than sending it back.

Good news! My radiator finally turned up! Bad news. It's wrong.... again!! HAHAHAHA hahahaha aaaaaaaggghhh *sigh*

Yeah it's a big bummer that basically 2 of the 4 AASA rallies will be gone now - especially since I built my car to AASA spec! But even though I've never done Mt Buller or Lake Mountain I can kind of understand why numbers have dropped for these events. There must be a heck of a lot of waiting around compared to a normal tarmac rally between driving stages since every time you have to wait for the whole field to go up and back down again between runs.

I'm in. Will be a final pre-targa shake-down for me.

I think we'll be using Mark Tierney. Met him yesterday down at Sandown actually.

No - its the distance between fuel stops. Day one from lunch til after Shefield there isn't a fuel zone and I had calculated I needed 68L, and day 2 from the sideling to lunch I'd need 62L - but that was based upon 1.0L/km. Even 1.2L/km would get me there ok. 1.8L is definitely fine. I know Jeff has calculated his at 1.7L/km so I'm now in the ball park. But at TWP we hadn't arranged for fuel to be at lunch and we would not have been able to make it up and back to Tahune with the amount we had used in the 21km's we did before the wheel fell off (the tank was over half empty).

Good - but not as good as this IMO. Infact I'd even say the SLG sounds better than the scud's so maybe I'm just not a fan of the fezza sound. But the scud's LOOKED awesome. Craziest brakes going around!

Well I decided to take the car to Sandown yesterday afternoon despite the radiator not being in. Thought we could still get some good data on the fuel usage and see how much of an effect just putting the smaller intercooler in had on temps as well (since it was 28 down here yesterday). We'd also wound the boost down as far as it would go (so purely on waste-gates which was pretty close to 1 bar). The good news was the temp issue was gone completely. My longest run was 38kms and the water temps never got above 82degs. Thats much better than 117degs after 17kms. So looks like the intercooler was the big issue afterall. Fuel was great - I was shifting between 7,500 and 8,200 rather than between 8,000 - 8,500 as I normally do but fuel usage was around the 1.8L/km mark (I've worked out I needed to get it to 1.2L/km to not run out of fuel so that makes it easily). BUT - the car was dead-set slow. LOL I was about 25km/hr down on the main straight speeds so that no-boost thing was FTL big time. And then I split a turbo line and poured oil all over my exhaust which gave me a 60s heart attack when I thought I'd done another engine! So still some work to do. I have to give myself some boost back and will check things again at Phillip Island in a couple of weeks. BUT - the good news was James came down in the Lambo SLG and gave it to me to take for some hot laps. That was fun And these things were also down there having some fun too

I have my old radiator. It works - it just works poorly (same as the other 2 down-flow radiators I've tried previously). It's good for around 8-10kms of hard driving but that's about it. I'm sure the new one will arrive before Tassie but the test day I had planned was for tomorrow. And the idea of the test was to see if we've impoved things. I hardly need to test what I've had for 5 years - think I've got those figures covered pretty well already

Um.... given this is the 1st one they have ever made to fit an R34 I'd suggest the answer is no

Someone braver than me!

My annoyance comes from the whole damn process. I rang them up originally to try and get the best possible solution for my over-heating issues. I rang and spoke to them and was told tha their standard 42mm design was the best possible option. I then was randomly chatting to Penno about it and he said "no that's rubbish they can do a cross flow radiator - they have done them before for him and for Mark/Russ but I needed to speak to specific person about it. So I rang them back (this was a day after the initial order) andspoke to the "right" person and he agreed to cancel the 1st order and make the new one. He then asked me when I needed it and I said well I need it for March 12th which was 4 weeks away and he said that it'd be done easliy by then. 2 days later the radiator turns up - but its the original down flow one that was cancelled. I rang to ask what happened and the response was "well we had one of those sitting here on the floor already so we just thought we'd send that one instead. If you don't want it just send it back and when it gets here we'll make the new one". WTF?? Anyhoo that was back in Feb so no massive panic until last week comes around and the thing still hasn't come. Ring AGAIN and ask and was told yep it's all good and will be shipped on the 6th. With the long weekend that left me with little time to get it fitted, car tuned and the alignment etc done (since the car can't do anything until the damn thing turns up!) Today comes - still not here - I ask why not and get told it's because its a new job (they have never done one for an R34 before) so they have to make up the drawings first. But they told me 4 weeks ago it's be no problems to be done in time for this week. When I reminded him of that he said "yeah but we sent you one originally" and I replied that it wasn't what I ordered so how's that my fault!!? The annoying part is there's nothing I can do about it except whinge here!! I can't stick another rad in and do the test day as the whole point of the day was to see if the temp issue is sorted and if not try and learn how to drive around it.

Well I won't be doing my MUCH NEEDED test day on Thursday because PWR are dickheads. Lily Allen wrote a special song just for them. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ITZBBV8Syg...feature=related

Indeed. I remember being told originally that the car would be covered on the track on the condition there was no competition number on the car. I'm not sure that is still the case. The old document mentioned the words "excludes coverage for racing" but never mentioned the words "race track" like the new one does. I'm trying to get a copy of the new form today.

The interesting part for Nissan is that if they decide to basically end all warranty if you do anything small to the car or take it to a track then people simply won't bother taking their cars to Nissan for services etc. And the fact is all the dealerships have paid truck loads to set-up for servicing these cars so really it is in their best interests to ensure customers do come back to them. As people have alluded too - the servicing side of this could be the real cash cow for Nissan so they wouldn't want to stuff that up. The U.S also have a post track inspection thing which basically entails them plugging the car into a PC to read the temps and determine if things fluids etc need changing. Their experiences seem to be good on this particular service. http://www.nagtroc.org/forums/index.php?sh...cotts+GTR+track So right now we are all just speculating on what is going to happen in the real world. The other fact is really these cars have been around in Japan and the US for 18months and really we haven't heard of a single warranty issue with these things other than related to the transmission coupled with the old LC and yet I have read plenty on them being tracked and seen several of them around as Targa cars. For anyone that wants to seriously track these things chances are you'll do things to the car to void the warranty regardless, but if you are just someone who wants to track the car once or twice to see what it can really do then follow the rules and you should be right. Mine will be seeing the track definitely (but not regularly - I have the R34 for that) as well as having a couple of small bolt on parts (I have one from Martin sitting in my office already!) and I won't be letting the threat of warranty stop me from using it. If something does happen we'll tackle it when the time comes. But if anyone thinks that doing even a basically track day doesn't cost more than the price of admission then they are deluded!