GraemeWi

Wellington Nissan Mobil December 1 1991. The Group A scene in NZ traditionally came to life every summer with an influx of the European and Australian teams. Wellington was a street race, with the road being closed on Friday with stands and barriers being installed frantically. The first session was Friday lunchtime, an un-timed practice session. Skaife was seen to be driving quite hard – sometimes launching the GT-R into the air over bumps in Cable St. Wellington was always a place which made the little BMW M3s shine – they always put on a strong performance, and Longhurst was there with his. Longhurst was unofficially timed at 1m 28.7s, with Skaife at 1m 29.07, 1m 29.34 for Pirro (Schnitzer European M3) and Peter Brock pulling a 1m 30.7s out of his Commodore. The word around the pits after the practice session was that the track was very bumpy especially on Cable St, with Mark Skaife claiming he had to back off the throttle half way down the straight - “All four wheels are coming off the ground. It's unbelievably bad for the car to be in the air so long.” Longhurst used the word “exciting” to describe the bumpy ride. The new chicane was singled out for some negative comment as it allowed no room for error. The next practice session was Friday night. The organisers modified the chicane by moving some of the tyre barriers further out, making a bit more room to pass though. The M3 of Pirro ventilated it's block only two laps into the session before it could lay down some quick laps. The modified chicane slowed the track down, with the GT-R recording a best time of 1m 30.33 Qualifying Saturday The European M3 was back out on the track with a fresh engine and a need to do some quick times. Pirro laid down a 1m 29.01s lap compared to the GT-R's 1m 29.69s. Brock even climbed the time sheets with a 1m 28.35s lap. Tony Longhurst had damaged his M3 when something broke in the suspension sending him into a minor collusion with a wall. As the session progressed, the times got faster. Jim Richards predicted a 1m 26s or 1m 27s lap from the GT-R with Skaife driving on sticky tyres. Skaife cranked out a 1m 27.62s lap followed with a 1m 27.60s. Pirro wrung his M3 and produced a 1m 26.7s lap, showing the speed of the little M3 around the Wellington streets. The Gibson team reckoned they would have no problem knocking off the M3 in the afternoon practice session, despite the full field being out on the track (the morning session was limited to the Group A cars above 1600cc) The afternoon session was cut short by an incident involving a Corolla, a Commodore and a Porsche bouncing off the walls and each other. The Nissan team only had one lap with their sticky tyres with Jim driving achieving a 1m 28.8s lap which disappointed the team as they were faster on normal race tyres. Longhurst produced his spare M3 and ran a fast 1m 27.99s lap which was good enough for 3rd of the grid. Sunday Race Day Overnight the Schnitzer team had slotted in their race engine. Unfortunately it had a bad misfire in the race warm-up, slowing the car by as much as 20s a lap. The team worked hard to fix a faulty sensor for the race start. The lights went green and the race had dramas with the first 10 seconds. A NZ M3 spun and caused the 20 cars behind to baulk. A Corolla ended up in the wall, ending their race pretty quickly. At the start of the second lap Skaife had pulled out a handy 3s lead over Pirro, Longhurst, and Brock. A Corolla burst into flame on the front straight, which bought out the pace car for the next 15 minutes. After the debris had been cleared the race resumed at full pace once more. Skaife was able to hold a 3 second lead over Pirro for three laps, the Italian driving the nuts off the M3. Skaife claimed a new lap record of 1m 28.39s, but wasn't able to pull away much. Skaife reported back to the pits that the GT-R had a handling problem, perhaps a puncture. The GT-R pulled into the pits for new tyres and resumed in 5th place. The GT-R returned to the pits twice more over the following 15 minutes before the team diagnosed a broken front differential – and converted the car to 2 wheel drive for the remainder of the race. Fred Gibson laid the blame squarely on the bumps in Cable St. “What it boils down to is with out car being so heavy, it's bouncing and crashing down again and it has broken the diff. When we're going so fast down there, in excess of 200km/h and your leaping off the ground like that somethings gonna break.” Skaife managed to lightly side swiped Pirro's leading BMW when he exited pit lane, there was no major damage, just some paint swapping. Dick Johnson also had problems with the Cable St bumps - “I was only running down there with half throttle so we could keep the wheels on the ground without wheel spinning – but even that obviously didn't work.” he said as his car was being fixed. Brock made it up to second place when Longhurst pitted with a flat spotted tyre. At the halfway point Pirro had built up a 1 minute buffer back to 2nd place, with nearly another minute back to 3rd. Skaife had managed to get the GT-R up to 7th place despite only having half the normal traction. Longhurst made it through to the lead when Pirro pitted for a driver change and fuel. He lead for one lap until he was caught out with a slower car on the track. Longhurst collided with the slower car sending them both into the wall. TV footage showed Tony's head coming out the widow and his helmet hitting the wall, smashing the chin guard. If he had been wearing his open faced helmet as he normally does, he would have been killed for sure. Light rain started to fall on the track which made it very slippery. Most of the major teams opted to remain out on slicks until the rain made it difficult to continue, the leading Pirro M3 ducked into the pits for wets along with Brock who was having difficulty seeing out a badly fogged windscreen. By this stage Jim Richards was driving the GT-R and making people remember why he was known as the 'Rain Master'. He held the GT-R wheel spinning most of the way down the straight and clocked in a 1m 30.45s lap. The race finished at the 4 hour mark with Pirro and Winkelhock taking the flag in the Schnitzer M3, followed by the Brock and Perkins Commodore 2 laps down, and then the GT-R of Skaife and Richards another 2 laps back. Onwards to Pukekohe next week.

Cheers! No it wasn't me on the US forum. I've only posted it to the NZ forum ages ago, and the pdf book. Thanks to the posts above I've got all enthused again and have stacks of papers, magazines and books scattered around the room here. Hopefully I can knock off 1992 this weekend. G

I wrote it. I still have to finish off 1991 with the Wellington street race, Pukekohe 500, and then the 1992 season after that. Unfortunatly I don't have as much material from 1992 as I would like as I was overseas teaching the english how to drink beer for most of that year and thus my collection of Autoactions, newspapers, videos and memories is a bit sparce! I'll have a bit of dig around and see if I have anything on the GTS-R years... I think I do somewhere. May also have the R30 Fj-20 years as well. Will be a fair bit of time befor eI do this though as I want to finish the GT-R story first before I extend it at the other end. Since there is some interest in the race GT-R history and the weekend is set to be wet, I'll put some time into it. Cheers, G

I'm afraid it's one of my missions in life to rid the world of the fixed drivetrain % loss numbers.... Lets take a stock 1975 LH Holden Torana. A nice simple car. With a stock 'backfire 4' motor, and stock drivetrain it turns the rear wheels on the dyno to 70 hp. Ok for one moment lets assume the drivetrain is stealing 30% (30hp)... so the engine must be making 100 hp.... Lets up the ante and swap out the backfire 4 for a 308 L34 engine. The Torana with the same drive train, now spins out 250hp at the rear wheels. Is it fair to say that without any changes the same drivetrain is now absorbing 75hp? Now drop in a Repco F5000 engine, the little Torrie is now pumping 400hp at the rear wheels. Now the drivetrain is absorbing 120 hp??? without any changes? Fixed loss exponents explain this.... (and if the additional power absorbed is lost through heat, 120 hp works out to be 90 x 1 bar heaters, thats a lot of heat!) kw and hp measure the same thing, just the same as miles and kilometers measure distance. 225kw at the rear wheels = 300hp at the rear wheels roughly. 'Nuff said. G

The only answer is to put the engine on an engine dyno, anything else can only be a guess. There will be figures banded about like a fixed percentage loss from the drivetrain (nup! logic says otherwise) or a quoted loss of something like 17kw. It really depends on the individual car and the condition it is in, eg gearbox, diff, the fluids in those etc. Of course it's nice to be able to tell the world hey my car makes lots of power at the engine, but it's the power at the wheels that actually counts. A dyno is really for comparitive testing, for example - do a baseline run and then add more boost, the second run will show some improvement (or loss) over the baseline run. Hey this bleed valve improved the cars output by 15% etc... Cheers, G

First of all, you should maintain the light was green. Seeing an orange light means you knew it was going to go red. Say green.

I've watched drag racing for quite a few years, there is quite a big difference between loosing traction and a cylinder carking it. G

Superchargers are driven off the crankshaft and rob a fair about of power - their main advantage over a turbo is that they produce boost at all revs. On the flip side, they can be noisy, they use belts which need checking and careful maintenance. And cost lots! I think turbochargers are more popular for economic reasons - they cost less, and produce some very nice results as our Skylines can attest. Oh and those top fuel engines - they last one run on the drag strip. Often when you watch them on TV you can see a cylinder or two die halfway down the strip...sometimes they expire in spectacular fireballs. The crews rebuild the engines between runs, it's amazing to watch them work - look out for the NHRA drags on ESPN etc. G

These are Top fuel cars - they look like a long rail with the engine at the back. Can't compare them to any form of road car! Does the quarter in about 4.6 seconds at about 300 mph. Picture big alloy v8's of about 8.9 litres pulling 8500 rpm, a supercharger pushing in 1,640 cubic meters of air a minute, burning 4 litres of nitromethane a second (the fuel is 3 times more efficient than petrol) G

Folks, the 'fixed' or 'rule of thumb' power loss is a fallacy. Lets say Car A has a 100 hp engine, and measures 70hp at the rear wheels. Thats a 30% loss through the drivetrain. The same Car A, except I replace the engine with a 350 Chev rated at 300hp. Without changing anything in the transmission or drivetrain, is it fair to say there still will be a 30% loss? All of a sudden the transmission and drivetrain is soaking up 60 more hp for no reason? Nope. Without putting an engine on an engine dyno, any power at the crank figures are pure guesswork. Look at the top fuel cars in the States - for years they have been working out their engine power using mass x acceleration, reconing that their engines produced 6,000hp...not so long ago they worked out how to measure the torque they output with a special torque sensor in the drivetrain and now say their engines are putting out 9,000hp! Thats a 3,000 hp difference. The guys who did the initial calculations are like the top engine builders, so they are in no way backwards or stupid. Car manufacturers also measure their engines power outputs in different ways (eg with no accessories like alternators or power steering pump) so what they may quote in their sales brochures has as much substance and use as a used tissue. Be careful with the car weights as well, I used to own a G-Tech and once measured my car on two different certified weighbridges on the same day. Weight 1 with a full tank and me was 1535kg, weight 2 was 100kg less. Both of these weigh bridges were commercial and recently tested and certified. I figure the 1535kg weight to be the correct one. G

Passed away early thismorning at 12.58am NZ time. Strong till the end.

Just heard on the Tv over here that Possum is being taken off life support...the injuries were worse than initially thought. Thoughts to his family. Messages to : http://www.possumpwrc.co.nz/ReadyUpdate/celebrate.asp RIP. If there is a heaven, it will have a gravel road. /me cries G http://onesport.nzoom.com/sport_detail/0,1...79-2-21,00.html http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm...section=general http://xtramsn.co.nz/news/0,,3882-2322501,00.html -snip--- Bourne's Injures Worse Than Thought 28/04/2003 07:29 PM IRN New Zealand rally ace Possum Bourne was more severely injured in Good Friday's crash than was first thought. His family made a special announcement at 7pm this evening. The rally driver has been in a medically induced coma in Dunedin Hospital since April 18th. Bourne was injured in a serious car crash when he was checking out the course for the Race to the Sky mountain climb near Wanaka. Subaru spokesman John Coker says he suffered a severe brain injury at the initial incident, and doctors have managed his treatment very actively until now. However, the full extent and severity of the injury has only become clear over the last weekend, when medical staff decreased ventilation support. Mr Coker says Bourne's condition deteriorated and doctors had to put him back on full life support. The family says his condition has been re-evaluated today, and a brain scan carried out. They say that confirms the original injury was very severe. The family says continuing full life support is no longer in the driver's best interests. Bulletin supplied by IRN Limited Copyright 2001 IRN Limited. All copyright in this bulletin remains the property of IRN Limited. Terms and Conditions. ---snip---

The +7 on the factory gauge is 700mm/hg - this is not PSI. +7 is equal to 13.53 psi or 0.93 bar...it's a very unusual unit of measure Nissan have used, it's more normally found in engineering. Stock boost on a R33 is usually between 5-8 psi (depending on a few things!) Cheers, G

I had the factory cruise control in my old R32 GTS-t...it wasn't a type M. Worked ok though. G

Off the clock on the dashboard boost gauge = more than 1 bar...lets hope the previous owner did some ECU work as well! Until you know for sure what the car has in the way of modifications, try to keep the boost <12 psi (about 3/4 on the factory gauge) G

Yip, Vince over here had different sized tyres (on the same rims) on his GTR and his torque gauge was something like 50% all the time. It would eventually cause premature wear on the clutch packs, I think Vinces also accelerated funny until he got 4 identical tyres fitted. Hows the AC3? Not been on my Konas for weeks!

Although it may easy to think of loss as a fixed percentage, IMHO it is a fallacy to do so. Think through the example further up the thread where 1000hp engines have a supposed 30% loss. My god the gearbox would be a puddle on the ground. I've yet to go to a drag meet and see a gearbox melt (break yes, but melt never) Any engine hp level derived from a chassis dyno can only be treated as pure speculation until the engine itself is put on an engine dyno. G

Got a boost gauge? A vacuum gauge measures the vacuum (or pull) in the inlet plenum. If you have a boost gauge you will notice how when you are at idle it will read something similar to -20 in hg or something like that. When the gauge registers boost > 0 psi it means the turbo has supplying more are than what the engine is sucking (becomes forced aspiration). Vacuum gauges are handy if you are driving for maximum economy : more vacuum = less fuel used. They can also be used to diagnose mechanical problems in the valve train. Cheers, G

Good plan guys - it's copyright. 'nuff said.

It would be a 93 R32, from memory there were 47 made with the 25det. I've seen 2 of them, and was going to buy one of them myself but couldn't get the $$$ organised. Lucky bugger!

Right-o - Husdons it is. I'll put them to the taste test. G

LOL well normally I don't go there, but after that place on the corner of Queens and Collins served me something that tasted like diff oil I kinda started looking for a starbucks and didn't find. Had another one at the airport which was ummmm.... shockingly aweful Usually with starbucks the coffee is the same taste where ever you go! G

I've got another trip to Melbourne on business next week, this time I've got a bit more of a plan but there are a couple of thing I need help with... Is there a Starbucks in the CBD? Or failing the Seattle invasion, who else makes a proper coffee? (Not the cafe on the corner of Queen and Collins!) Are the Queen Victoria markets open on Thursdays? I've heard heaps about them...are they worth it? Any help much appreciated! Cheers, G

You might be interested to have a read of http://forums.skylinesdownunder.co.nz/show...=&threadid=7291 Cheers, G

LOL, nah, not the security making it slow... They had about 4 flights arrive at once and the place just fell into chasos, masses of people backed up past the duty free shop etc. Frankfurt had the most security I've ever seen at an airport...man they were armed with machine guns and everything! I really like Melbourne, hope I can score another trip over there in the next few weeks G